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Scrolling through Reddit last night, I came across a post titled “Isn’t This the Real Dream?” where a Redditor described a carefree lifestyle of working 30 minutes a day and then spending the rest of their free time playing games, watching movies, staying fit, buying random useless stuff, and being “happy forever.”
Pretty nice, don’t you agree? 30 minutes instead of 8 hours a day is the real dream (according to the Redditor, at least). So why do many of us still worship the drudgery of spending 40 hours a week at the office?
Thinking about this paradox reminded me of a passage from the book “Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (September 29, 1934–October 20, 2021):
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Like other animals, we must spend a large part of our existence making a living: calories needed to fuel the body don’t appear magically on the table, and houses and cars don’t assemble themselves spontaneously. There are no strict formulas, however, for how much time people actually have to work.
It seems, for instance, that the early hunter-gatherers, like their present-day descendants living in the inhospitable deserts of Africa and Australia, spent only three to five hours each day on what we would call working—providing for food, shelter, clothing, and tools. They spent the rest of the day in conversation, resting, or dancing.
At the opposite extreme were the industrial workers of the nineteenth century, who were often forced to spend twelve-hour days, six days a week, toiling in grim factories or dangerous mines.
He goes on to note that “work requiring great skills and that is done freely refines the complexity of the self,” and “that there are few things as entropic as unskilled work done under compulsion.” Then he adds:
Because work is so universal, yet so varied, it makes a tremendous difference to one’s overall contentment whether what one does for a living is enjoyable or not. Thomas Carlyle was not far wrong when he wrote, “Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.”
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