We Don’t Need to Work So Much (2015)
The whole ‘we should work less’ meme strikes me as more about the meaninglessness of modern work, moreso than our desire to have more leisure time. In other words: people want more meaningful work, not merely to have less meaningless work. Maybe this is an American-centric idea, wherein your work is strongly tied to your purpose and identity, but I don’t see how you can simply brush away an activity that takes up 1/3 of your time.The example in the article (Amazon packing plants) is perhaps the most pointless Kafkasque job one can imagine: packing boxes of mostly unnecessary consumeristic products.Speaking only personally, but I want to be working so much that I have little leisure time, but only because the work I’m doing is fulfilling and fundamentally important. I have no desire to have more leisure time to consume content (which is what most people do: look up the hours spent watching TV/video per person, or social media usage), as I don’t think consumption activities are ultimately fulfilling.