Free time

What would you do if you could keep your wages. The exact same wages you make at your current job, but you have only 2 hours of work to do a day. You already took a two months long vacation where you traveled to all the places you wished you could and had the time of your life.

Yet, your generous employer has offered you a two hours work day and you can do anything you want with the 22 hours left. This is not a temporary settlement, as long as you work for this company, this is the only work you will be required to put in.

What would you do with that time?

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In most jobs the average paid time off (PTO) you get after a year of work is 3 weeks. Three weeks is hardly enough after toiling 49 weeks during the year. But free time, is complicated.

Some people carefully plan those days the whole year only to have it spoiled by bad weather or simply the unexpected.

But when we add all the hours we dedicate to an employer it goes way beyond the assigned 40 hours. For salary employees it is very common to reach 60 hours work weeks, and you add a good 10 hours commute and you are barely left with enough time to eat and sleep.

We have been conditioned to accept this as the only way to make a living. When we hear of a company that offers its employees less time of work for the same compensation, we treat it like a myth. Or worse, we think that the employees are lazy.

The problem is even when offered, most people don't know what to do with the extra time. I asked a friend what he would do with the free time after he has enjoyed the vacation, he said he would get a second job.

There are so many quotes that tells of the nobility of work. But a person toiling 9 to 10 hours a day under sun hardly has time to write those quotes.

Here is what Bertrand Russell said in 1932:

If you ask him what he thinks the best part of his life, he is not likely to say: 'I enjoy manual work because it makes me feel that I am fulfilling man's noblest task, and because I like to think how much man can transform his planet. It is true that my body demands periods of rest, which I have to fill in as best I may, but I am never so happy as when the morning comes and I can return to the toil from which my contentment springs.' I have never heard working men say this sort of thing. They consider work, as it should be considered, a necessary means to a livelihood, and it is from their leisure that they derive whatever happiness they may enjoy.

It is a question we have to think about because we have accepted that the only way to stay alive is to work, or else. What would you do with your free time?

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