Working less: decoupling self worth from paid labor (part 9)

Happy Labor Day to my fellow Americans! (And workers abroad ✊) This is part nine of a series on tackling wants, managing my media diet, and finding enough. Each post stands alone. Read the introduction on “the mindset of more” to see all the posts in the series. How much should we work? 40 hours and up Economists love to talk about people as rational actors, but the market doesn’t allow this when it comes to work. Nikhil Suresh came to the realization that the inflexible deal of work meant it was no longer a good tradeoff: “The deal makes sense until I have enough money to comfortably avoid homelessness, then each dollar gets less and less valuable, but society only has a default template to buy most of us in five-day-a-week batches whether you like it or not.” The idea of “eight hours for work, eight for sleep, eight for leisure” is tidy, but that’s not what 40 hours works out to; depending on commute, people may be adding an hour or two a day just in transportation time. And many…