Writing about population, but solving another issue

Professor Danny Dorling doesn’t specifically endorse the Four-Hour Work Day, but the implications of his 2013 book, “Population 10 Billion” suggest he would support the idea.

Danny Dorling's
 book - "Population
10 Billion".

The Professor of Human Geography at the University of Sheffield sees the future welfare of the world as intimately implicated in humanity’s broad consumption habits and discussing how we could live in a vastly fairer and essentially better world he wrote: “But first we need to control growth, not population growth – that is being controlled – but economic growth, which is still uncontrolled.”

The near uncontrolled hours allowed for work (work in its traditional and understood sense) is the driver of economic growth and that, along with insistent advertising ensuring we always remain materialistically aspirational in an our ambitions.

That near daily grind with its unrelenting hours of work brings a range of individual and communal difficulties from personal dissatisfaction to neighbourhood dystopia.

Chief, however, among the ailments arising from seemingly unlimited work hours and the unbridled consumption that arises from our personal wealth is the dissonance humans have brought upon the world’s climate.

There appears to be a simple equation: if we worked fewer hours; we would have fewer funds at our disposal; we would consume less; our subsequent carbon footprint would be smaller; we would have vastly more time to invest in the welfare of our neighbourhoods; our social lives would become richer through cooperation and working together, rather than spending most of our time, and our thinking, living in the combative and frequently de-humanizing world or business; we would also be in a position to expand and enrich the natural human social capacity that allows for collaboration that until now has been poached for profit by the world of work that is largely insensitive to the environmental needs of the planet – those needs being considered “externalities”, which are never represented in business balance sheets.

Climatologists who understand how we (humans) are disrupting the world’s climate system and grasp the seriousness of our behaviours, along with our insistence on burning fossil fuels, can only see successful mitigation through the immediate cessation of our embedded consumptive ways of life.

The Four-Hour Work Day is an immensely simple concept, but its implication is both intricate and complex in that it is seen confusingly through an ideological prism and its successful implementation demands an honest reappraisal of what it is the humans deem as “success”.

The idea of success for many is inextricably linked to the traditional mechanistic world of work, where a world in which work is simply realigned with answering needs is fundamentally kinder to earth, or at least the environment that allows humans to flourish.

Traditional work with which most of us are familiar, is, unequivocally, climate-disrupting and the energy consuming targets of the commercial world that are about massaging the toxic demands of our wants.

It is a risk of extreme proportions to abandon work without first understanding what we do to replace it for work as we experience it today answers out natural human need for the sociability that injects steadfastness into our lives.

Revolution is fine, but what happens after such a social upheaval is equally, if not more important.

A change to our lifestyle that bring changes that more than doubles our free time, demands that we reimagine how we live and within that create a paradigm that ensures that we are actually busy living fulfilled lives that bring many bring many positive psychological traits and allow us to flourish, both as individuals and as a group.

Work has become probably the most important tribal experience in our lives and we need to re-think that to make our neighbourhoods the source of the richness we draw from those tribal encounters.

Followed faithfully and through adherence to its principals, the Four-Hour Work Day will play a critical role in refreshing equality throughout civilization.

A degree is inequality has societal value in that it drives innovation and ambition, but too much of what today is a class-driven imbalance is massively de-motivating, which will ultimately lead to the very confrontations that those in charge fear the most.

A few guidelines for the Four-Hour Work Day:

People are only to work four-hours a day, no double shifts, no overtime;

Public services, such as hospitals, transport, postage, law enforcement and various essential facilities are not restricted; and

Any business that is privately owned and operated that employs four or fewer people does not face the four-hour limitations.