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9 Jul 10 Working for the sake of work will make you poor
I came across a short anecdote the other day that I found very revealing:
Three men of a tribe need travel an hour to the river each morning to get their water. Then one has a good idea, he digs a well in the centre of the village, now no man need travel any morning and they all have their drinking water. The men are now happily unemployed.
Were the men better served when they had the jobs of traveling several hours a day to get water? Of course they were not - they are now much better of being “unemployed”. This is why the orthodoxy of working a set numbers a day, five days a week is actually damaging to both our happiness and future prosperity: people get rewarded for being busy, not valuable.
Of course there are few limits on human wants, thus ensuring we can stay busy if we want to, for instance the men in the short anecdote above could have moved on to build better huts for themselves, or whatever else they wanted and now had time for once they no longer needed to carry water.
But the key take-away here is that their prosperity was not based upon them simply being busy, it was based on finding short-cuts and more effective ways of getting what they wanted with less time and effort spent to get it.
