On wasting work
Welcome back!
How was your long weekend? Good? That's great to hear.
Say, can I ask you something? You can be honest, I won't tell anyone: do you think the work you do matters?
Like, obviously I hope it does. But if it doesn't, shit, isn't that alienating? Giving most of your time–the most precious thing you have–to something that doesn't matter?
Meanwhile, the people doing the work that really matters are super overworked. That it's important work is what keeps them there–it certainly isn't the pay.
But it doesn't make a lot of sense, does it? You're doing a lot of busywork that doesn't need to be done, meanwhile the important stuff is getting done by people who are over-stressed and under-slept.
I mean imagine working for, say, a company that makes cheap plastic toys; the kind kids play with once or twice before it gets thrown away and sits in a landfill for thousands of years. You've got people working in procurement, design, manufacturing, distribution, marketing–all to make something we probably agree doesn't need to exist in the first place.
What if instead of doing that stuff, those people all got to work doing something that matters? Nursing, and teaching, and cleaning, and cooking, and running deliveries of things people actually need. And then the people who do that stuff now could work a little less, on account of all the extra people sharing the load. With at least the same pay, mind you–we can give them the money we would have spent on plastic toys.
It just doesn't make a lot of sense to me that with all our modern technology, that anybody needs to be working so much in the first place. Productivity keeps going up and up. If we can get the same amount of work done in less time, why not do that and knock off early?
We've just come back from a four-day weekend, and didn't it feel great? Getting some errands done, seeing loved ones, resting. What if that were every weekend? I reckon we could make it so, if we wanted.
People talk about a four-day work week, but I think they're dreaming too small. Combine what we know about the productivity of a four-day work week, with the knowledge that most jobs are just meaningless busywork we could do without–hell, those three work days probably don't even need to be eight hours.
Time's the most precious thing we have–why are we wasting it?
