all ages in history have had their stupidities about what is work and what is not our time is the stupidest of all we use digital technology to reinforce the same extractive and automated biases of industrialism but now we do it on steroids digital one of the most extraordinary things that has emerged pandemic coronavirus is that it has shown us that our work life does not improve our lives to the contrary represses the person who would want to be in the moment in which we find climate change or automation and the aging of society we have been forced to rethink our value system few say on their deathbed wish they had spent more time in the office for 150 years economists have dreamed of the idea that we would become so productive that we would work 10 or 15 hours a week to acquire what we need to live well but it has not been like that if we go back We go back to our hunter-gatherer past we discovered that back then we worked 2 hours 3 hours a day and it was not even work and we did things for two or three hours a day that allowed us to survive and that were part of our cultural life we probably loved and enjoyed hunting and gathering after all is what people do when they have free time and money the rich go hunting and gathering on November 5, 1217 two constitutional letters were sealed in San Pablo- by the king who was 10 years old an era the magna carta and the other the forest letter and the forest letter was the first environmental letter the first letter that recognized the right of everyone to subsistence and access to raw materials that would allow them to work wow and it was a very subversive legislation it said these rights will forever be the idea that people were unable to access the resources they needed to live and prosper was unthinkable in At that time and in any part of the world that changed when the right to housing was violated the letter of the forest was systematically broken by what we now know as an enclosure that lasted for several centuries to seize from the people the lands where they traditionally had inhabited their lands were fenced off and privatized by wealthy elites because they were not willing to give up their subsistence crops to work for a minimum wage on someone else's land it made no sense they preferred to continue leading their own lifestyle for the first time in history people did not have access to the means they needed to survive the only way to do it was by selling their bodies their work in exchange for a salary and the work itself employment is something quite recent human beings used to create things that they exchanged and sold when they stopped exchanging them because it became complicated, the market money appeared that was almost like fi poker cards that were issued in the morning and could expire at the end of the day but that allowed them to exchange products then it was when the middle class appeared as the town got richer the aristocracy was relatively impoverished so they illegalized the trade and established what They called a monopoly certificate which meant that you were only allowed to do business in a certain sector if you had real authorization in that way a shoemaker who made shoes and sold them in the market now had to work as an employee of Her Majesty's Royal Shoe Company and travel or go to live in the city like that instead of selling the product that he had created he sold his time in reality that was the first time since slavery in which they hired workers to build the clock tower in the medieval city that was when he was born employment and well four or five or six centuries later we thought about having a job and working for a company like way to earn income I had worked in pubs cafes and restaurants was not something I liked especially so I thought midwife do that me motivated me would form and then take care of moms and babies my first job was in the section of cardiology and I immediately started doing 12-hour shifts, we entered at 7 in the morning and worked until 9, I had 12 patients in my charge, it was a lot of work, although I had help, I did not take care of everyone alone, but the work of a qualified nurse is great responsibility I remember the case of a young man who was getting worse little by little we had to take care of him and explain to the relatives that he was not well and they listened but he did not recover I believe that the work of a nurse exhausts everything has a limit and when that comes At the moment you have to ask for help unfortunately the man suffered a cardiac arrest and then there were only the two of us in the world it is very hard that was the first time I had to give m The news I will never forget when his wife came into the room with their children and I had to tell them that none of my friends had died has that responsibility that changed my life inevitably you start to doubt yourself and you wonder am I still capable of doing this job And it all started in 17th century England with the Puritans it was they who invented the work ethic, they were not especially concerned with the production or accumulation of wealth as an end in itself but salvation works tirelessly in a disciplined way to realize the God's will on earth that meant that you had to choose a specialized occupation and dedicate your whole life to it and above all never waste a minute of your time if you were caught standing for a moment and suddenly you would suffer a heart attack or at that moment You were struck by lightning the fact that you weren't working hard was a sign that the oil had left and what awaited you then it was eternal damnation no no good it was like a dream it was the time of the dynasty and dallas i saw the planes landing at manchester airport and i thought i'm going to the usa i got on a plane and i moved to the us to learn all about the business there everything is bigger and better win over more and more in America everyone says hey that person has a work ethic amazing and it basically means that working all the hours god sends good that does not have a personal life outside work the