Plague of overwork stems from ills of consumption
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"Overwork, over scheduling and time poverty threaten our health, our marriages, families and friendships, our community and civic life, our environment, and even our security," Graaf observes.
Specifically, these problems include:
Kids are "over-scheduled," and families "under-connected." Parents drop their kids off because they have to work.
Civic participation has declined. Exhausted citizens, having little energy to spare after the daily grind, prefer to spend more time before the idiot box.
Overwork contributes to such crimes as road rage, child and spousal abuse, and drug abuse.
Speed to produce leads to poorly designed products, and increased waste. For example, when sonar technology makes easier the tracking and capturing of large schools of fish, about a third of the 30 million tons of fish caught each year is wasted. Most fish are killed and thrown back into the ocean.
A vicious circle in transport is spurred by the quest for speed.
As roads become wider and cars move faster, offices, schools, and restaurants become more scattered, resulting in more time being consumed in traveling anywhere.
This condition has many consolations.
Dual-income families become the norm.
The standard perception is the emancipation of mothers as they are liberated from their limiting domestic drudgery -- it's strange that even mothers have joined in the praise of "liberation."
But the industrialized era would not have been so successful had it not been supported by a militant ideology celebrating the era as progressive, liberating, and democratic.
The author has proposed many solutions, but none of them would work if people do not abandon their mad pursuit of the "good life."
As people work more to buy more, the real solution for this undesirable state is to reduce consumption, reject the common definitions of success and simplify aggressively.
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