It’s really interesting for me coming into threads like this. The vast majority of people that I see discussing these things seem to have office jobs consising of largely arbitrary objectives and deadlines. And for these people it would almost certainly be true that society could get by with minimal change if they only worked 2 or 3 days a week. It’s an interesting perspective to me because I work in a veterinary medicine where (just the same as with human medicine) long weeks and long hours are practically a necessity. Very, very rarely do I find myself doing anything that is an unnecessary task, something that could be done later, or something that could be automated. While it would technically be possible to just hire more people and rotate shifts through the hospital to allow shorter work days for everyone, cutting days decreases the consistency of care (i.e. increases the number times a patient is transferred between doctors) which dramatically increases the chances for medical errors. Plus that doesn’t even take into account that there is a dramatic hiring shortage so good luck ever finding enough people to make that work in the first place.
While I agree that a lot of people work jobs that have more hours than things to do during them, I notice all the time in these threads people claiming that “no one ever needs to work more than a handful of days a week” while not acknowledging that a lot of jobs exist where that just isn’t possible.
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