HERE is totally useless research and yet there is a lot of it even from places like Princeton and people like Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz.
While labor- and therefore time-saving devices are giving people more time to chill out the same people are spending more time working as if making up for time gained by losing more time working harder than ever.
William James, brother of Henry, my favorite novelist, said the sense of time is comparative. Something takes a longer time only in relation to another thing that takes a shorter time. And since people have come to believe that time is money, the more time you spend working, theoretically the more money you make. But William James never heard of Filipino politicians who work less and make more.
There is Thorstein Veblen’s classic, The Theory of the Leisure Class, an finely written book devoted to the phenomenon in the title; a certain de Grazia concluded his book Of Time, Work and Leisure with the injunction to “lean back under a tree, put your arms behind your head, wonder at the pass we’ve come to, smile and remember that the beginnings and ends of every great enterprise are untidy.” So stop looking for loose ends to tie up and give it a rest.
Unless you work 24/7 in an Asian or US sweatshop for Mango or H&M or any of the other fashion houses that cater to the lower end of the market that want to look, even if they cannot afford to be as fashionable as the upper end of it.
But the real reason people work so hard—aside from sweatshop workers who risk starving to death faster than ever—when they can afford to take it easy is that, if they aren’t working they will be bored with themselves.
Believe it or not there really isn’t that much that’s interesting outside work. Think of it: even rock climbing is a lotta work and dangerous too though thoroughly pointless.
Man is made to work. The only real concern is if he or she is paid decently to do it or not like the sweatshop workers of Swedish fashion houses. It all comes down to the just wage for the worker in the vineyard, as Jesus said. The rest is just poop. It isn’t anything grand like “work defines man” or in work he discovers himself. None of that’s true. The practice of law should be interesting but it isn’t, unless you are fabulous like Amal Clooney taking on genocide cases. Law is humdrum work just a notch more interesting than accountancy which isn’t at all though law is paid less.
We work because it is what we know how to do aside from being the only source of income for most people. Other than that, work isn’t anything much yet it is still a whole lot more interesting than doing nothing.