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.