Once upon a time I was sold the myth that advances in technology would allow us all more free time.
Ha, bloody ha.
I know as a small business owner that looking at the clock does not make sense during the week I'm at the beck and call of all and sundry, on Saturday I get around to doing my work, on Sunday I write project proposals and do the accounts. Vacation? WTF is a vacation, we managed to get almost a week off to go see some snow. I use design programs and mathematical modelling and yes technology makes that la lot less painful. I still have to manually sense check the results to make sure there is not a mess in the program.
As for my partner, her patients seem to believe that she is some form of automaton that never sleeps. Ninety nine times out of a hundred it could have waited it's the one percent that she cannot afford to miss. So for weeks on end I live with a zombie.
This last vacation passed in a blur I think it was only on the last day we could do anything but mumble at each other, the first couple of days were like sinking in quicksand, eventually we touched solid ground.
Then I talk to friends who work in corporations there is supposedly a 35 hour week and loads of vacation time all planned out. They must be all zenned out? Ha, bloody ha, they say. Technology means they can be permanently linked to the corporate beast and are expected to respond to any needs immediately. The result is that many live in dread of their mobile phone and email box, thou shalt never disconnect. Most have signs of stress whether they actually admit it or not, like children that can never actually settle in one spot.
If you can be contacted you will be contacted, technology can be like an essential symbiotic organism making your work more efficiently but also seemingly inescapable, because if you get rid of it you will suffer sudden income reduction.
Teachers must have it easy, well the ones we spent our vacation with managed to finish the marking and then started the course preparation for the next term.
The ones who actually get the 35 hour week are subjected to productivity methodology better suited to machines than human beings. Always in danger of being outsourced when mere technology is not enough to compensate for the corporate profit model. It gets to absolutely absurd levels when they have to work two jobs or more, merely to survive.
Ah, but surely those unemployed scroungers whom the system deems surplus to requirements, constantly bombarded with what they cannot afford, constantly vilified. The collateral damage of Austerity.
So when I hear business leaders declaring how hard they work and how they deserve their mega salaries one has to laugh, on what planet do they live. When I hear an actor whinging that if his ego isn't boosted enough he will take his balls and leave, all because he was asked to contribute to the society that made him, I want to puke.
Funny I once believed technology would actually serve us, and it still could, but we would have to start reducing the abuse that it makes possible.
Good god, if people had more time on their hands they might cotton on and revolt.