weekends if I was there working alone simply had no life worked all discover time is as if society applaud you from the bands nobody tells you hear know what you're doing because you're making these decisions when it appeared capitalism industrialist who produced a total change of model more and more people were forced to depend exclusively on wage labor the process of rapprochement took away their land and often or they had to physically move away from them as they were taken to the suburbs of emerging urban areas they became dependent on salaried work and that became a model where the standard employment relationship meant that people fixed when entering and leaving in blocks of time the main change that occurs when you go from an economy in which you generate value to an economy in which you sell your time is that human beings begin to be considered for their utility value I was a strategy manager for a large retail and corporate bank could arrive at the office at seven or seven thirty and left around seven thirty eight twelve hour days were the norm the business response was very negative and that affected my self-esteem even though I thought that I was doing a good job and basically that made me more and more paranoid and more stressed and anxious until one day I sat at my desk and lost my mind. In view, everything happened at the very moment of the end of feudalism, in addition to the authorized monopoly, the central currency was created. The monarchs decreed that whoever used something other than that money would die and that is what they did they killed them there were wars for that when someone wanted to do a transaction had to ask for a loan with interest in the authorized currency and that meant that they returned more money than you had borrowed but where did that extra money come from for economic growth that worked well for the colonial powers because they could go to Africa America [__ ] slaves take over their things and continue to grow and so we continue to grow I speak of the West just until the end of the Second World War until all the colonies began to become independent and when they became independent we had to find another way to continue growing and we did it through consumerism we had television the desire to consume from the agency and in that way we were able to build r more factories and employ more people and as long as we had enough landfills to dispose of the garbage that we were acquiring, people could continue to buy, so in the West we entered that consumer spiral in which everyone wanted to have more things but in that period In an incredibly short time between the 1940s and the present, we have become completely different beings with a whole new set of aspirations that are supposed to fill a void in our lives, the void left by the disappearance of the community, the withdrawal from nature forgetting ourselves alienation from ourselves this alienation partly originates from our consumerist vision of the world consumerism is the invisible ideology that surrounds and defines our lives is the plastic soup in which we swim because we swim in it even though we do not see it We do not recognize it as an ideology we are not aware that it is an ideology built p Of course, advertising is only one link in the chain, but it is an essential part of it, without which nothing else can happen in that causal chain, and what advertising does is act as a catalyst for an economy that draws resources from a hole in the ground.
at one end of the world it transports them several thousand kilometers takes them to people who will use them for a few hours a few minutes or a few seconds and then they throw them into a hole on this other side of the world basically this is how the economy works and it couldn't be otherwise without advertising throwing all that useless electronic waste all that plastic and that metal of our lives in that great abyss that opens in our lives we are destroying our own life support system the complete integrity of the planet that gives us life and that allows us to survive and thus what began as a project to sell more things has ended up becoming a project to destroy humanity and the other species with which we share the planet I opened my eyes and kept seeing double but this time it was the right eye that could not focus it was as if I was about to lose consciousness I went to the hospital and they told me this has been caused by stress and You should come up with a solution because it can only get worse and it's already quite serious I thought okay and if I talk to my boss and say hey, I 'm not really like that, what impressed me the most was that instead of being receptive and understanding how I had reached such a serious situation his response was good we do not want anyone on our team who does not want to be here or who we think is not capable of doing the job stress is a modern concept in the late 19th and early 20th centuries diagnosis What was in fashion was the so-called neurasthenia, also known as nervous exhaustion or lack of nervous energy, there were really bizarre treatments such as connecting electrodes to the patient to recharge their nerves, which also It was called a rest cure the modern term did not appear until the 1980s the expression I am stressed did not enter our language until the early 1980s which is interesting because that is when the neoliberal economic policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan began. a good portrait of our modern capitalist economy and as individuals we have to learn to adapt to it it is also very curious that in companies the CEOs will suddenly begin to be interested in mindfulness a tradition that was born but far from the offices of the West We help companies of all types and sizes by offering therapy to their employees. They put our nestlé pet food company is an example of our strategy at work we have seen that it is beneficial to have dogs in the workplace and if you have had a bad The benefits are noticeable day we are specialists in training in mental health in the workplace.
