Skeptics locked into seeing life through the prism of the present

Skeptics of the Four-Hour Work Day are unable to escape the mindset that limits their gaze to what the can see through the prism of the present.

Life tomorrow will be decidedly different from life as it is, and so looking at it, and considering our response, then it quickly becomes apparent that in having such a limited view is pointless in the extreme.

Complications, diverse in impact, but common in root cause all spring from our abuse of our planet’s life support systems and beyond, and within that, our irresponsible access to, and use of, the earth’s finite resources.

The Four-Hour Work Day is little more than a beginning, a first step in fracturing the nexus between population, consumption, wants and needs and rampant individualistic egos.

Introduction of the Four-Hour Work Day would undoubtedly be difficult, challenging and almost beyond the comprehension of a society that originally evolved at almost at a geological pace.

That was, however, until man discovered how to unlock earth’s ancient sunlight resource (fossil fuels) a couple of centuries ago and the pace of life accelerated significantly.

Those activities, as is the case with everything we do, had unintended consequences.

Behaving as if the resource constantly replaced itself, we lived with a rather loose abandon and so have nearly exhausted those resources and to really complicate matters, have changed earth’s atmosphere bringing upon us unpredictable and destructive extreme weather events.

We now need to change how we go about things at what in modern terms might be called “warp” speed.

The time for negotiation is long past; our resources are drying up, our funds are drying up and as we stand in what could easily become a wasteland unless we act, we need to exercise the human spirit before it too dries up.

Rather than devote scarce time, energy and funds trying to protect the comforts we once had, it is time to apply those resources to creating a world that will provide succour to all.

That drive to achieve a degree of cheer, bolstered by the reassurance that the broad interest of society is not in growth or profit, but the general wellbeing of all.

The first move, demanding generous and athletic thinking, is the introduction of a Four-Hour Work Day. 

Slowing crippling exponential growth

The move to a Four-Hour Work Day will bring many benefits, among them the slowing of exponential events that are crippling our world.

This YouTube clip discusses energy, population and exponential growth is “The Most IMPORTANT Video You'll Ever See”.

Prof Albert A. Bartlett

The message is important, but those who need to see it are not watching or if they are, they are not listening.


Featured in the clip is the Professor Emeritus in Nuclear Physics at University of Colorado at Boulder, Prof Albert A. Bartlett.


He has been a member of the faculty of the University of Colorado since 1950. He was President of the American Association of Physics Teachers in 1978 and in 1981 he received their Robert A. Millikan Award for his outstanding scholarly contributions to physics education.


In discussing exponential growth, Prof Bartlett said: "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."

Considering The Four-Hour Work Day

The Four-Hour Work Day

What is it? – Exactly that; four hours at work, no overtime and no double shifts.

Why? – The world’s finite resources are being plundered at an alarming rate and exhaustion is within site. Our consumption of “stuff” not only capitalizes the world’s energy supplies, but the refuse from burning our fossil fuels has our environment sinks filled to capacity.

Beyond that, filling our oceans and the atmosphere are becoming so polluted that the acidification of those oceans brings life threatening implications and the carbon dioxide build up in our atmosphere is changing earth’s weather patterns at a rate vastly quicker than human’s can evolve to adapt and so threatening the entire human project.

What for?  - The  Four-Hour work day would make as all fundamentally poorer and if implemented with a sense of fairness and generousity those now living on the financial fringes of society would be embraced and invited in – in other words allowed their helping of the world’s wealth.

How would it work? – It demands a wholesale change to the philosophical understanding of work and the abandonment of the growth paradigm to which corporate world is addicted and through the threat of compounding difficulties to any society that abandons the ideal of growth, people, generally have joined this rush to the abyss.

What would be the benefit? – Work as it is understood in the contemporary world would no longer by our “reason”. Finally we would have time to reflect, consider, enrich our neighbourhoods simply by being their more often; as we would be working fewer hours, long commutes would be pointless and so we would be inclined to encourage the creation of the “five-minute” life – that is where everything important on a day-to-day basis (work, shopping, leisure, services, education, friend and family) would be within a five minute walk or cycle. Neighbourhoods would subsequently by stronger, more resilient and more able to cope with slings and arrows of life.

