My first ‘two-part’ humor article for the Pagosa Daily Post.
I don’t get paid enough to work this hard.
But I can justify it, because today is Thursday… which might be the new Friday — someday — if our friends across the Atlantic have anything to say about it.
According to various newspapers published in Great Britain, including The Guardian, at least 100 companies in the UK have “signed up for a permanent four-day working week for all their employees with no loss of pay, a milestone in the campaign to fundamentally change Britain’s approach to work.”
That’s a quote from a major left-wing newspaper published in London. talking about economic milestones.
If I’m not mistaken, the Daily Post is the only major U.S. news outlet to break this story. Other than The New York Times and the Washington Post.
As we discussed in Part One, certain people have been claiming that the future looks bleak for pretty much everyone, but especially for Our Children. One of those certain people is journalist Kate Julian, who wrote in The Atlantic in May, 2020, in an essay titled, ‘What Happened to American Childhood?’
Imagine for a moment that the future is going to be even more stressful than the present. Maybe we don’t need to imagine this. You probably believe it…
Well, sorry… I don’t believe it. I believe, instead, that Ms. Julian was just having a bad day when she wrote this in May 2020. Probably, her daughter’s school had closed its doors, due to COVID restrictions, and Ms. Julian had to cancel her Ladies Luncheon date with her old college roommates and… well, the world just seemed like it was falling apart.
Ms. Julian’s essay continues:
Suppose, too, that you are brave or crazy enough to have brought a child into this world, or rather this mess. If ever there were a moment for fortifying the psyche and girding the soul, surely this is it. But how do you prepare a child for life in an uncertain time — one far more psychologically taxing than the late-20th-century world into which you were born?
So you had to cancel the lunch with your girlfriends… and your daughter, who is probably going through one of those stages that daughters go through, expects you to help her with her Zoom school lesson, and you really don’t understand the way they are teaching math these days… it’s not the same way you learned math in fourth grade…
And you come to the conclusion that we are not living in a ‘world’ but, rather, in a ‘mess’.
It’s not your kids who are going through psychological hell. It’s you. And you’re dumping your stress onto your kids. Yes, it’s a mess. Well, just look in the mirror.
How can we prepare kids for the future, when their parents totally freak out every time there’s a little global pandemic? Of course, we can’t. Because the parents are the main problem.
Enter, stage left, the Four-Day Work Week.
“Over the course of the last year and a half, we have not only seen a tremendous increase in employee wellness and wellbeing but concurrently, our customer service and relations, as well as talent relations and retention also have benefited.”
He said adopting the four-day week was “one of the most transformative initiatives we’ve seen in the history of our company.”
Mr. Ross didn’t highlight “retention” in particular, but I will do that for him. “Retention”, folks.
Turns out, people actually like getting paid the same amount they were paid for five days of work, while also enjoying a three-day weekend. But what’s strange (but maybe not so strange) is the employees seem to get just as much work done in four days as they used to get done in five days. In some cases, they seem to get more work done in four days.
A thoughtful person might wonder… what if we had a one-day work week? Imagine what America’s GDP might look like.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Or rather, the United Kingdom is getting ahead of us. We’re still whining about what a terrible the world our kids will inherit, when we could be whining about having to work on Fridays.
Do we want to make the world a better place, or not?
I don’t know about you, but I’m going to start by taking tomorrow off.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.