Well-being is an individual responsibility, but employers can do something to improve the well-being of their employees. We should ask ourselves why it has become a buzzword in the business world and I think this is one more example of how the culture of well-being at work it has come to replace collective struggles union struggles our bosses are interested in convincing us that our work problems can be solved with individual therapy time is money that phrase that we repeated so many times at the beginning of the 21st century I actually pronounce it benjamin franklin 250 years ago at the dawn of the industrial era the idea is that the faster you are the more money you win first won workplaces and production but eventually has permeated everything we do and thus we finished trying to do more in less time and at every moment of the day in the workplace or at home with our children when it is supposed that we should play every moment is a race against the clock very well you have more questions some other plan for the day work completely took over my life you work seven to nine you do mixed shifts of days and nights of mornings and nights and you come home on Sunday morning you sleep two or three hours long enough to get through the day you put the kids to bed and then you disappear and then you go back to work you help you end up getting used to shifts the nursing world has always been like this and when you receive your salary you think there should be something more for the amount of hours you have done for your delivery some cleaners with contracts of so-called 0 hours have a job during the day and another at night this culture of overwork and job burnout does not exist in just one company in one sector it has become the norm in the us all neighbors have a lawn mower everyone has a snow plow everyone has their own prop The car at first seemed like a good idea because people worked and earned money and thus could buy things from other people, but what this kind of consumerist frenzy has achieved has been to lead us all to be essentially dissatisfied because in reality no purchase can provide the consumer that inner satisfaction I decided to create my own company my own brand of fashion accessories I never stopped to think because I was doing what I was doing I felt obliged to work more and more and more people refer to it as a work addiction but to know really how is that experience i couldn't stop i didn't realize i was destroying myself because i was getting sick i never recovered and we did a presentation at london fashion week and my body just stopped gave up said enough to me They sent Charing Cross to the hospital and while I was lying on the gurney I realized that this compulsive behavior had led me to This is there and I had to change it now we live in a world in which even when we leave work we take with us that voracious appetite to do more and more we leave work and suddenly we are in amazon buying things and consuming we feel that we have to be more and more productive in our free time and consume more and that locks us into the vicious circle of working earning money spending working earning money spending we go round and round like in a toxic hamster wheel if you have to check your email to respond to the clients or do what your boss wants you to do great but you come home and write more emails so we are working all the time we work at work and we work instead of playing and living and that leads to low free time madness capitalism is not something that we are really able to use we often do a job simply to earn an income a job that can be alienating to dropper and when we get home we have no energy left and there is a lot to do feeding the children putting them to bed doing the shopping work has that colonizing effect on our free time and the interesting thing is that even though we are advancing in the digital age We continue to use that extractive control model of the industrial age and although people said that digitization would change capitalism and the economy and acted as if it were a kind of revolution, it is not a reactionary movement in which we use digital technology to reinforce the same kind of extractive and automated biases of industrialism only now we do it on digital steroids and now I have returned to live in my parents' house with my mother I suppose that being in the same situation again as when I was 18 years old can be considered a great setback because I think many people would envy what I earned today I go to the employment office to sign the unemployment benefit the money now and sa bigger problem than I would like I have spent a large part of my career analyzing the world of work and the paradox is that most of that time I dedicate to studying how negative aspects of employment affect us, such as job stress and insecurity workplace and workplace harassment and often the mental health of people without work is worse than that of most people who have it is still a stigma even though we know that unemployment is not caused by lazy individuals it can be caused by bankers with their credit restrictions etc. but it is only one aspect of what makes unemployment such a negative experience that it affects mental health so much people miss that routine and share goals with other people there are many studies that do so demonstrate I believe that this common sense that unemployment is a depressing experience for most people deprives you of a salary and we live in a society in which income is utilized They raise to satisfy any type of need and it also deprives you of recognition if someone approaches and asks you what you do can be a very uncomfortable moment for many people Unemployment is synonymous with social isolation They do not have a sense of community or of participation that can be derived from work the state in companies work closely to ensure that the economy is profitable we are the owners of capital and to achieve this they must have a large workforce that cannot reject the option of working if you do not try hard enough to get a job then you are part of the group of the poor you are lazy and you do not deserve to have access to state resources that began to happen a few centuries ago when there were asylums for the poor and people considered lazy who were forced to work in some harsh conditions we see news that comes out every month in the media saying things like what to do s in the future when robots do all the work and we no longer have to work and when I hear that I think well we will not be so lucky because in reality the main objective of automation is not that we have more free time, the objective is to make the production is more efficient so that companies obtain greater benefits companies benefit by replacing human workers with machines because they do not need breaks or are unionized, the reason why we do not see that automation translates into a drastic reduction in working hours work is because that is not their main objective I would like to see that boring work disappear but what automation and technological changes have been doing is increasing inequality we are talking about a problem of overwork but it is not just a cultural problem a kind of work addiction or ideological brainwashing to make people obsess over work this is an economic problem people work too much because they have to earn a living the uber driver who drives 7 days a week does not do it because he has been culturally brainwashed to work so much but because he has to do it it is interesting that games will think that by now we would have a three day work week and that human progress would be measured by working less and living longer but now especially in the UK - people spend twice as much time going to work every day as they do on the job.
