There is a common saying of great truth: no one wishes they had spent more time in the office on their death bed. At least, no one with a balanced view of human existence. It all comes back to another popular adage, whether you should live to work or work to live.

None of which implies that how we labour on this earth is insignificant. Work matters in an endless number of ways: to keep society functioning and to create progress, wealth and prosperity – for goodness sake, to keep vulnerable people alive. Not least, it matters to our deepest sense of self. We are taught almost from the cradle that work is somehow a reliable measure of our worth, that it truly defines who we are.

And yet, when you look around at our modern Britain of zero hour contracts and endemic low pay, it’s hard not to worry about the ‘labour market’. Is it just me who wonders whether we need to radically re-think our attitudes to work in the UK?

Actually, I suspect that over the coming decades ordinary people will get no choice in the matter. Let’s take York as a case in point. A recent article in The Press raised serious questions about employment in our city (The ads which reveal the growing recruitment headache for York’s bar, café and restaurant owners, 19 August 2017).

The first issue is of supply and demand. Put bluntly, there is a real shortage of labour for the service sector on which York’s economy is increasingly reliant.

Employers have identified significant factors affecting the supply of workers. These range from the hugely noticeable expansion of bars and restaurants transforming the city centre to problems of national, even international concern.

One national issue that should deeply trouble us all is the gap between workers’ low pay and the rents they face each month. I use the word ‘rent’ deliberately, because home ownership is no longer an option for millions of people, especially the young who have been consigned to the unenviable demographic of ‘generation rent’. One could add that privatised utilities’ and rail companies’ profit margins inevitably increase people’s day-to-day burdens.

Employers also identified concerns about EU nationals returning home as a factor in their recruitment problems. Brexit has cut immigration substantially according to recent government figures, as more and more EU nationals respond to feeling unwelcome in the UK by voting with their feet. All the more reason for a pragmatic approach to immigration, one based firmly on jobs and prosperity.

However, deeper currents are flowing through society when it comes to work. And not just in Britain.

New technology threatens to make hundreds of thousand s of jobs simply obsolete – and it’s coming at us fast. Take the driverless car. The very concept was science fiction when I was young.

Now we are mere decades from completely safe and viable systems of transport without humans behind the wheel. Think of the consequences for taxi drivers, delivery drivers, road haulage and bus drivers. And if you don’t need them, presumably train drivers are as outmoded as Stephenson’s Rocket, as well.

Or take accountancy. The hugely complex and labour intensive paper systems once required by all sizeable enterprises, whether public or private, have already been fed through history’s shredder. The next step is completely automated accountancy systems that require little human input other than reading and (possibly) interpreting the figures created. Little wonder the idea of paying everyone a basic citizen’s income has been floated to counter a future world where traditional jobs are steadily under threat. There is a real danger of not having enough jobs to go round.

One of the first questions we ask a stranger at parties is, ‘What do you do?’ Perhaps we need to find a better answer than naming a job as though it sums us up. How about, I volunteer for a charity, I love kite flying, football and keeping an allotment, I read as often as I can to my children, I’m learning Boogie Woogie piano. Maybe a human being’s most worthwhile labours are always, in the end, labours of love, curiosity and kindness.