The lessons we learn from violence can be applied to the Four-Hour Work Day

Violence has been embedded in human life ever since man drew a breath.

Arrival of the eight-hour day was
accompanied by much procession
 and celebration.

Subsequently the idea that we should injure, disable or kill the other has been normalized and so becomes, or has become, an understood and accepted way of life.

Many talk of peace, but it is a concept that few truly understand, illustrated when a world leader once said: “We tried peace for a month and it didn’t work”.

The idea that peace could be achieved in a month when the contrary, violence, has had millennia to be normalized draws a comparison in the understanding of a Four-Hour Work Day.

Driven by and living a life with allegiance to the profit and growth urgency over the past two centuries, we are psychologically ill-equipped to even seriously think about how we could build our lives around a process in which our traditional working hours were much shorter.

Each of us has been normalized to understand and accept that our happiness and wellbeing hinges entirely on working an eight-hour day, something that was introduced in a limited sense in New Zealand and Australia in the 1840s and 1850s.

However, most employed people had to wait to the early and mid-twentieth century for the condition to be widely achieved through the industrialized world through legislative action.

The idea of labouring for another with the intent of improving your lifestyle was a product, largely, of the Industrial Revolution, although the idea of working for another has been integral in human societies for centuries.

The concept of our time that work is good as it allows us to accumulate the goods that are the product of a way of life enriches the minority and enslaves the majority.

However, in what has been termed “managed democracy”, society is convinced that its adherence to this way of life enables, or entitles them to what is a democratic life, but without much thought can be shown to be inverted totalitarianism: a process that has every hallmark of democracy, but what is really societal control.

The Four-Hour Work Day will, if implemented thoughtfully, bring an equity that will permeate throughout society.

Growing from a weed to a beautiful flower

The idea for a Four-Hour Work Day sprung from a bed of concerns, almost like a weed, but it now has a certain richness and urgency that demands careful and attentive husbandry.

The Four-Hour Work Day - from a weed
 to a beautiful flower.

That richness and urgency stems from human-induced changes to our climate; the prevalence of putting the economy ahead of human welfare; a blatant disinterest in the state of the earth (at least in keeping it habitable for humans); and equally seeming disinterest in the welfare of the other; an inability to see past, or care about what happens beyond the life of our grandchildren; the embrace of superstition and the inordinate rejection of reason and reality; the adoption of gigantism at the expense of what is small, simple and local; and a apathy toward, or at least a misunderstanding of, what is simply good for people.

A Four-Hour Work Day will not directly resolve any of those difficulties, but it will encourage a restructuring and rethinking of how we live.

Humans have walked the earth for about 200 000 years and we evolved to a point at which, about 200 years ago, we discovered how to unlock the secrets of ancient sunlight, that is fossil fuels, and in that blink of geological time we have understood complexity to such an extent that now have the capacity to end life, as we know it, on the planet.

Interestingly, we have shown sufficient restraint to avoid blowing ourselves up, but appear to be walking blindly into another trap about which many are aware, but with our natural inclination to multiply unabated and eagerness to exploit fossil fuels not being interrupted in any way, we are rapidly depleting the earth’s finite resources and along the way causing irreparable damage, at least on time-scale that matters to humans, to earth’s atmosphere.

A Four-Hour Work Day will simply slow that damage and, in concert, enable us time to recreate a sense of community and along with that build a five-minute life style – a life that puts all that is important on a day-to-day basis  (food, work, leisure, and various services, friends and family) all within five minutes walking or cycling.

Corporations will be replaced by community, growth by generosity, profit by a neighbourhood sense of pleasure and the urgency of the contemporary understanding of work by the more leisurely concept of the artisan who draws comfort from perfecting individual items, rather than being chained to the endlessly grind of the production line.

The sense of camaraderie, frequently cultivated with the purpose in existing workplaces with the prime purpose of ensuring growth, will naturally arise in tight-knit communities that work together to enable the building of resilience, endurance and a deep sense of caring.

