Hamster wheel (Photo credit: sualk61)
This post might just be me being a lazy bugger, but is a five day working week really necessary?
I enjoy many things. For example, on the weekend I often go cycling
and last night I went a run. I even manage to write some stuff now and
again. However, if you asked me to do any of those things – note, things
that I enjoy – a regimented eight hours a day five days a week, I would
almost certainly start to dislike them. So why do we expect work to be
any different?
I’m probably romanticising, but I’m guessing things wouldn’t have
been like that back in the good old days when we lived in the forest and
had a high chance of being eaten by something with big pointy teeth or
dying horribly from a common cold. I guess in those times we worked when
we had to, ie when we were hungry, and the rest of the time was pretty
much up to us, leaving us to sit about grunting or poking the mysterious
fire to our heart’s content. So why do we think that sitting in an
office for forty hours a week is sensible?
And what is it we are working for exactly?
‘Well if we don’t work hard the economy will go into recession and
that would be terrible!’ said a made up Tory politician (I’m pretty sure
they say that kind of thing all time.)
But don’t they get it? The economy, money, recessions, they’re all
made up! They don’t really exist. It’s just some convention that we’ve
all agreed to work by and could just as easily stop working by and do
sometime else instead. It would be like going to another planet and
finding out that they worked only because if they didn’t the giant bunny
rabbit of death would come and eat them. On further questioning we find
that they are all perfectly sensible people and know that the bunny
thing is… well… nonsense. ‘But that’s just the way we’ve all ways done
things on this planet, so no point in changing that.’ So what it we are
working for? I can understand a scientist, doctor or someone talking
about the advancement of the human race etc, but for most of us our jobs
are not like that and what we do is simply production for the sake of
production with no real benefit to mankind what so ever. In fact with
the way the environment is going we’re probably doing harm.
Another of those fallacies is that if we stopped forcing people to
work, then nothing would get done, but again that is total nonsense.
Just look at the internet and be proved wrong. A five minute search and
you’ll find load of free programs, stories,games and music that people
have spent a lot of time and effort making, not for financial gain, but
because they wanted to. People are not lazy, we just think we are
because we are so tired from working on stuff we don’t like all the
time, but give people a month off and once they’ve spent a some time
recovering, suddenly the urge to work will come and it wort be work
it will be work
.
So here’s a not really thought out idea to consider. How about we
take the jobs that people don’t really like doing (making shoes and
cleaning sewers stuff like that) and divided them up between everyone in
the country. Hopefully that works out as about three or four days a
week for most. The rest of the days are then ours to work on doing
whatever we want. You want to be a teacher, teach. You want to be a
writer, write. Okay so we might be a little less productive, but we’d
certainly be a lot more happy.
- Walk With Me (walkthetalkwithme.wordpress.com)
- Embracing uncertainty: What does it really mean? (rewritingtherules.wordpress.com)
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