Changing Attitudes

[The proposals of Carlos Slim and others to work fewer hours and to maximise leisure] are lovely utopian ideas, but they also seem quaintly out of place in an age where work has expanded, like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, to invade every hour of waking life.

Elizabeth Renzetti of the Globe & Mail sits on the fence somewhat, but nails the fact that we need to change our societal attitude towards work.

It’s fine to talk about taking more vacation or working fewer hours, but attitudes would need to be adjusted alongside punch clocks. As the Washington Post reporter Brigid Schulte writes in her enlightening new book Overwhelmed, we have become addicted to busyness. Psychologists, she writes, talk of “treating burned-out clients who can’t shake the notion that the busier you are, the more you are thought of as competent, smart, successful, admired and even envied.” To be on the brink of collapse, perversely, is the height of success.

Seeming busy is not important and it’s about time we all understood that. We need to develop the idea that the person with the most idle time–not the person most harried–is the winner.

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Billionaire Calls for Three-Day Workweek

Second-wealthiest Earthling Carlos Slim suggests we adopt a three-day workweek.

“With three work days a week,” he says, “we would have more time to relax, for quality of life.”

Alas, he also suggests we work longer shifts (grueling 11-hour days) to offset the loss of earnings and productivity, so it’s not entirely an idler-friendly idea. This being said, a 33-hour workweek is still shorter than the currently typical 40.

It’s a better-organised approach to labour. Since a worker is basically knackered and good for nothing but a quick dinner and a DVD box set after eight hours of work, she might as well go the extra mile and work into the night if it results in fewer commutes and a routine four-day weekend.

If dudes of establishment renown like Carlos Slim, Larry Page and Professor John Ashton are calling for less-orthodox work schedules, maybe employers will begin to look more favorably upon the flexier work modes more generally. Part-time work, for example, should be more readily available to everyone: something I’ve long-thought could be the solution to the “Freedom versus Security” problem for most people.

It occurs to me I’ve been sounding a bit like an organizational psychologist lately, but in a world where billionaires and top doctors are starting to sound like Escapologists, anything’s possible.

To make up for it, here’s a picture of a tortoise eating a strawberry:

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Post-Scarcity

Rare things (gold, love, flow) are usually worth seeking out and holding onto. Less rare things (plastic bags, recent superhero movies, dust) are usually not.

You don’t normally find gold nuggets lying around in the street and you don’t usually have to stockpile tap water.

The more scarce a commodity, the more valuable. The less scarce a commodity, the closer it is to being garbage.

Maybe one day — through technology — no commodity will be scarce. Everyone will share unlimited abundance. This design is called a post-scarcity society and is fueled by post-scarcity desires and post-scarcity economics. The word ‘rare’ will come up primarily in steak houses.

Most of us would see post-scarcity as a beautiful Utopia: enough for all, no poverty, no insatiable commodity lust. Post-scarcity Anarchists believe the Utopia’s already here (or at least already possible if only we’d distribute the abundance more evenly).

Many of you will know of my aloofness to material goods. By choice, I don’t own much of anything. My idea of heaven is a spartan, minimalist enclave where nothing exists save for the relevant, the useful, the beautiful. Most people share this sentiment but don’t observe it, or their definitions of relevance, utility and beauty are broader than mine.

A good guide for deciding what to keep and what to jettison as a minimalist is to “act as if” we have a post-scarcity economy. This way, you’re more likely to keep things of value and less likely to waste your time fussing over garbage.

I have a friend who isn’t a minimalist and doesn’t think in post-scarcity terms. He’s a spectacular fellow, but he basically lives in a man-shaped cavity in a cube of refuse.

He accumulates all manner of stuff. A thousand DVDs, hundreds of books, a graveyard of superfluous kitchen equipment (salad spinners and the likes). The effect is of a clogged-up nest, a hoarder’s den, the walls closing in, empty space at a premium. His home is the very antitheses of minimalism.

If he likes to live this way, so be it. But he “acts as if” airport paperbacks and unused kitchen appliances were somehow scarce; as if having them in his proximity at all times is worthwhile; as if it gives him some advantage.

He thinks his stuff provides an advantage because he thinks he still lives in a pre-scarcity world: a world where there aren’t enough salad spinners to go around. He thinks he’s richer than his neighbour because he hasn’t noticed that these things are in massive abundance.

The kind of books he’s accumulated, for example, are not scarce. Should one of his books vanish or be destroyed, he’d be able to replace it in moments. The local library undoubtedly has a copy, as will the local bookstore. eBay is chock full of them. A digital edition floats in the ether, ready to be captured at a moment’s notice. To all intents and purposes, this book is not scarce.

Realising that these things are not scarce leads one to believe that maybe we really do have a post-scarcity society already. What, really, is scarce any more? For what do we want today?

If an era, as Arthur Miller said, is over “when its basic illusions are exhausted,” maybe we’re at the end of the era of scarcity?

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The Condensed Minimalist

There has, ironically, been a lot said about minimalism in books and online. But to live minimally really just requires adherence to two simple objectives:

1. Don’t buy or otherwise acquire anything inedible;
2. Rid yourself of anything not frequently useful or aesthetically pleasing to you.

That is the whole of the law!

John Ashton calls for four-day work week

Professor John Ashton, a prominent NHS director of public health, has called for a four-day work week on the grounds that it will reduce the nation’s blood pressure, create more time for public service and time with friends, and lower unemployment. He says:

When you look at the way we lead our lives, the stress that people are under, the pressure on time and sickness absence, [work-related] mental health is clearly a major issue. We should be moving towards a four-day week because the problem we have in the world of work is you’ve got a proportion of the population who are working too hard and a proportion that haven’t got jobs. We’ve got a maldistribution of work. The lunch-hour has gone; people just have a sandwich at their desk and carry on working.

This is excellent news and a rare example of someone of such establishment renown speaking like this:

We need a four-day week so that people can enjoy their lives, have more time with their families, and maybe reduce high blood pressure because people might start exercising on that extra day […] It would mean that people might smile more and be happier, and improve general health.

Would Brits stick to a four-day work week? Pleasingly, 89% of people who responded to the Guardian’s reader survey said they would welcome a four-day week. Perhaps the desire for maximum busyness is not as widespread as it might sometimes seem.

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Don’t Retire Early! says government

An attack on those who leave the workforce:

[Early retirement can] have a major impact on people’s mental health, leading to “boredom, loneliness and poverty” and create a huge dent in the British economy.

The findings are part of the research behind a new “action plan” to get older people back into work, launched by pensions minister Steve Webb. The report, Fuller Working Lives, concluded that the British economy missed out on £18bn last year because people left the workforce early.

The report focuses on those who have been forced to leave the workforce, largely through redundancy or ill health, rather than those who have chosen to retire in their 50s because they can afford to do so.

As if people aren’t knackered enough as it is, and as if the slave mentality weren’t already drummed into us almost from birth, but now the sick, the elderly, the redundant (lovely term, that, by the way), and those already physically damaged by work are being hassled into returning to work.

Again, the obsession with looking after the economy (ooh, the economy, everyone should roll up their sleeves to help the poor old ailing economy, will no one spare a thought for how the economy must be feeling?) leads to the reluctant enslavement of people who should be living their lives, should always have been living their lives, and have already given away the best years of their lives.

There are ways to address “boredom, loneliness and poverty“. Working in some demeaning job at the age of 50 is not one of them.

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Full Employment

This lovely animated short, El Empleo or The Employment explores a reality in which unemployment is no longer a problem.

Something else to think about on these lines is Anarchist Bob Black’s assertion that “[some] favor full employment [while] I favor full unemployment”.

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I Rose Slowly

Friend Fraser provides this quotation from Pulitzer-winning poet Charles Simic:

I was five minutes late from lunch at the insurance company where I was working and my boss chewed me out for being irresponsible in front of twenty or thirty other drudges. I sat at my desk for a while, fuming, then I rose slowly, wrapped my scarf around my neck and put my gloves on in plain view of everybody, and walked out without looking back. I didn’t have an overcoat and on the street it was snowing, but I felt giddy, deliriously happy at being free.

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Running on Empty

More grist for our mill arrives in the form of this opinion piece in the New York Times:

The way we’re working isn’t working. Even if you’re lucky enough to have a job, you’re probably not very excited to get to the office in the morning, you don’t feel much appreciated while you’re there, you find it difficult to get your most important work accomplished, amid all the distractions, and you don’t believe that what you’re doing makes much of a difference anyway. By the time you get home, you’re pretty much running on empty, and yet still answering emails until you fall asleep.

It comes complete with some handy statistics (Source: The Energy Project):

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The Future of Work and Death

Friend Neil directs our attention to this great-looking forthcoming documentary, The Future of Work and Death.

I can hardly wait. Quick, someone throw some money at their kickstarter.

I love that work and death are placed together as discussion topics: the two great so-called inevitables.

This potential film is very much part of our Utopian conversation about what’ll happen when the machines more properly take over and the idea of the human as functionary is more widely accepted as an appalling waste.

Recall this Buckminster Fuller quote:

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery.

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