We have tried living on the premise that growth will resolve human challenges: it has not and so not we must look toward a different way of doing things, a way that revolve around limiting the number of hours we devote each day to the sustenance of that hypothesis.

The dilemma of a Four-Hour Work Day

by Robert McLean

Sitting at my feet was a poster about the Four-Hour Work Day and sitting next to me was Kylie Legge, of Place Partners in Sydney, writing notes from an earlier event and preparing for a presentation she was about to give.

Kylie Legge.

The juxtaposition had a decided dissimilarity with which I mentally struggled – at my feet was an illustration (literally) of an idea to restrict work, as we know it, and to my right was a practical illustration of someone enthusiastically enjoying their work.

How, where and was it possible that the two could meet?

The difficulties and challenges facing the earth are not bound up in the fact that we work too hard, rather that our time is appropriated for the wrong tasks.

Therein lies the difficulty as for many our modern world has untold seductive and addictive avenues in which to work; processes that give people a sense of completeness, the idea that they are actually making a contribution to our greater wellbeing and of course they are, if you see life through the prism of growth and within that an ideology that puts profit ahead of people.

That is a remarkably dangerous observation for few people, beyond those who actively set out to deceive and profit from others, honestly believe that what they are doing is not in the greater good.

Kylie’s company Place Partners has done, according to its website, some startlingly good work, work that has enriched neighbourhoods and so the lives of many people, and so it would be difficult, if not impossible, to argue that their interest is not in the “greater good”.

This, however, is not a conversation about what is and isn’t good, rather it is about looking at a societal position that will preserve the planet and allow for the flourishing of people everywhere, including those who can’t even image the wonderful places that Kylie and Place Partners have guided to reality.

The dedication to and excitement people have for the seemingly endless array of opportunities in our modern world is to be applauded, but critically examined they are inappropriate for world in which we will be able to survive, a world that will need similar dedication, innovation and psychological contentment, but a world that is going to demand a re-focus and re-direction of that enthusiasm toward building a world in which solutions are to be found closer to home.

The idea of international and national “anything” will have to be replaced by the intense development of local – that is food, work, health, leisure, shopping and, importantly, ideas.

Considering the difference between 'unemployed' and 'under-employed'

Books have been written about the emerging group of people who are under-employed, note: “under” rather than “un”

Ms Gabrielle Whitehead, who is among the
 army of Australians who work part-time.

There is a difference and those under-employed as opposed to unemployed escape classification  and are among what author, Guy Standing, writing in his new book, “Precariat – The New Dangerous Class”, discusses how precariousness is becoming the new normality in globalised labour markets, and offers important guidelines for all concerned to build a more just society.

A story in today’s Age (April 21) tells of Gabrielle Whitehead is in her early 50s and lives near Ballarat. She is part of an army of Australians who work part-time, and want more work - but simply can't find it.

The dilemma Ms Whitehead faces is, or course, is the manifestation of values that are primarily about growth and profit, two things that are achieved when the inputs are limited and outputs continually expanded.

Labour is an input that can be reduced and held within prescribed limits.

Standing wonders, rightly, what will be social out-come of this new financially and so socially disadvantaged group.

It will not be good if we continue to adhere to the existing business as usual paradigm where our success if measure by the seemingly endless accumulation of goods, but the final analysis does little, but simply enrich as few.

It is in instance such as this that we need to break from the existing paradigm; a mindset that puts profit and growth ahead of people; and re-invent life in a way that stresses that everything we do needs to be about enhancing the welfare, physically and mentally, of people in a way that ensures the world’s eco systems remain healthy and intact.

We need to unshackle ourselves from the corporatization of life that drives endlessly at complexity and being conscious of that work in concert with nature that prefers equilibrium and simplicity a goal forever in its sights, commonly understood as atrophy, that being the return of everything to its simplest state.

Complexity and energy equate and as the complexity of life increased so did mankind’s use of energy and as of today, that has primarily been energy arrived through the burning of fossil fuels and although that has appeared free, the bill has now been slammed on the table for humankind to pay.

