Do you think society would be better off if we only had 3 working days a week?

[DYM]

VOTE.

[Illu]

Yea why all the fucking rush, like where the fuck does everyone have such a God damn hurry to anyways? Just fucking chill and have an icecoffee and think about it.

[DYM]

Pretty amazing how both sides are almost equal. I think Eliters who have jobs prefer a shorter work week from looking at the results. Maybe a 4-day working week would have been a better poll option.

[wheatrich]

as a person you'd be better off working less.  Wasting your life working just to make your boss rich has never made sense to me.

as a society hell no

[Shadow]

40 out of 168 isn't bad at all, modern society has more leisure time than we know what to do with, we end up just burning it on entertainment like Angry Birds and Twitch.

But I don't work to make my boss rich (no one does), I work to make a difference in the world, I'm hopefully going to leave it better than I found it.

Maybe the short-week people have terrible jobs. I like mine.

[Wouter Jansen]

I never have trouble using tons of spare time for lots of interests, never understood how anyone could feel like there's too much. Plus I love educating myself in spare time too, you don't need any job to make a difference, I would argue that a job limits my ability to do so: it doesn't teach me all the skills and insight to make the difference I want to make. Most people that make a difference would also argue that they don't feel like they are working, so making the world better and contributing is inherent to something other than work, more likely a passion. Someone with such a passion isn't as likely to work for a boss, but on their own terms. Pretty sure most people work because they need an income and not because they use it as a means to make a difference in the world.

[AEB]

What Wouter wrote.

[Shadow]

I agree to an extent. I also am very engaged in a plethora of activities when not "working", including learning typography and republishing public domain books, genealogy, cycling, fencing, firearm competitions, reading, research papers, etc. Even so, I don't feel like my work encroaches upon my personal betterment or goals. I certainly could be more productive with the leisure time I have and I would say in general most people won't be more productive with more leisure.

Now whether they'd enjoy themselves more is a different matter. That's up to the individual. But definitely society wouldn't be better off.

[Thiradell]

"I certainly could be more productive with the leisure time I have and I would say in general most people won't be more productive with more leisure."

agree with this fo sho. It's a pretty crazy hypothetical anyway, things have to keep moving 24/7 in the USA for society to work at all. Road construction often has to happen at night, and emergency response has to operate 24/7. The rewarding aspect is being a part of what needs to get done and helping individual people with their needs. Yeah, a lot of bosses suck and there are lots of work environments which are monotonous, or toxic, or whatever else, but those things are everywhere in life, not just work. Work is inherent in human life as well; before technology and commerce you had to farm or hunt or grow to have food, and work was just constantly a part of everyday life (unless you're like, royalty). American companies like Hershey's use slave labor camps in Africa to this day because somebody has to just grind out the work for things to function (not that I condone that, and it's supposedly going away soon).

My dad grew up on a dairy farm and had to consistently wake up at 4 AM to milk the cows in the barn, in addition to helping out with many other things and just working a shitton in general. He talked about getting a sloppy joe and Coke for lunch every day from school, and sometimes, if he was really lucky, his parents would give him a little extra money for fries. The result of his upbringing is that is he values everything in life and instilled an incredibly strong work ethic in all in his kids. For me, that ethic has always been founded on the principle of "I want to make a difference in the world."

Going off of that, it's important to say that I've often hated work, and I've tried to push the work ethic part of me down lots of times in favor of being lazy, or whatever. The immediate appeal of working less is very high, and I've complained and whined more than my fair share about work. But I know for a fact that I value everything in my life and have never wanted for anything materialistic that I don't have, and I am a better, more complete person in many ways because of the work that I've done. Work has improved me in ways nothing else has.

[Thiradell]

Kind of uhhhhhhhhhhh rambled but my answer to OP is absolutely not

[Illu]

Actually a 0 day a week workday might be better, for some people.

Searching for a job I've realized majority of the jobs out there are kinda irrel, I might go for becoming a pavior because it seems simple enough for me to learn and probably wouldn't drive me insane. The job seems really irrel, I could care less if the ground didn't look nice or if the ground I walked on gave me bit of a challenge to walk around but yea I need money.

Rocket engineer is another job that's really irrel, it really seems advanced beyond belief and I don't understand how it's humanely possible to create rockets and go into space. Problem is we don't need to go anywhere, the earth is fine, or maybe it's not anymore from all the pollution created from the rockets and now we need the rockets dunno.

Anyways to me the rel jobs are those that gives us food, water and shelter. These are nessesary for life to be comfortable enough but not everyone can have the same job so I think it would be better to have just a few people working on these jobs who want to or who want some extra benefits in society bad enough so they are willing to work for it.

If we eliminated all the irrel jobs and instead just gave everyone some sum of money for not doing anything then they could do whatever they wanted instead. Maybe much of the airplanes and cars would dissapear, we could live in smaller communities and people would know each other better rather than have shallow relationships where you message someone on facebook a couple times a year. Maybe most of computers would dissapear too, and things like videogames and we'd take up simpler forms of entertainment.

We'd need someone to take care of the money however and some type of computer system unless we just decided to ditch the money altogether and just hope enough people would care to do the rel jobs. This system could be refined with time as we learned more what foods are rel and easy enough to make to keep us in good health, unless some people wanted to go trough the trouble to make some advanced luxury food.

It just seems to me like this thing with needing a job to make a living for yourself is creating alot of irrel jobs and products that slowly turn the earth into a scrapyard of useless crap that someone desperately needed to create and market so he could put food on the table.

At the end of the day also, no matter how good you are at your job you might still get screwed over because someone was just a bit better, someone will get left out. There's this idea of working hard and making no excuses but yea maybe I'll succeed and maybe I become the best at my job after all and then I'm the one who leaves few people in the dust and laugh my ass off at the losers who didn't work hard enough. No matter how you turn it though someone will get left out, there's not enough jobs for everyone no matter how much more desperate marketing we create and at some point you are creating such useless products no marketing in the world can save it. It may be a technically very advanced product even that many people have no idea how it functions but there's only room for so many products that contribute nothing to the nessesities of life.
I guess that's why I've been looking into biochemistry because I thought maybe I could figure out how to live healthy my whole life, learn how to pick up the rel stuff that the body needs and eliminate all the crap. Biochemistry is insanely complex though, maybe because the body and life is complex, I just hope science hasn't turned into a scrapyard also where some poor guy needed desperately to make a living so he threw out some complex shit out there and then someone continued on that. Actually what if that's why it's so complex? There's lots of irrel shit out there, the people who are far advanced in their understanding of biochemistry seem like they are trying to find the rel stuff among the garbage created out of desperation. Some people seem to have a mind for these kind of stuff, for me it's starting to feel like I've bitten into way more than I could chew. Offcourse if I had infinite time on my hands maybe I could figure this shit out, though it seems my time is running out moneywise and now I have to become another person who contributes to the scrapyard or die.