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.