The Four-Hour Work Day is not the solution, rather just the first step in us moving toward a simple and less energy intensive way of living.
It would allow people more time to focus on their communities and neighbourhoods; it was allow them more time to be better citizens; it would allow them more time be engaged with political decisions (it was Aristotle who noted that a civil society and leisure are connected); it would allow more time to be better neighbours and, importantly, better people.

The dilemma faced by Ms Whitehead and others like is real and would not be resolved by the Four-Hour Work Day, but coupled with a resetting of our aspirations and the hosing-down of our egos and the creation of powerful community bonds, that survival would insist upon, the Precariat Guy Standing writes about might vanish.

Age reporter, Clay Lucas, has written about My Whitehead’s dilemma in the story headed: Part-timers up against the wall.

Burnham via ElKadi provides the inspiration

Professor Hisham Elkadi has no direct connection to the idea that we should be working just four hours every day, but he is an inspiration.

Or more accurately, the final slide of his presentation at the National Urban Design Forum in Melbourne on Friday, April 20, that was, and is, inspiring.

Professor Hisham Elkadi.

And to refine it even further it was the comment on that final slide from American architect and urban planner Daniel Hudson Burnham, (1846 – 1912) who in 1909 said:

"Make no little plans,that have no magic to stir the blood and probably will not be realised. Make big plans, aim high in hope and work”.

Burnham was the Director of Works for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and took a leading role in the creation of master plans for the development of a number of cities, including Chicago and downtown Washington D.C. He also designed several famous buildings, including the Flatiron Building in New York City and Union Station in Washington.

Daniel Burnham.

“Daniel Burnham’s observations stir my blood,” said one of those watching the April 20 video link between the university’s Geelong and Melbourne campuses, Robert McLean.

Professor Elkadi is the Head of School, Architecture and Building in the Faculty of Science and Technology at Deakin University in Geelong and is also the Chair of the university’s Academic Board.

About 70 people enjoyed the April 20 National Forum and were challenged and provoked by a series of presenters who adhered to the theme of “Urban Design in Regional Cities”.

Working fewer hours and peace are related

Violence has been embedded in human life ever since man drew a breath.

Achievement of the eight-hour-day in
 Australia was not without its
challenges.

Subsequently the idea that we should injure, disable or kill the other has been normalized and so becomes, or has become, an understood and accepted way of life.

Many talk of peace, but it is a concept that few truly understand, illustrated when a world leader once said: “We tried peace for a month and it didn’t work”.

The idea that peace could be achieved in a month when the contrary, violence, has had millennia to be normalized draws a comparison in the understanding of a Four-Hour Work Day.

Driven by and living a life with allegiance to the urgency of profit and growth over the past two centuries has left us psychologically ill-equipped to even seriously think about how we could build our lives around a process in which our traditional working hours were much shorter.

Each of us has been normalized to understand and accept that our happiness and wellbeing hinges entirely on working an eight-hour day, something that was introduced in a limited sense in New Zealand and Australia in the 1840s and 1850s.

However, most employed people had to wait to the early and mid-twentieth century for the condition to be widely achieved through the industrialized world through legislative action.

The idea of labouring for another with the intent of improving your lifestyle was a product, largely, of the Industrial Revolution, although the idea of working for another has been integral in human societies for centuries.

The concept of our time that life can only be improved through adherence to the market-driven corporate ideal and so giving what has evolved as the commonly understood notion of work preference in everything we do is clearly wrong.

A beautiful life can be accessed with just a handful of the goods that the mercenary world foists upon us – happiness and contentment and qualities we are born with or if they are not natural they can be nurtured.

The necessities of life, contrary to what we are constantly told, are pretty much free.

Working fewer hours is about enriching your life, making you a better person and allowing you, importantly, to be a more engaging member of your community.  

The struggle is with closed minds and 'won't work' attitude

“Won’t work” is the instinctive reaction to the proposal for a Four-Hour Work Day, no overtime and no double shifts.