rest of europe these trips by car or other means of transport involve a very high cost in carbon and a great impact reducing the working week would have a positive impact on the climate and would improve the human aspect few say on their deathbed they wish there were spent more time in the office since I was told at the young age of 56 that I may have days or weeks left I have been able to reflect a lot s work calm and acceptance of things now we live in a society in which having a job is much more important than enjoying your time and that time is never recovered, especially with children who grow up very fast and change very fast and you you lose crucial moments you simply miss the most important thing when you see those women so beautiful and elegantly dressed in such a hurry it means that they are very busy that the important thing is to earn money without living I can not do this according to them because I have a work appointment on a date of delivery or preparing a meeting is an impossible situation I think people do not realize it until it is late at the hospital and I had a moment of clarity I realized that I needed help because I did not know how to live in another way I simply did not know how to live in another way one of the most incredible things when you destroy your life working is that you have no alternative but to get to the essence of things, for example, you have to dedicate your energy I realized that I do not need so many things I gave away about a third of my things I adore my house but I needed to get rid of all that people are very worried about technological unemployment because of the idea that automation technologies will replace the human workers in certain areas of the labor market in that situation in which work will not function as an income distribution mechanism for all of us we will need another way to achieve it and one way to achieve it could be the universal basic income universal basic income is a policy that establishes the right that each citizen has enough income to live you do not have to do anything to be entitled to it would be the same for everyone and the basic income would be guaranteed will allow any of us to make decisions about what forms of leisure work and recreation we develop and I will be able to dedicate more time to taking care of my elderly grandmother for example I will be able to dedicate Spending more time caring for my young son and spending more time helping him with his studies and more One of the benefits of the Universal Basic Income is that it frees us from the financial pressure we have when we make decisions about where to work and how much to work with support Regarding economic security, we could make those decisions in a more autonomous and rational way. Recently, we have found in some research that it happens when people work fewer hours and we have indeed been able to verify that people's mental health and employment is worse , work 1 provides a routine offers valuable experiences and prevents us from worrying too much there are many positive effects but that can be achieved by working one day a week from then on there does not seem to be any difference the work does not benefit but neither does it harm up to 40 hours a week that gives us a positive picture of what the future might look like if we had the political will to arrive r to this, one of the usual criticisms of the reduction of the working day is that people did not know what to do with their lives that leisure would make us fall into vice. An important objection to these criticisms is that we have never experienced free time from work.
the way utopian authors imagined it would not be like the one we have now would be free time with adequate resources or free time in which a variety of non-work activities would be considered valuable and useful would be free time in which new types of social spaces would emerge we are now programmed and trained to dedicate our free time to consumer activities we go shopping or on vacation to the places that are advertised on the subway and it will be crucial that as we move towards a more leisure-oriented society Let's reconsider what leisure is, it may mean doing more for ourselves, learning how to clean our houses, cooking, gardening, fixing things. s furniture or even to make our own furniture, things like that I think it is very important that there are universal basic services, for example a new universal free childcare system let's imagine that we also had very cheap housing renewable energy is public transport and wifi all very affordable or even free, that is the kind of thing that makes it possible for people to live safely and not be forced to work as many hours as they do now. Time to think is one of the most essential ingredients of freedom when we consider the free time of this way then we could see it as a question of distributive justice just as we see money as a question of distributive justice perhaps governments should start to think about introducing policies so that everyone receives their fair share the time to think is one of the victims of the current culture of endless working hours and I think that time is essential ial to have freedom to think about the roles that your habits play in your priorities are your priorities seriousness gives you somewhere without time to think the truth we do not have time to reflect on these things all cultures have traditions to stop the Jewish tradition -Christian has on Saturday a day of rest for pause or prayer prayer is the best way to stop being present to reflect or to get out of yourself from your own selfish economic spiral and simply live in the moment and have a broader vision If we ask ourselves how we got here, an important factor that is not talked about enough are some of the instruments and economic parameters with which we measure how well we are doing as a society and of course one of them is GDP and gross domestic product.
that it is only the result of adding everything we produce and that can include weapons for example and also the main ways in which we pollute the environment. environment is not an indicator of success nor is it an indicator of the well-being and happiness of society is not an indicator of the health of the population or of child poverty in fact it excludes all those elements from the equation and makes it worse because it treats people like robots produce produce and when we live in an aging society in which we must take care of people, which is the productivity that every day there are more elderly people and we dedicate less time to them that completely dehumanizes our economy that right now is driven by a goal that makes us feel bad and the problem we currently have to create a movement that allows us to organize and regain control in our workplaces is very big now we have a digital culture that encourages us to think in a very individualistic way and consumerism really It prevents us from becoming aware of our relationship with our heads to the state so i if you lived in the southern uS in the decades of 1940 and 50 and you would like to end racism of course it would be useless if you stayed home and were not racist you would have to go out mobilize and try to change the racist system it is not enough to modify our individual behavior we have to organize for a different type of system that will be imperative the countries that have succeeded in reducing the working day did not do so relying on individual choice they achieved it through collective bargaining the large unions fight so that each year in addition to a small salary increase the working day is reduced by a few minutes with This type of collective action as a society is how we can reduce the working day so that it benefits everyone, not a few, to facilitate this transition towards a more ecological or more humane economy, we will have to think about regulating advertising in a meaningful way and even freeing up space.
