this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
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90 hours a week is just insane. But so is working 40 hours a week tbh. I understand that many people need to work fulltime in order to provide for themselves and their families, but they shouldn't have to. Nobody should have to give up 5 out of 7 days of their life to sustain a moderate quality of life. We (humanity) should be better than that.
Darn tootin’, we need Universal Basic Income!
I will say some people in some industries can give up 40hr/wk of their lives from their laptops at home and sustain a phenomenal quality of life. That should def be a choice available to those who care to make it. (And the privileges necessary to be qualified to work those jobs should be afforded to all, of course.*)
*not sure how this sentiment would survive a truly level global playing field with 8bil equal competitors, but don’t wanna be too domestically biased
It really blows my mind that people get stuck in this "that's the way it should be" mindset.
You know that with more exposure your comment would attract tons of replies about "you're lazy, 40 hours is the minimum you should work! You just want life handed to you for 5 hours of work." Completely ignoring that 40 hours a week was "recently" changed to be the norm and only because the owners realized that the workers need time to buy and use their products so that they can sell more...
There's nothing natural about 40 hours weeks let alone 90...
tbh that's something that always scares me a bit when I make slightly more "political" comments like this. It feels like humans are prone to believing that the way things are right now is how they are meant to be, and that the status quo is the best possible option. As far as I know (and all I really know is what I remember from a couple of sociology books that I skimmed for a paper five years ago), opposition to overwhelming changes is a very human reaction because we tend to like "the same as yesterday with a few minor changes to liven things up a bit," but it still saddens me to see this kind of reaction to ideas that could improve life so drastically. Given how big of a change leaving the 40-hour week behind would be, though, I can see why it causes this kind of reaction.
It's not even like I don't want to work at all. It'd be nice to achieve fully automated gay luxury space communism or whatever, but if humanity ever reaches that point, I'll be long gone. A good work environment where everybody is treated well, hours that align with my life, a commute of no more than half an hour (or work-from-home), seeing a point in my job, and not being poor when I work, say, 20 hours a week are all I really want and need, but that's already a lot (too much?) to ask for in this world. I think some theorists call that "agreeable work," and I feel like that's what we should be striving for.
"A society grows great when old men plant gay space trees whose communist shade they know they shall never sit in."
I'd rather die a painful death than work 90 hours. Even 40 hours is worse than the worse thing I've otherwise gone through (life threatening dehydration).