That mindset; a mindset of doom for an idea that could literally liberate humankind from the advanced sclerosis of our minds and along with that prove an effective step in the abatement of climate change.

Impenetrable minds are the first thing that advocates of climate change abatement must access as most conservative thinkers, generally where you will find a sclerotic-like mind; those minds that inevitably question the science that confirms the realities that are changing our climate.  

Accessing closed minds is the
 first challenge facing
advocates of climate change
adaptation and within that
the Four-Hour Work Day.

Admitted the idea of a Four-Hour Work Day is, of course, quite a break with the status quo, but so was the introduction of the Internet in the last decade of the 19^th century.

The internet, and its various ramifications, have changed the face of business and that in turn has changed the face of how will live and interact socially and less than 20 years later it is ubiquitous and in fact so pervasive that what was common 30 years ago is now archaic.

The advancement of technology brought with it promises of increased leisure for all except that we were not paying attention and those innovations were purloined by the corporate world and used to further enslave people, making them obedient and respondent to the whim of market and growth driven endeavour; endeavour that has an unblinking allegiance to profit, irrespective of the cost to people or earth’s ecosystem.

We are sleepwalking into decidedly difficulties, our salvation depends upon us breaking the trance of the profit and growth- “It won’t work” thinkers and deciding for ourselves that rather than devote our relatively short lives to making others rich, we would rather work less in the traditional sense and within that afford more time to reflect, consider and share.

Anything that is worthwhile is not easily achieved; bad things happen quickly, good things happen slowly; and the journey to working fewer hours will not be easy, will not be quick, but it will lead to rich rewards and not rewards that sees the accumulation of goods, rather the accumulation of a people who are decidedly more content, happier and fulfilled.   

Looking for the 'silver bullet' in climate change adaptation

The “silver bullet” in climate adaptation is the Four-Hour Work Day.

Should we want to reduce our impact on the atmosphere, then it is important that we reduce, rather almost eliminate, our reliance on fossil fuels and therein is the critical aspect of working fewer hours.

The “silver bullet” in climate adaptation is
 the Four-Hour Work Day.

With society built around a four-hour work day, the interval between our journeys to and fro would be short compared to what exists, encouraging people to live within an easy walking or cycling distance of their work places.

That would, by its nature, reduce the distance travelled by people to and from work subsequently eroding the need for an extensive, and expensive, road network, easing the pressure on public transport systems, leading to a “five-minute life” – that is a neighbourhood in which everything important and day-to-day basis, including work, shopping, health and educative services, various government services, reaction and leisure – are all within five minutes walking or cycling; obesity would be eased and general health would improve as more people would be physically active; communities and neighbourhoods would be vastly stronger and be markedly healthier, more resilient and stronger as people would simply have more time to be there.

And, of course, just as soon as it became clear that neighbourhoods were enriched through the deeper and more expansive involvement of those who lived there, it would have a self-fulfilling dynamic as it began to “feed upon itself” and the improvement would become organic.

With additional time at their disposal to pursue activities that enhanced life personally, for their neighbourhood and the broader community, people would experience a sense of wellbeing and achievement that had been missing from their lives under the strain of a market-driven, profit and growth based society.

Adptation demands reduction and limits

The Integral Fast Breeder Reactor has the
potential to ease our climate change
difficulties and could be a major
tool in our adaptation.

Any adaptation to climate change will only work if the world can reduce and limit its current consumption of fossil fuels.

The move to a Four-Hour Work Day is just a step in slowing down our consumption for there will be, if instituted with a fairness unapparent in the existing market-based capitalistic system, an equity of income throughout society.

Being forced by a change in income, we will consume less and so use far less energy, most of is produced by fossil-fuel powered energy generating plants.

There are alternatives to our traditional power plants and they use a source of fuel to generate electricity that has a variety of titles, including renewable and sustainable, such as solar, wind, geothermal and wave.

All have a role to play, but even a cursory examination of their individual and combined contributions suggest they would be unable to met base-load demands.

