Is fulfilment in the workplace one of the benefits of our twenty-first century culture, or a myth perpetrated by big corporations to make us work harder?

Fulfilment in the workplace is a relatively new concept. When I started my first job back in the seventies, I certainly felt entitled to have a job I'd find interesting - but that's not as big an expectation as "fulfilling". And my father thought I was foolish to expect even that!

My parents were in their forties when they had me, and reflected the view of the wartime generations – as far as they were concerned, work was just a necessary evil, something you had to do to put food on the table.

The one thing we did agree on, was that real life was outside the office. We worked hard, but only from 9 to 5.

Leaving work at 5, I used to stop off at the supermarket and still be home by 6 or 6.30. I would pop a casserole in the oven and still have plenty of time to enjoy a relaxed aperitif with my husband (who had arrived home about the same time) before dinner at eight.

Nowadays, I’m lucky to be home by eight, so I often resort to take-out or convenience foods. By the time we’ve eaten and done the chores, it’s time for bed – the whole evening has disappeared, unless we stay up late - in which case we end up sleep-deprived, because we have to get up early in the morning for our commute back to work. I can't begin to imagine how my friends with kids manage. And this is progress?

When I started work, the vision for the future was of a Jetson-style future with even more leisure - three day weeks and six weeks holiday a year. What happened?

Instead, in the last twenty years or so, our working hours have lengthened and our holidays shortened. I officially work 40 hours a week instead of 35, and on top of that, the edges are blurred.

We can no longer take an undisturbed coffee or lunch break, because our mobile phone or Blackberry goes with us. We may go into work early or leave late to keep up - and don’t even think of getting paid for that overtime, as we used to do. Long hours have become such an accepted practice, staff who work a normal day are often accused of not pulling their weight.

Even if we resist putting in extra hours, those who do are liable to call us and expect an answer, regardless of whether we're in the shower, eating breakfast or on the train to work.

When we are at work, we're being squeezed into smaller and smaller spaces, with fewer and lower barriers between us, until our workplaces start to look strangely like those old black-and-white photos of serried ranks of desks in Victorian offices a hundred years ago.

Meanwhile, the Human Resources Departments are spruiking how wonderful these new arrangements are - being cheek-by-jowl with our workmates promotes "teamwork" and "camaraderie", and our work is "challenging" and "fulfilling". Am I the only one who feels that the more our employers treat us like battery hens, to be squeezed for every extra egg, the more they talk about how well they're looking after us and how great our jobs are?

The employers' logic in this is easy to work out. They've cut their office rentals by half! Twenty years ago, divide the size of an office building by the number of people in it, and you'd find there was about one person for every 20 square metres. Now, it's one person for every 8 or 9 square metres. And included in that calculation are the funky staff kitchens, vast receptions and all the meeting rooms we need because we don't have an office - so our actual personal space has shrunk by far more than half.

The same logic applies to the blurring of hours. Employ two full-timers and persuade them to work 50 hours each, and they're almost doing the work of three - you've saved yourself a whole salary. In fact, it's been calculated that if everyone in Australia went back to working 9 to 5, and employers had to hire more people to take up the slack, we'd have no unemployment!

Often we are willing participants in the game - we have to believe our jobs can be fulfilling, otherwise we wouldn't be able to endure the long hours of work, plus the long hours of commuting, and the resulting disappearance of our leisure time. If our current job isn't fulfilling, then it's worth hanging in there in the hope we'll get promoted into one that is fulfilling. We've learned to substitute socialising with our workmates and online for socialising with friends and family in the outside world, and we think that's normal.

I've been able to step outside the treadmill by switching to contract work on an hourly rate - where at least, if I am expected to work longer hours, I get paid for it. And employers, conscious that it's going to cost, are less likely to ask me to work late! I'm also lucky that I did stumble across my "fulfilling" career in my thirties, so I do enjoy the work itself, if not the petty bureaucracy and office politics.

I've also been able to get part-time work occasionally - but employers don't ilke the idea, because part-timers are by nature more conscious of the hours they work. They're more likely to expect to be left alone on their days off, or to get up and leave at 3pm if that's their finishing time. While an employer can hire a full-timer on an official 38-hour week and squeeze 45 hours out of him, a part-timer hired to work 20 hours a week is likely to work 20 hours.

That's sad, because it dooms an army of working mothers, who would happily cut back and do job-share or part-time, to a full-time job that takes them away from their children for 10 or 12 hours a day, by the time you factor in commuting.

It's an old saying but true - we should be working to live, not living to work.

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All text copyright Marisa Wright.