Leisure And Work : A Balance Between Leisure And Work

In the article “ The Busy Trap” Kreider tries to convince readers to chose time over money. He makes numerous points including how boasting about busyness takes the form of a complaint. He insults those who voluntarily take on obligations by remarking that they are obsessed with always being occupied. However, the basis for such a conclusion is founded on only a few examples of individuals who were negatively affected by the burden of work. In Kreider’s opinion it is wasteful to be busy all the time because life is too short to work more than 5 hours per day and not spend enough time in one’s happy place. What is your happy place? Picture it and stay there for a while letting your thoughts flow. Notice that your thinking becomes more positive and somewhat out of reach. Next, imagine a life with minimal stress that includes little to no work and much enjoyment; now you 're floating back to reality because that type of life is not in the grasps of most. Similarly, Kreider writes his article as if most people have plenty of time to waste, and to enjoy themselves, as he has. Kreider’s overall point that people keep themselves busy to escape the feelings of emptiness is both ignorant and a reflection of his narrow perspective of the world. His opinion that people feel apprehensive when not working, along with the fact that most people wouldn’t be content living the lifestyle Kreider is promoting, plus his support towards the propositions of full unemployment and a

The rate of production is surpassing the pace of people’s sense that they need them. Businesses and political elites have found a way to fix the stagnating economic growth by implementing the idea of “the gospel of consumption” on the radicalized working class. Convinced people believe what they have will never be enough. Manipulating them to crave “endlessly for newer” things, Kellogg tried to achieve this notion by changing three eight- hour shifts to four six- hour shifts. Hoping that the “workers would be liberated …” the company argued people could work more efficiently on shorter shifts. Workers embraced the news because it gave them an opportunity to spend time with their family. Nevertheless, the CEO concealed their purpose for employing additional people in the job market. Benjamin Hunnicutt author of the book Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day explains the company wanted to

As the future approaches, automation and technology are quickly evolving and diminishing the amount of jobs available for Americans. American work-life has evolved drastically over the years. Certain jobs are being replaced by drones and robots, leaving many Americans unemployed. It has caused a slight shift in how we work. However, the continuation of work is still alive. In the article “A World Without Work,” (2015) the author Derek Thompson expresses how people are losing their jobs. Nevertheless, they’re using their hobbies and talents to generate money. Someone might sell their poetry and written work when they have lost their job generating income while also fostering creativity. President Nixon’s “Address to The Nation on Labor

Work-life balance has been a popular topic for employees across all age and occupations for years, representing a rising concern of contemporary human resource management and labor policies. This topic has attracted the attention from the millennium generation, who is stepping into the market and beginning to grow a career. Therefore considering the increasing demand, well-designed workforce planning with diverse scheduling options offered to employees appears to be extra credits for most companies. This research paper aims to communicate the positive effects of four-day workweek, and providing support for why employers should adopt this schedule for employees and themselves through 1) introducing background and history of four-day workweek as a work schedule option and 2) demonstrating benefits of four-day workweek from both employer and employees’ perspectives.

Work and its role in society has become the subject of considerable public commentary and debate in recent years. Work, for many Americans, has changed significantly over the past 25 years. Some people believe that the world of work is changing so thoroughly and quickly that we should consider ourselves pioneers of a new historical era. Some say that the idea of a job has become antiquated.

Roszak makes a point in his essay about jobs being our salvation, where he describe there is no end to a working life. Roszak describes the waste of time in people’s jobs and that most employees don’t even put all of their effort into them. He figures

When employed labor is involved, productivity in terms of time becomes important, because the employer generally pays the worker in terms of time. For many jobs, then a shift from task-orientation to timed labor occurs, as the laborer’s time becomes the employer’s money. Thus, a separation between work and leisure occurs, as

On my travels around America in the 1800s one man that stands out the most among the crowd would have to be Samuel Gompers, Writer of “What does the working man want?”. Mr. Gompers wrote this piece to help people understand the importance of the working man and how implementing the 8 hour work day would

American entrepreneur, Steve Jobs, once said: “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” Some people may take a job out of necessity rather than being passionate about their work. You have to love what you do as you spend more time working than being with loved ones. In Studs Terkel’s Working, adapted by Harvey Pekar, the reader is presented with visual adaptations of the lives of ordinary Americans that show how they feel about what they do for a living ranging from farmers, miners, barbers, box boys, and a hooker are some of the jobs mentioned in the novels. The author gives the

The world of work and the world of wonder are two worlds that play a prominent role in the lives of humans. In that sense they are commensurable to one another, yet at the same there there is a clear distinction between how the two worlds worlds operate that make them incommensurable. The purpose of this paper is to to argue that the world of work is incommensurable with the world of wonder in certain senses, but commensurable in others. This will be done by providing evidence from Leisure, the Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and works of Plato.

Many people today find themselves in “dead-end” jobs, or they feel like work is purposeless and frustrating. At the same time, some people figured out that work is a blessing to them. People who suffer their lives in a slavery for many years in another country, think that work is a curse because they were ruled by people. They work because they are forced by other people. Work is a blessing for most people, but for some people work is a curse because of the lack of opportunity. Work is a blessing for those who understand it. To understand that work is a blessing was one of true understanding the purpose of life. It is important because not knowing the purpose of life brought people depressed. As Honore said “I'm retired from the Army, but

This leads into the final point Carr makes in chapter one that automation is changing society’s perception of work and leisure. Many people would agree that work is not pleasurable and humans like leisure. However, Carr argues that, “thanks to our bias for leisure over work, ease over effort, we overestimate automation’s benefits” (19). Not only does he argue at the end of the chapter that most people are searching for a blend of life and work, but also he argues that people actually enjoy work over leisure because of the sense of accomplishment and productivity they feel afterwards. Carr argues that we overestimate the benefits of technology, when it may not even be what we really want as human beings. Furthermore, the his skeptical beliefs regarding automation, tacit knowledge, and work versus leisure are central to his argument throughout this entire book.

Work takes on greater importance in a society where people believe that they can master the material world and shape their own destinies, and less where they believe that they can not. An Ancient Greek philosopher said that the only stability in the world was within one's mind or soul, where ideas were secure from the unending changes that took place in the material world. In Ancient Greece, philosophers believed that a person's thoughts and ideas were more important than that person's work and that work in the material world lacked permanence. For the ancient Greeks, the status of particular occupations depended on the degree of freedom a person had, the perceived moral integrity of the occupation, and the amount of mental and physical work it required. Today we tend to feel that working in an office is better than working in a coal mine, regardless of which worker makes more money. Our language suggests that it is a privilege to work sitting down.

          As we can see from my personal examples and views, workers spend their leisure time more productively that a laborer. Since

At the beginning of this course leisure was a topic I did not give much thought to and I felt like I did not have the time to spare to put much thought into. To me, all leisure meant was having free time to do whatever it is that I wanted to do. But after analyzing my life I noticed that I had surrounded my life with solely work and school and my “free time” was anytime I spent watching television and anytime I slept. However, after taking this course I learned that leisure meant more much than that. Now leisure to me means, as Richard Kraus states, leisure is “time which is not devoted to work or work-connected responsibilities or to other forms of discretionary or unobligated time,” (Olson et al., 2003, 12). The “time” in which Kraus