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.