Morphing sweetly to improving the quality of our lives

Happiness is in our hands.

The idea for a Four-Hour Work Day emerged first as an adaptation to climate change and has morphed sweetly into a concept underpinning the quality of our lives.

Work is essential to human wellbeing for it grounds us socially, connecting us with our fellows, gives an important sense of purpose and, importantly, generates many of the things that are crucial to our broader health, both physically and emotionally.

Sadly however, the idea of work has been corrupted, diverting our attention from those truly human qualities of connection, purpose and the innovation that provides those goods that allow us to attend to both our physical and emotional needs.

Struggling with the idea of work, humans, or at least most of us and certainly in the developed world, are now locked into a paradigm that dictates that we devote, almost exclusively, our talents and time to a process that is about boosting consumerist-based egos.

Life, it must be noted, is not about surrounding ourselves with “stuff”, the production of which consumes an inordinate amount of primarily fossil-fuelled energies to bring to the market being assembled using, mostly, an irreplaceable resource.

The complication is that while that wasteful paradigm simply expands exponentially and worsens the circumstances of anthropogenic climate change, it subtracts rather than adds to general human happiness.

Ideas that drive the modern “work-world” have been hijacked from the happiness, contentment and wellbeing humans experience when they pool their talents, time and personal resources to enrich the purpose of their being.

Simply, we work too long and too hard to achieve far too little in terms of making what is the human experiment a worthwhile endeavour – we have been grossly mislead and so we are equally grossly mistaken about what it is that makes humans, human.

Strip away the glamour of the commercial world; consider what it is that makes a person’s heart beat faster; look at what matters to them on a truly personal level and it is not, except in the rarest of cases, spending more time with your shoulder to the wheel (laboring to enrich others) for the ultimate benefit of another.

The Four-Hour Work Day will make us all substantially poorer, or at least bring some equity into the world economic system, but in doing that make each of us time-rich and so in a position to contribute the greater wellbeing and happiness of our communities – the quality of our lives will be better.