Workers of the World Relax

Let me start off with my questions for you, my friends and Internet vagabonds, and then I’ll give you the background:

If you could choose to work 4 days a week (with a commensurate decrease in salary), would you do it? Why or why not?

If you did, what would you do with that extra day a week? And what spending would you be willing to sacrifice in order to afford that extra day off?

Inspired by Chris at TucoRides, I finally got around to reading the little book, Workers of the World Relax by Conrad Schmidt. (Isn't that a deliciously cheeky title for a book???)

Chris set the stage for an explanation of the book much better than I could:

A Vancouverite, Conrad was working away as a software engineer and driving his car to work, as so many on this continent do. Getting increasingly concerned with the environment, Conrad did some math and figured that the earnings from one day of his workweek went towards affording his car - therefore, if he gave up his car, he could give up one day a week of work. He talked to his boss, and voila, he was a man of three day weekends who was no longer sending CO2 emissions up into the air.

He did this for a while, and then his worries about consumerism's effect on the earth caused him to do some deep thinking about his job - "Even though I was earning a great deal, I wrote software and the software made junk, the junk went to landfills and the landfills polluted the planet. I quit my job."

In the book, Schmidt talks about the danger of consumerism to the planet (waste of resources, environmental effects of mining, lumbering, manufacturing excessive goods, etc.) but also makes points about how we often don't have enough time to be active, well-informed citizens and consumers, members of our local communities, etc., and how we have insufficient time to participate in the arts or music or parenting or cooking or gardening or any other form of self-actualization.

For example, Schmidt writes:

Education programs [regarding the impact of lifestyle and diet on cancer and cardiovascular disease] are not sufficient in addressing the problem because they focus on the symptoms of the problem and not ht ecause. Bad diets, high stress and lack of exercise are symptoms of high intensity lifestyles, where people do not have the time to prepare home-cooked meals, spend an hour a day exercising or getting involved in the community. It is impractical to warn people who are enveloped in stress to exercise more and prepare healthy meals on a consistent basis. There is simply not enough time … For us to realistically address the problem we need to make lifestyle changes a realistic option.

I would whole-heartedly recommend reading Workers of the World Relax. While I might not agree with every argument Schmidt makes, it’s very thought-provoking.

So talk to me: what do you think? What are your answers to the questions at the start of this post? :)