The No-Day Working Week

I don't know how I ever managed to work full time.  Even now, when by choice (or should I say "choice"?) I'm committed only to three days (22.5 hours) a week I still find myself often pressed for time.  The feeling that so many things are happening, so fast, that I just don't have the time to participate in, given over as my hours are to working, travelling to and from work, resting from work, and all the other vague time-sapping peripheries that feed on employment.  How did I ever live by working full time?

Vivez sans temps mort!

The answer, in a sense, is that I didn't.  You don't really live when you work full time.  You work, and you recover from work.  All "free time" exists only in the context of unfree time - only in the context of work.  Work is anti-life.  It shouldn't be this way, and maybe even now reading this you're forming a rationalisation in your brain about how your work is the exception, but I challenge you to articulate that  sincerely.

I wonder if this feeling of being short of time (or is it just this "FOMO" we've heard so much about?) has nothing to do with the number hours you've given over to work, as such, so much as an inevitable consequence of the nature of paid work itself.  Marx's "alienation", perhaps, at the deep psychological level.  When alienated from the right to exercise control over how you spend your time, you're alienated from yourself.  It takes enormous discipline and strength of will to separate this alienated self, who works, from your "real" self (the one on the "life" side of your "work-life balance" - note in that phrase the hiding in plain sight of the fact that work equals = death) and I wonder if that rare, rare breed of individuals who feel truly happy with their work, is the only one who can achieve this separation, since for them, there is none.

Guy Debord's "Ne Travaillez Jamais" ("Never Work") grafitti, 1952. 
SOURCE: https://www.thecinetourist.net/the-persistence-of-graffiti-paris-c1952.html

I'm happy to see that a UK campaign for a 4-day working week exists, and is gaining some momentum.  It's the natural next step in the process that brought us weekends, paid sick leave and holidays from our employers.  And why stop there?  Once won, campaign for a 3-day working week, a 2-day, a 1-day...and finally, freedom.  This is how I understand universal basic income might work.  The so-called "job creators" who hoard most of the money (which they like to pretend is synonymous with "wealth") can pay us not to do our jobs.  How about it?  It sounds insane, but it's also the logical outcome of many historical processes that are already well underway: automation, under-employment, bullshit jobs, and so on.

"To get out of prison, all means are good ones.  If needs be, even absurdity can be a source of freedom" - So writes Gaston Bachelard, a line that I would, if I could, tattoo on to my heart.  The world we live in, after all, is absurd, and very nearly dead.  Whatever comes next, if anything, will seem from our perspective, here and now, impossible.  Which is another way of saying, inevitable.

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A Case of the Mondays
The First World Problem
Go to Bed
The State of Play
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