Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Slaves to the System


If I had the power to change one thing about the world, it would be to eliminate the need for people to have to work. I don’t mean “work” as in doing things around the house, but being obligated to go to some “job” for 40 (or more) hours each week just to bring home a paycheck.

Now, as far as jobs go, I have a pretty nice one. I work in a library, so things are quiet and relaxed. There is no heavy labor involved, and I get to play on the computer most of the time. But it still doesn’t change the fact that I have to sacrifice a big chunk of my waking hours to something or someone else. Am I the only one to see something wrong with this picture?

I long for the freedom to spend my days any way I want to. Now, I don’t want you to picture me sleeping in until noon and then just playing video games all day. I have so many projects I want to work on, that I’d spend hours trying to list them all (writing is probably one of the biggies). But I get so little time to spend on what is meaningful to me, that many of my projects languish for want of attention.

Since my utopia—with no one having to work at all—may be an impossible dream, I’m willing to compromise. A nice start would be to reduce the amount of one’s time spent at a job (maybe only 20 hours/wk?). Of course, along with that we would also need to minimize (or eliminate) the importance of money over one’s quality of living. How we’d actually accomplish something like that is beyond me, but surely it must be possible—after all, it works on Star Trek…

Lee

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hey, while you're at it, let's just do away with housework too!