The only answer is to work less.
I was sitting in the passenger seat of a car my wife was driving down the Taconic Parkway, with my laptop propped unevenly on my legs and the sun visor akimbo in front of me, when the irony hit. |
Here I was, tapping away, hovering on the edge of nausea, a parody of American overwork, editing an essay on … how we need to work less. |
Much less. So consider this an episode, not uncommon in newspaper life, of do as I say, not as I do. |
The author of the piece, Bryce Covert, lives her life more intelligently than I do, while working plenty hard. Her argument is that in the wake of the pandemic, "Americans can't be content just to gain the right to work 6 to 2 instead of 9 to 5. We have to demand time off that lasts longer than Saturday and Sunday. We have to reclaim our leisure time to spend as we wish." |
The old labor slogan that helped bring about the eight-hour work day — "Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what you will" — could serve as a motto for much of the work Bryce has done for Opinion. One of her many wonderful qualities is that even as she focuses on how the economy affects families and children, she casts a cold eye on how the different parts of the system interact. |
"If everyone worked less," she writes, "it would be easier to spread the work out evenly to more people. If white-collar professionals were no longer expected or required to log 60 hours a week but 30 instead, that would be a whole extra job for someone else." |
Or as Susan Lambert, a professor of social work at the University of Chicago, puts it in the essay, the goal is "one reasonable job per person," not "two for one and half for another." Lambert goes on to make the key point that "the overlap between the overworked executive and the underemployed hourly worker" is "that they cannot fully engage in their personal or their family life." |
So in the end, no matter what we are doing by day, Covert writes, "we shouldn't just be talking about the parameters of how we get work done in a postpandemic world. We should be pushing to do less of it." |
I don't know if I am constitutionally capable of heeding Covert's words, but I vow at the very least never to edit them again from a moving vehicle on a serpentine road. |
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