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.