Working Out The Math, Part II
Apr. 18th, 2009 10:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiat_knoxOkay, here's the thing.
One full week, Sunday midnight to Sunday midnight, is 7 x 24 = 168 hours.
Eight hours' sleep, seven days a week = 56 hours. That's good quality dreaming time there. Not to mention other things people can get up to in bed, but we're talking about sleep here. ;) Out of 168 hours, we're down to 112 hours.
Work. Let's say it's 30 hours. Spread out over five days, sure, but around 30 hours. Commute time there and back, one hour each way, tops. Another ten hours. A total of some 40 hours, bringing the total time left not sleeping and not working down to 82 hours.
So we can spend more time asleep than we do involved with work (that's the commute and the work combined), and more than twice our working life being wide awake and not working.
Okay, so take out one hour a day for lunch. That, plus work, plus commute, is 45 hours. We still spend more time individually asleep and dreaming, and still get more time not working.
In fact, working time is the briefest amount of time you spend - and all you get out of those hours of heartbreak and harassment is money. Which you can't take with you.
So you have 77 hours not sleeping, not eating lunch, not working, not commuting. Oh, if only I could get organised enough. The amount of words I can get written in that time ...
It's only someone like me, with zero status and therefore zero status anxiety, who can get unstuck enough from the rat race to think like this.
One full week, Sunday midnight to Sunday midnight, is 7 x 24 = 168 hours.
Eight hours' sleep, seven days a week = 56 hours. That's good quality dreaming time there. Not to mention other things people can get up to in bed, but we're talking about sleep here. ;) Out of 168 hours, we're down to 112 hours.
Work. Let's say it's 30 hours. Spread out over five days, sure, but around 30 hours. Commute time there and back, one hour each way, tops. Another ten hours. A total of some 40 hours, bringing the total time left not sleeping and not working down to 82 hours.
So we can spend more time asleep than we do involved with work (that's the commute and the work combined), and more than twice our working life being wide awake and not working.
Okay, so take out one hour a day for lunch. That, plus work, plus commute, is 45 hours. We still spend more time individually asleep and dreaming, and still get more time not working.
In fact, working time is the briefest amount of time you spend - and all you get out of those hours of heartbreak and harassment is money. Which you can't take with you.
So you have 77 hours not sleeping, not eating lunch, not working, not commuting. Oh, if only I could get organised enough. The amount of words I can get written in that time ...
It's only someone like me, with zero status and therefore zero status anxiety, who can get unstuck enough from the rat race to think like this.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-18 01:34 pm (UTC)When I was unemployed I got so much more done - I was fitter and healthier than I've ever been because I had time to go to the gym every day, I bought and cooked fresh vegetables from the market instead of pre-packaged stuff from Tesco, I got enough sleep and didn't spend half my time crammed into packed trains and tubes with other people's germs. And of course I had much more time to read and do my own research. Yet there seems to be a perception that all 'unemployed' people spend their entire lives slumped in front of the telly with a can of Special Brew.
Yes, a lot of good things do cost money and I was lucky in that I did have some savings, including a bit of money left over from a previous redundancy package, and I don't have any dependents to support. I don't wish to belittle or romanticise the real poverty in which many unemployed people live. But time is more precious than money, because once you've lost or wasted it you can never get it back.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-18 04:41 pm (UTC)After a hard day's work, my brain is usually to frazzled to much writing. Fortunately not every day is hard, but enough of them are.
I can't seem to find a copy of it, but I'm sure I've seen an old joke where the number of hours in a week are all used up with things like work and sleeping and cooking, and going to the loo, and the punchline is that all that is left is 5 minutes, and you've just used that to read this joke!