When was the last time you all did a 40-hour work week?
With evolution come progress comes change. Some change is for the sake of change, and some is in the name of progress. Progress can be the main driver for working 80 hours, or perceived progress.
Progress comes from an easier way of doing things computers and technology has the promise of making life easier. However, we now do these easy things for far more hours in a day and in fact now for 7 days a week. Is this really progress.
As we evolve into the generations that went to work to earn money to buy stuff, we forget why we wanted that stuff and more times than not we don’t use it and have no time for it anyway.
We spend years paying for a home that we never see as we are working. Then at the end of our lives we wonder where the time went and regretting the amount of time we spent at work. We spend years paying off a car to be in traffic to go to a job to pay for the house and the car.
All for someone else’s dream. We all want more for our children then we had. We all want a better life with a bigger house, more expensive car, more stuff. Is this what we were put on this earth for? Is the trap that is “worker harder, longer” worth it?
In Japan they have a word for working yourself to death.
“Karōshi”, its translated literally as "overwork death" It is occupational sudden mortality. The major medical causes of karōshi deaths are heart attack and stroke due to stress and a starvation diet. This phenomenon is also widespread in South Korea, where it is referred to as gwarosa. In Chinese, overwork-induced death is called guolaosi.
The saddest thing about this is that we as humans recognise the issue, give it a name and then continue to practice it anyway.
Why? Because the world population has us brain washed into thinking it’s what we must do to progress to gain money, to be rich and to have a good life. We do these “jobs” because it’s what generations before us did. It what we mark as “good people” hard workers and success. When in real terms we reach the end of our lives and haven’t achieved those things or haven’t lived life on our own terms. True success cannot be measured in just dollars and sense or stuff we have accumulated. Stuff we cannot take with us in the box at the end of our fleeting time here.
In actual fact true wealth is not about money, the only thing that really runs out is time. True wealth is the abundance of time. True wealth is experiences and who we choose to surround ourselves with. The smiles from family, the time to travel, the life we all deserve on our own terms. Most governments will have you believe you have to work your 40 hours or a whole lot more, so that the economy can take their share to manage the roads that all the traffic is on, to get people to work so they can pay their taxes to pay for the roads or the tolls to drive on the roads. Of course, a civilized society need things to function, (or so the world will have you believe). There is a better way than working yourself to death to gain what you will not use.
The good news is that this evolution has opened doors that means we don’t have to do these things we don’t have to sell our time for a weekly piece of paper or just numbers on a bank statement. This world is full of trapped and over worked people. Most of these people will continue to live in this trap and be none the wiser. Most of these people will go about their lives working 50, 60, 70 hours a week or more with all the excuses in the world that they have too. This will be their choice; it does not have to be yours.
Bruce Partridge.
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