The Original Affluent Society
One thing that the pandemic has done for many of us is to cut commute times down to zero. I live in an apartment building surrounded by Amazon, Google, and Apple offices that have been more or less vacant for a year. That's tens of thousands of people who have not been getting up early, eating, grooming, dressing, and transporting themselves, which translates to millions of hours that have been freed up for . . . what?
I hope most people have been sleeping longer or engaging in hobbies or some other self-selected activity, but I suspect not. I'm guessing most of that extra time has been used being in some way productive, which is historically what we do with the gift of time. Peasants in the Middle Ages, for example, working with the crudest of farming tools, for instance, worked far fewer hours each day than our modern farmers with their advanced farming machinery. Homemakers continue to always have work to do even as they no longer have to churn their own butter or scrub the laundry by hand in a tub of soapy water. Every day business tasks that once took days, can now happen in seconds, yet office workers still CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: The Original Affluent Society