There is however, a fossil fuel alternative, but it demands that all of us to re-examine our values and clearly put facts and realities ahead of emotional and ill-informed responses. That alternative is nuclear.

The conversation could easily become distorted for a devastating picture has been painted about the safety and seemingly endless complications of nuclear power, but any reaction should be tempered by an understanding of facts and realities of accepted and traditional energy sources and then the huge, and significant advances, made in the design and building of the new generation of nuclear power plants.

Look at without bias and analytically, coal power plants have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, far more than the miniscule number of people lost to nuclear-fired power plants.

The new generation of nuclear power plants – the Integral Fast-Breeder Reactor – were virtually ready to go in the late 1990s when the U.S. Department of Energy had built a prototype, but the IFR project was canceled by the US Congress in 1994 three years before completion.

Mysterious cancellation of the IFR project stopped in it tracks something that had it been implemented, then we would have been facing a whole different scenario.

The IFR does not require nuclear fuel that could be diverted to nuclear weapons; they will consume most of the world’s present stockpile of nuclear waste; they produce little waste of their own and what they do is stabilized at a much lower level of radio activity and so becomes vastly less dangerous in a few centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years; their design is fundamentally safe as should there be any difficulty, they automatically shut down and in the way they operate they would simple not explode.

IFRs have the potential to provide the world with it base-load of electricity, but the challenge for each of us is to mentally get beyond the “scare-factor” that emerges immediately the word “nuclear” enters the conversation.

The IFR will resolve energy needs (it is argued that we have sufficient uranium to power the world for as long as the sun exists), but our quality of life produced by a civil society which will only prosper if we have more time to be reflective people who invest that time and energy, both intellectual and physical, into our communities, communities that bond around and build a Four-Hour Work Day.

The market-driven world has pilfered all that is good about community

Communities are rich in knowledge and resources.

Plato and Aristotle - it was Plato
 who said: "An unexamined life
is not worth living".

Our market driven world has, however, pilfered many of those riches, or at least has created a dynamic in which people are so pre-occupied and exhausted from a day in the market economy, that their community and neighbourhoods are wounded by that depletion of personal energy.

A day devoted to the sustenance of the capitalistic-driven market economy demands uninhibited access to an individual’s knowledge, their emotional energy and equally their physically energy.

Their neighbourhoods and the attendant lifestyles are maintained through the misplaced allegiance to corporate values that are about growth and profit, two things that, despite the manifest claims of most economists, are diametrically opposed to the creation of resilience in communities and the continuing health and wellbeing of people.

The idea that we work fewer hours is primarily about recovering a person’s life; enabling them to find fulfillment and happiness in a world that promotes an understanding that an ethos based on those values is counter to present culture that sees the accumulation of goods, and within that money, as being indicative of success.

The Four-Hour Work Day would allow people decided freedom from the daily drudgery of the eight-hour day and liberty from the constraints of a lifestyle that enriches a few and enslaves the rest.

Early thinkers and many since, have often advocated for time in our lives to be reflective; a reflection that would allow us to examine our lives and it was Plato who said - “an unexamined life is not worth living".

Present lifestyles are such that most of us offend Plato everyday for because of our addiction to the “corporate way” we are so busy that our lives are unexamined and so, according to Plato, not worth living.

We can make it worth living in that we can allow time for that “examination” by working fewer hours for the corporate mandate and embracing the Four-Hour Work Day.

Economics editor alarmed about inaction

Ross Gittins

Do you ever wonder how the environment - the global ecosystem - will cope with the continuing growth in the world population plus the rapid economic development of China, India and various other ''emerging economies''? I do. And it's not a comforting thought - Ross Gittins.

The Four-Hour Work Day would introduce a natural contraction to growth and through that ease the pressure on the global ecosystem and play and instrumental role in preserving the world’s finite resources.

Listen as the Sydney Morning Herald economics editor, Ross Gittins, discusses: Human cost of inaction incalculable.

Understanding and embracing a 'civil society'

A society that understands and embraces the idea of the Four-Hour Work Day is one that is also cognizant of the concept of a “civil society”.

