How much should you work in an ideal life?
How much do you work now?
The standard is 40 hours per week. But in practice it’s more.
Add up all the time you spend outside of work to check email and messages, think about them, ponder and worry about work tasks, recover from work stress and effort. This is all part of work although we often don’t acknowledge it as such.
How much does this add? It depends. But let’s be conservative and assume only another 10 hours per week.
Then add around 14 hours per week for domestic work (e.g. cleaning, maintenance, repairing and replacing broken things, etc.). And another 14 hours for cooking and buying groceries and other regular items. If you don’t cook, this time still comes in the form of waiting in restaurants, choosing take-out, etc. And then you pay an additional cost in your health. The let’s say 7 hours per week for grooming, hygiene, fashion.
You (should) also sleep for at least 56 hours per week.
Add all of this and you get 141 hours for work, chores, eating, sleep, grooming, other tasks. A week has 168 hours.
This leaves 27 hours per week for yourself, for socializing, exercise, entertainment, learning, self-development, hobbies.
Four hours per day to live your life.
That does not sound like much.
But that is just how thing are, right? People have always work a lot haven’t they?
How much should you work in an ideal life?
People used to work much more
Looking back hundreds of years, we can see most of the world worked more than now. There was child labor. Many places had no work limits. The working conditions were awful.
From the beginning of blue-collar jobs and factories, workers worked long hours. In the Industrial Revolution most people worked 12-16 hours six days per week.
Before the Industrial Revolution, it was even worse. Most people worked in food production. They were farmers, or better said, peasants. This was even more work than subsequent workers. People had small farms. They got up at the crack of dawn and worked all day long into the night. Weekend breaks were less of a thing because plants don’t take Sundays off from growing.
Peasants in Medieval times, Antiquity and earlier times had to work a lot. And most people were peasants.
The expression ‘back breaking work’ comes from agriculture. The repetitive motions of manual farm work are so harmful, they literally break, or bend, the spinal column.
Slavery was common practice because kings needed a way to reduce the unbearable work pressure so their peasants don’t rebel.
Compared to recorded history, we should be grateful. We have it easy with 78 hours of work per week (counting domestic chores, regular shopping, cooking).
Our normal is to work much less than in recorded history.
How much should you work in an ideal life?
Maybe now is the least work ever and we should be grateful?
What about The Four Hour Workweek and other similar philosophies? Are they fantasies?
Is our ideal more like the ethos of hustle culture: never stop working to get ahead no matter how burnt out, depressed, disillusioned or regretful it makes you?
Not quite.
People ever since there have been States and agriculture have worked a lot. But this is in fact a small part of human history.
Homo Sapiens has existed for 300,000 years. Agriculture appeared first around 12,000 years ago. How much did people work for the previous 288,000 years?
These were hunter-gatherers. They had to forage for food through gathering, hunting, scavenging. They had rudimentary stone tools and fire, and that was about it. Lived in small bands of dozens which sometimes fused into bigger communities and then split back into small bands. Did not have permanent shelter, but moved regularly.
Surviving in wild nature every day? It sounds difficult, scary and exhausting.
But it was not so much work. They worked about 15 hours a week to meet all their material needs. More details in Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots.
Hunter-gatherers worked on average about 2 hours per day.
Contrast this with our modern 70+ hours per week. Remember this includes getting food, preparing it, domestic chores, maintenance of belongings.
How did they manage to work so little?
On one hand, they worked for their direct needs, rather than for corporate bullshit, office politics, abstract incomprehensible KPIs. They worked to procure food, shelter, reproduction, companionship and safety.
On the other hand, they did not have hundreds of thousands of items to maintain. They did not have innumerable bits of information to process. They did not have millions of unnatural decisions every day (e.g. should you buy a product in a Facebook ad, how should you react to each Instagram post, what to do for fun, where to go to eat).
In most of human history, our ancestors worked less than us.
Also, they worked better.
Hunter-gatherers had to perform at their best. Every single day.
A mediocre hunt was a failed hunt. String multiple failed hunts and you died.
The same applied for every action they took. The safety margins were much smaller. Our Prehistoric ancestors had to bring their A-game to everything they did.
How much should you work in an ideal life?
Less but much better
It’s obviously a problem that we are working more than we evolved to do. One with serious negative consequences. But that’s not all.
The fact that we produce work of mediocre quality is as bad. There is little pressure and reward for excellence. Employees are asked to produce a lot of work, but it does not really matter how good it is. In fact, often in corporate environments exceptional work harms rather than helps the career. We built jobs like they are assembly lines. People should behave like cogs, producing predictable and mediocre work, instead of humans who create and innovate.
The Ideal Life cannot exist with such work.
Let’s be clear. We are not talking about the meaning of work here. We are not exploring how much it matter what impact your work has on the world. We are not discussing the soul-crushing knowledge that your work does not matter, or even worse, makes the world a worse place. That is very much part of the Ideal Life, and will be in a separate element.
We are talking about the volume and quality of your work.
What to do
Refuse to be a cog. Refuse to be a robot.
You are human. You evolved to focus and produce exceptional work for a few hours per day. And you evolved to have the rest of the day to enjoy life.
If you spend most of the day half-avoiding mediocre work and then interrupt your relaxation to think of the same work, that’s an awful life. I know it is the normal now. But that does not change it’s horridness.
This applies to your job.
But it also applies to all of the rest of the work that you do. All the never-ending stuff you have to manage. All the information you process. All the meaningless decisions you make each day.
All of this is work. You are working for other people. For the people who sold you the stuff. For the people who want your attention. For the people who want to persuade you to behave in a certain manner.
Unless you create barriers, then these will continue to enslave you the same as kings enslaved other people to work them to death.
Summary
The Ideal Life means little exceptional work, so you have time to live.
This applies to your job. But it also applies to all the other work. Prevent people from stealing your time and attention. And find work that rewards you for being exceptional.
Don’t be a factory line cog or corporate noise-maker. Be a human.
If you care about other people improving their life, share this. It would help a lot to get the information out there. Together we can Build Ideal Lives.
Further reading:
Bullshit Jobs - David Graeber
Deep Work - Cal Newport
Digital Minimalism - Cal Newport
The world until yesterday - Jared Diamond
Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari