Working harder or working smarter?

Paul Gavarni, Le Flâneur, 1842

The Industrial Revolution brought us all sorts of labor-saving devices that allowed people to produce products in far greater quantities than they ever could by hand. And with modern information technology, anyone can instantly send a message across the country by e-mail that would have taken weeks to arrive by pony express.

And yet how many people do you know who still have time to answer their phone or e-mail?

Labor-saving devices and greater technological efficiency, rather than giving us more leisure time, are actually making us work harder. Because the more products we're able to produce, the harder we have to work to be able to afford to buy them all. This is not good for the environment. We live on a planet of finite resources, and we can't just keep on producing more and more goods to create ever-increasing profits.

Instead of using increased efficiency to purchase more goods, we need to use it to purchase more leisure.

Consider this: More people are currently out of work in this country than at any time since the Great Depression. And yet people who do have jobs are working more hours than workers pretty much anywhere else in the world. At many companies, even though the recession has officially ended, people are still doing the work of other people who were let go in the recession in addition to their own jobs, and yet companies are still not hiring.

Why should this be? Why not hire more people and have them each do less work? What happened to all those productivity gains that were supposed to bring us ever-shorter workweeks? Why are Americans still working 40-hour weeks (those who have jobs at any rate) while Europeans are working 37, 36, or even 35 hours a week? Why are Americans working more weeks out of the year than Europeans, who get double or even triple the amount of vacation time of the average American?

Americans like to think we're the most productive workers in the world. We scoff at those "lazy" Europeans who take so much vacation time, like the Italians, who invented the phrase dolce far niente, meaning "It's sweet to do nothing." (Though in fact we're slackers compared to the Japanese: 57% of Americans use all their vacation time, but only 33% of Japanese do.) But are we really more productive, or are we just running around like hamsters on an exercise wheel?

According to financial services firm UBS, if you divide per capita gross domestic product by the number of hours worked, the French are actually the most productive people on earth.

Yes, you read that right: the French. A people who have words for laziness that don't even exist in English, such as boulevardier (someone who strolls around the boulevards without a care in the world) and flaneur, which John McIntyre of The Baltimore Sun describes thusly:

The word is translated "idler" or "lounger" or even "loafer," but it encompasses a more graceful and poetic approach to loafing, deriving from flaner, "to stroll" or "to saunter." Sauntering captures that elusive but essential quality of motion without undue exertion.

A hole in the ocean to pour money into.

We live in a finite world, with finite resources. And yet capitalism demands continuous growth. Sooner or later, we're going to run into a "debt ceiling" that we can't legislate our way around. And yet people—Americans especially—continue to measure their quality of life in terms of the amount of goods and services they're able to consume. Though if you're one of these antitax Tea Party types, just think what you could save yourself in property taxes by not owning such big-ticket items in the first place.

And all this consumption requires work. Does anyone say on their deathbed, Gee, I wish I'd worked more so I could've bought that yacht/Maserati/vacation home on Charlestown Beach Road? No, typically at the end of their lives, people regret not having had more time to spend with their friends and families.

So why not start living the way you'll wish you'd lived at the end of your life now? If friends and family are what you truly value, and time is money, start spending that "money" where it will give you the greatest return on your investment. Spend it on what's truly valuable.

Author: Linda Felaco