What is painted today as “democracy” is a reality remote from demotic behaviour and if honesty were to prevail, it should really have another name that in some way reflected the realities of totalitarianism.

"Managed Democracy" by
 Sheldon S. Wolin.

It was author, Sheldon S. Wolin, writing in “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism” discussed the control corporations have over society; a society in which democracy is portrayed, but rarely genuinely enacted.

Although most societies have the infrequent breakout of groups intent on securing equity and a certain civility, they are rare and without the backing of the majority, which because of what Wolin has described as “managed democracy”, is predominantly passive and submissive, and so cause little trouble for the powerful lobby of the military/industrial/growth complex.

Life is not meant to be lived with your “shoulder-to-the-wheel” to ensure the survival of a way of life guaranteeing days of ease and comfort for a few and endless toil for most.

The idea of a civil society is, in a popular sense, considered irrelevant and unneeded as most have been convinced that we already live with freedom and equity, but even a glance beyond the façade constructed by the corporate world we will see it is a house of cards resting on what are portrayed as firm foundations, but which are nothing more than a shaky superstructure whose fidelity depends upon ever-more growth and profit reliant on the endless consumption of finite resources.

The Four-Hour Work Day would begin to restore to some equity and begin a conversation about the importance of shifting to a way of living in which the emphasis is on people rather than growth and profit.

Let's talk with the aim if getting it "right"

Life lived through the
corporate/profit/growth prism
obviously hasn't worked and
 now we need something new.

The idea of a Four-Hour Work Day, when considered through the present commercial prism, is absolutely unworkable, but we (society generally) needs to have a discussion about how we adapt to a future which simply has to be decidedly different from the present corporatized profit and growth driven mindset that has the world on its knees.

What exists is clearly not working as it has created huge inequities among the people of the world, is exhausting or has exhausted the world's finite resources and in filling up the earth's natural sinks (the oceans, for argument's sake, absorb excess carbon dioxide and they are so full, that they are becoming acidic and so killing sea-borne species at an alarming rate).

We need a different way of doing things and although the idea of a Four-Hour Work Day might be naive, at least it is a way of breaking the nexus between corporate profit, work and the wellbeing of individuals and so society.

We have tried the corporate/profit/growth idea for a couple of centuries and it obviously hasn't worked and now we need to try something else and may, just maybe a Four-Hour Work Day is a step toward getting it right, what "right" might be is questionable, although what exists is clearly not "right".

Impractical? Maybe, but it ignites the conversation

The idea of a Four-Hour Work Day might quickly be shown to have little practicality and so be absolutely unworkable.

A cartoonist's image of A.C. Grayling.

Whatever its failings, if it has any, the idea will, if nothing else, ignite a conversation about the reasons we work, the value it has for the broader wellbeing of society and of course individuals, and whether or not in its contemporary understanding, it is integral to the health of communities.

The challenge of course is to reposition ourselves to avoid having our gaze limited by viewing what it is and how we live through the modern prism of a corporate controlled world in which profits and therefor mercenary aims are put ahead of the welfare of people.

Even small businesses in small towns that employ local people and answer local needs are, by default, controlled by the corporate ideology in that their viability can be, and is, directly influenced by the behaviour of corporations.

Just recently, the humanist philosopher, A.C. Grayling, talked about the importance of acting decidedly and intent to ensure you built a worthy life through which you made a laudable contribution to your community and so society generally.

Grayling emphasized the limited time we each have (300 months for those who live to 80 – meaning 960 months, less time spent sleeping, eating and in ablutions, and general wasting of time – leaves just 300 months) and so that available time to enrich our lives would be near doubled if we were involved in traditional work for only four-hours a day.

Arrival at the point of four-hour work days is not easy (nothing of any value is easy, or course), but it is not until we ignite the discussion can we even begin to understand what we would need in the way of changes to live more fulfilling and complete lives.

We are born equal, supposedly

Equity is one of life's great commonalities, but not always.

Beyond a few rather sad health related difficulties, time is one of life’s equities.

 Equity is about balance.

