We Spend Our Lives Trying to Become Children Again
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The girl of a friend of mine recently left university and entered the work world, taking on a temporary function job. At the end of her showtime week at work, she phoned home in tears. "It's horrible," she complained to her mother. "In that location's no time to do anything else. I'thou so tired when I go home in the evenings that all I can exercise is lookout man TV. Then I have to go up early the next morning and practise it all again! If this is what work is like, I don't want to spend my whole life doing it!"
Nosotros have it for granted that work must be a major part of our lives. In fact, for many of us, it's the master aspect of our lives. We define ourselves and others by our job roles—'So what exercise y'all do?'—and measure our happiness in terms of how successful we are in these roles. Forty hours a week, 48 weeks a year, for up to 50 years—non including travel fourth dimension, and the fourth dimension nosotros spend resting and recovering from the exertions of our working lives.
Is this really what we were born for? Is this really what life should be about?
Of form, if you lot're lucky, you might accept a job that's fulfilling, that suits your innate interests and skills and that you lot find challenging and stimulating. In that case, your job may provide you with what psychologists call "flow"—a state of intense absorption, which makes you experience engaged and alive. Perhaps the majority of people aren't then lucky and work in positions that are repetitive and tedious.
Just I would argue that, even if your chore does provide y'all with catamenia, work should just be an aspect of our lives, rather than its defining feature. Working 40 hours a calendar week makes our lives get narrow and constricted, so that we lose sight of whole vistas of possibility—of activity and gamble—outside it. There's so much to acquire in life, so many different ways to develop, so many experiences to blot, and so many activities to enjoy (including doing null). When nosotros spend then much time working, information technology's hard to find time and energy for those activities.
The History of Piece of work
Work every bit we know it is a relatively modern action. For the whole history of the human race upwards until a few thousand years ago, human beings lived as hunter-gatherers. Their master piece of work was simply to find nutrient, and mayhap surprisingly, they didn't take to piece of work particularly hard to practice this.
Anthropologists estimate that hunter-gatherers only had to spend around four hours a day searching for food—the rest of the time was leisure time. Life only actually became difficult once our ancestors started farming. Grinding food out of the soil was a lot more labour intensive than hunting or picking fruit from trees or plants from the ground.
And then came the industrial revolution, when human beings were imprisoned in factories and mills for near all of their waking hours, treated equally nothing more than objects of labour, working in appalling weather for appalling wages, and usually dying at a young historic period. Then much for progress!
Working atmospheric condition are infinitely better now, of course, at least in more economically developed parts of the globe. Just I would argue that nosotros yet haven't gone far enough in a positive direction. We're still living with the legacy of the industrial revolution, and in thrall to a mistaken idea that work defines usa and should be the main pursuit of our lives. We're still living every bit economical objects whose main value is what we can produce.
What'due south the alternative, you might ask? If we didn't piece of work then hard, our economies would neglect, and we would all exist living in poverty. But this isn't necessarily the case. In continental Europe, working hours are significantly shorter than in the U.s. and the UK, and productivity is really higher. Countries like Holland and Denmark are actually more economically successful than the US or the UK. And not uncoincidentally, they besides have higher levels of well-being. Working less does not hateful economical failure—the opposite may be the case. It may exist that longer working hours just makes people tired and resentful, and therefore less productive.
And in any case, mayhap we need to rethink our whole relationship to economics. It's clear that the earth's population cannot go on producing and consuming textile goods at the present charge per unit, especially now that countries similar China and India are becoming more economically adult. The environmental furnishings are simply besides severe—our planet is already suffering the strain, and won't be able to withstand much more impairment. Sooner or later, we may all have to reduce our consumption of material goods (many of which are just unnecessary luxury items, after all). That in itself would necessitate less economic activity, as these goods wouldn't need to be produced. Societies which were more than egalitarian, and more sensibly controlled, might be able to cope with such a transition.
The mod accent on work is completely out of proportion, and harmful to our well-being. One thing is for sure: If you spend virtually all your waking hours working, then it doesn't matter whether you're a millionaire businessman or a fiscal analyst, you're not really so different from a factory worker in a 19th-century industrial town—an economic object, whose life just has value in terms the labour you produce. The only difference is that y'all have the liberty to change and to make your life more than meaningful and fulfilling.
Steve Taylor, Ph.D., is a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Metropolitan University, Great britain, and the author of The Leap: The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening. Steve'due south website is: www.stevenmtaylor.com
Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-the-darkness/201401/working-our-lives-away
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