Amerika

Sweden has just mandated a six-hour workday. While this will irk the blustery “work hard and get ahead” American conservatives, it is in fact a move toward sanity:

“The eight-hour work day is not as effective as one would think,” Linus Feldt, the company’s CEO told Fast Company.

“To stay focused on a specific work task for eight hours is a huge challenge. In order to cope, we mix in things and pauses to make the work day more endurable. At the same time, we are having it hard to manage our private life outside of work.”

…He said the new work day would ensure people have enough energy to pursue their private lives when they leave work – something which can be difficult with eight-hour days.

The culture of perpetual work is viewed as a form of patriotism to our egalitarian ideal, in which all the smart people get tucked into miserable offices to work hard and pay for the rest. If you refuse this daily cuckolding, you are seen as striking a blow at the heart of our Republic.

And yet, because this work is nonsense two ways — most of the tasks are unnecessary, and most of the projects ill-conceived or pointless — people get caught into an ugly cycle. They hang out at the office, doing a whole lot of nothing, but cannot spend that time on something meaningful, so instead become trapped in a cycle of wasting time and then working too much.

The Swedes address the nonsense culture of work as well:

Mr Feldt has said staff members are not allowed on social media, meetings are kept to a minimum, and that other distractions during the day are eliminated – but the aim is that staff will be more motivated to work more intensely while in the office.

Sending people home for more hours a day enables them to have full lives and get to know themselves, at which point they are more able to make sane decisions regarding the world around them that previously was inaccessible. When we exist in a mutually consensual false reality comprised of human social interactions, actual reality becomes obscured.

The Right-wing parties have conventionally emphasized work as a good thing because to them, it is a valuable personal behavior. In doing so, they have subsidized the Left by creating a culture of constant work, so that Rightists have no time to fight Leftist insanity, and high taxes arising from the income generated. This is why they tend to bloviate on about the importance of work, and how they defeat themselves.

A more sensible Right-wing approach is to view civilization through an existential filter: the societies that are pleasurable and ascendant are the ones in which citizens are naturally productive, but this requires doing away with the notion of equality and replacing it with hierarchy, in the process moving along the parasites. This is why Leftism constructs itself around equality; it seeks to ensure that this does not happen.

In the meantime, the average Western citizen is subtly miserable, which is why people are destructive, dissolute and refuse to breed at replacement levels. Striking back against work culture and mindless brain-distractions provides one method of circumventing this damage.

Tags: antiwork, collapse, distraction, modernity