Looking at life through the existing prism and seeing a handsaw

Considering just four hours of paid work each day is impossible, especially when our view is limited to the prism of what exists.

The common handsaw will see a return
 to common usage as we adapt to our
changing climate.

Should we struggle to comprehend the idea of a Four-Hour Work Day, then what is incomprehensible is made even more so because of the intractable burden that has settled upon us, gaining both weight and force with the passing of recent centuries.

The idea that contentment will emerge from having your shoulder to the wheel and that there is simply no other way of achieving such serenity is embedded in our psyche.

The world’s market driven system has become so pervasive and so entrenched in our being that consumption inevitably equates with contentment and much to the delight of unquestionably the military/industrial cohort, along with the world’s neoliberals (the same people probably) we work tirelessly to enable that consumption and so the associated  imagined contentment.

What exists did not arrive on the horizon, perfectly shaped, in ideal working condition and ready for instant implementation – rather, it was knocked into shape over the centuries: some bits working, other bits being discarded and all along being shaped to ensure it favoured the few, enriched them and allowed the orchestration of life to ensure that those with their shoulder to the wheel believed they were working for the broader betterment of mankind.

The latter is not true as the majority are really working for the betterment of just a few – there is an imbalance; an imbalance that favours “that few” with the implication that the present economic structure needs rescuing and definitive restructuring.

The Four-Hour Work Day is about many things, but chief among them is the restoration of neighbourhoods in that people would be able to spend more time in there and play their part in ensuring its resilience and so its adaptation to a changing climate; changes that will raise, hugely, the importance of such basic technologies as the hammer, the handsaw the shovel.

The existing paradigm almost denies the hammer, the handsaw and the shovel and their near extinction from the human landscape has, in an environmental sense, cost humanity dearly and as we adapt to a changing climate through the Four-Hour Work Day we will see their return to former value.