Time maybe evenly handed out to us all, but almost immediately we are born it becomes distorted.

Opportunity is supposedly equal, but the reality is that the circumstances of birth are so differing that our prospects appear cast even before we draw our first breath.

The world’s conservative thinkers decry the efforts of many who fail to take what they see as the endless opportunities the world offers, but neglect to acknowledge that those opportunities fall within the paradigm they understand and so know exactly how to exploit.

A Four-Hour Work Day would balance the scales as those comfortable in the profit and work-based paradigm could answer their needs and those more comfortable with a process that builds strong and resilient communities would have the time to pursue that belief.

Trying to understand equity in income

Equity in income has troubled the world for centuries.

A shift to a Four-Hour Work Day will not in itself change that, but it will be an important ingredient in the recipe of events that will eventually bring about altered behaviour.

We have tried this,but now we
 need something differrent.

The inequity of incomes is embedded in what exists and a switch to Four-Hour Work Day, without overtime or double shifts, will not engender the necessary change.

This time, however, things will be different.

The mix of corporatism, labour and consumption that has sustained capitalism for centuries, particularly those of late, now has something else to consider; something that has always been an ingredient, but until now mostly ignored and been treated as a free asset - that is nature.

Services provided by nature have always been costed in at nil value, that however, is changing (albeit reluctantly in the minds of many) and as nature cannot be told what to do, it is emerging as the most significant cost facing businesses.

Businesses have ignored nature, profited handsomely from its largesse, but now it has to pay, as do all of us and that is not just directly in cash as the costs are coming in the form of disruptive changes to our climate manifested in unpredictable storms, floods and cyclones that are wreaking havoc around the globe.

The shift to a Four-hour Work Day will need to be a legislative change, meaning that businesses can only operate four-hours a day – an idea that collides head-on with the present agenda calling for changes to work arrangements allowing businesses to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution a couple of centuries ago, the ideology of profit and growth has been indelible etched onto our lives that we now grow believing consumption equates with happiness – it doesn’t and a Four-Hour Work Day will make all of us make all of us, from the orchestrators of our money-based society down to the oppressed soul, financially poorer and yet hugely time rich.

Individual adaptation warrants applause, but top-down change is needed

Individual adaptation to climate change abatement is to be admired and so warrants applause.

However, it should be noted that although such changes may be remarkably extensive on an individual basis they will have no noticeable amelioration on the catastrophic conditions emerging from climate change.



Being subsequently poorer because of a
four-hour work day, we would naturally
consume less and so waste less.



Nor will those changes have any impact if everyone on your street follows you lead, and nor will it make much difference if those mutations are echoed throughout your whole community.

Demands for a rigorous response to climate change adaptation are so demanding, are considered by many to be unnecessary, unneeded and unimportant, that any bottom-up movement is likely to falter and so a workable adaption and mitigation program hinges on courageous top-down legislated changes.

It is abundantly clear that the combination of earth’s population, along with their consumptive habits, particularly those of the developed world, is the prime cause of our worsening climate.

A host of climate change abatement ideas have emerged in recent times, but most appear to revolve around the central paradigm in which life as we know and understand it is maintained.

There, however, lies the folly – life as it is simply consumes far too much of earth’s finite fossil resources, first as an energy source and, second, as the prime ingredient in most of those goods that we consume with seemingly absolute disregard for how those who follow will survive.

Most everything that happens in the developed world consumes energy and goods made possible by our gouging of our finite resources, which some describe as ‘ancient sunlight’, that is made easily accessible by our burgeoning wealth.

To trim that wealth and so ease the developed world’s impact on a worsening climate, we urgently need to take steps to make all those in that world substantially poorer and so the equation needed to make everyone poorer, and so less able to consume and therefore live a more limited life is to switch to a Four-Hour Work Day.

Such an approach, with the restrictions of no overtime and no double shifts, has the implication that each of us will need to live much closer to where it is that we work.

The “five minute life” will become increasingly important, that is most everything important on a day-to-day basis is within a five minute walking or cycling radius.