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Here in the United States, and what a good number of my friends and acquaintances doing?
Working.
As this amusing comment from the New York Times reinforces, working is so embedded in the culture of this country that it almost seems un-American not to work.
Add to this to almost unchallengeable desire to win, and you have workplace scenarios such as described in this Washington Post article where the only real qualification for success is how many hours you put in. Talent, capability, intelligence – strictly second rate.
This is all so manifestly absurd that one is, once again, forced to step back and wonder just where people's sense of balance has gone. Who are the main beneficiaries of this trend? Employers, investors – the people who have, and are accumulating even more, wealth in this society. Who loses? The average worker, who despite working lengthy hours at one or more jobs, has not seen any real rise in household wealth over the past few years, and in many cases is actually losing ground when inflation is factored in.
One wonders how long this will go on before the penny drops. Perhaps not long.
A man after my own heart ,here in the UK we even had shops wanting to open on Christmas day last year and people prepared to work.I believe in the work ethic but also in the Rest And Play ethic and throughout the western world we are sadly losing that ability to relax in search of just one more step up the ladder or one more Pound (Dollar) in the pay packet.
Yes, Capt. P, it's pretty sad when stress becomes more fashionable than relaxation! Thanks for commenting! 🙂
Very good points, all, Edward. I particularly lament the increasing trend to subdivide time into smaller and smaller particles, denying us the ability to judge, consider, contemplate and, in general, give any real thought to the process of our lives.And, of course, we still have essentially the same brains as our hunter-gatherer ancestors!
But, as so often is the case with this country, there is a dichotomy with regard to the issue. We are supposed to have a strong work ethic, to go the extra mile and "work hard for a living."And yet, we (and here's the dichotomy):Play they lottery and dream about winning it so that we'll never have to work again;Are told that we should look forward to our twilight years of retirement and getting to do all the things we supposedly didn't do because of having to work, and this is usually stated as a positve thing;Fill our lives with more and more to do each day, while at the same time trying to save two minutes going from Point A to Point B and pretty much avoiding anything that takes too long, like reading a novel;Get our information in tiny bits like blog posts or light-weight TV "news" magazines or just about any self-contained hour long program that gets the "entertainment" job done for us and gets it done quickly;Educate our children with five-minute sound bytes of our concern, because we have filled our day up too much to do otherwise, then wonder what went wrong when they have trouble in life.Aa a side note, nthropologists have said that the average hunter-gatherer c. 60,000 Before Present had more "free time" than we do today.They didn't live as long, of course; but they had more leisure time while they were living.