The 4 day working week.

I read this piece online suggesting a 4 say working week was the way forward and wanted to share my thoughts…

I think it also needs to address cognitive load, which differs from person to person. And the reimbursement focus for the work being achieved. I.e the way salaries are paid.

Yes we would all like to work less and be paid the same for it, but do we all DESERVE to? And with that, what do humans deserve at the base of it all? To survive.

For skill based roles, combining shorter working weeks with output focused pay structures (not performance focused) could work well for many sectors as a short term solution to a deep rooted problem.

To highlight this problem to those who are feeling their tightly woven morals attacked, I’ll start with jobs where the benefit to the company is your time. There is no logical reason for the company to pay you for time you didn’t give them other than to recognise and respect the fact they are a human not a robot and therefore time working has an impact on health.

They can define their own pay structure based upon this factor and if your time is more valuable to you than what they are offering for only 4 days a week, then you are sacrificing your own mental health, not somebody else’s time or money. In your days off you should be encouraged to be learning to hone a skill or trade that will value your effort and not continuing to work extra hours in a job that doesn’t do anything but waste your time.

Of course this just highlights how we are valuing our time in money and how much we have bought into capitalism even if we are stuck at the bottom trading equitably valuable good and services amongst the same friends. The answer to life, I found through a cocky farm lad in Scotland, is that life is a pyramid scheme, you gotta keep working your circle but looking out for chances to get to the next rung, no matter who you unintentionally use and abuse along the way. To break away from that would be to break away from capitalism. I don’t see that happening any time soon so for the time being can we make capitalism work for us by capitalising on the thing we all have in common? Survival. My ex had it right in some ways, we’ve got to put ourselves first. He’s just been messy about it.

If people like him were educated in communication and social emotional skills, then his success would have been greater. And he firmly believes you get what you work for. So where do the issues lay? With people who can’t afford to work only 4 days a week. Therefore value to survival is clearly not factor already being used to decide reimbursement for service. Why?

There’s also a million excuses people could come up with for not being able to do 4 days at all due to physical/environmental/biological/psychological challenges. But if we are all striving to survive anyway then surely even without the financial incentive, we don’t get born expecting survival from doing nothing for ourselves.

Or do we? I am not stupid. I would say many people who meet me would describe me as intelligent. But even I get fooled at times. Hoodwinked and taken in by people I trusted. I’ve had to go to some dark places to learn a basis of the philosophy of life. Of which taking responsibility for personal survival seems to be a common theme. But all my life Ive wasted my time bartering with a system that needs dependency to thrive.

Society was sold to me. Good grades and good jobs and leisure choices were packaged up and served to me on a plate my whole childhood with the rules of law and justice as protection and the only ask that I conform and obey these rules myself and buy in. But these rules have let me down time and time again and conformity has bred my anxiety. Like many others, I’m starting to put my survival and my quality of life as my focus point. But I have the skills and knowledge to do so. I am fairly successful despite my troubles, and will be able to support myself through this. Other adults are not so lucky. And why should they be? The system needs them to depend, for it to thrive.

And whilst school these days does indeed try to put the child at the centre of their learning (with minimal funding and abuse), there are many decades of adults who felt like a fish being made to climb a tree, never making it to their own pond. These adults are the ones with the reasons because they are the ones who were sold a lie, bought into shooting for the moon, so capitalism has to pay for it. Either educate, or we pay for hours that they don’t work and hope their children can unlearn their mistakes, before it’s too late, with 5 hours of school and child benefits.

Perhaps this is what is already happening. It just suits them to let the successful ones continue to buy in. Capitalism is a pyramid scheme, really, when it you look at it some ways.

So 4 day working weeks are a nice little gimmick to make you continue to buy in to a system that is selling luck of the draw to you with incentive laced extra tickets in education and socialisation but failing to disclose the small print of ‘but don’t forget you’re in reality just a feather floating about in space’. Don’t put your eggs in that one basket. Don’t fill that extra day with leisure like they want you to, use that time to hone your own skills and make life work for you. That’s the real work/life balance, is it not?