It’s Monday. How many of y’all closed your laptop on Friday and did not open it again until this morning?
How many of y’all didn’t think about work until today? Were not compelled to check notifications? Slacks? Texts from colleagues?
For most of us the weekend isn’t focused on rest, community, family and hobbies.
The weekend is the bare minimum we need to keep our heads above water, to get done all of the foundational things of life that we couldn’t fit into the workweek.
If this is you, you are definitely not alone.
According to the Families and Work Institute for the Department of Labor, 2/3 to 3/4 a majority of wage earners say they do not have enough time to be with children, get work done, spend time with spouses, or spend on themselves.
We are in a state of time famine.
Time famine refers to this cultural wide feeling (reality in my opinion) of having too much to do but not enough time to deal with the demands placed upon us.
Many folks in the early-mid 20th century believed emphatically that technology would enable folks to work a fraction of the 40-hour work week. That we’d all have time to center families, community, civic life, hobbies.
That dream back-fired. And why? Racialized capitalism depends on extractive labor practices, it’s rotten at the core --technology wasn’t used to free us, it was used to extract more from us.
...let me quickly respond to my boss's Slack at 8:30pm. Let me shoot off this email to my colleague before dinner or while I am at my kid’s soccer game.
This isn’t a new trend, we can look to the technological advances in the 18th and 19th centuries (industrialization) that poured fuel on enslavement and the oppression of the working factory class.
Today, we’ve been fed the lie that overloaded schedules, constant messages, meetings during the day and “working” at night and using the weekend to catch-up equate to authority or our being indispensable.
We’ve been conditioned not to question the psychological impacts of checking email over the weekend, or why we’re so damn tired all the time, or how come we’ve said for years we were going to volunteer for that thing but we’ve never “found” the time.
We are starving for time.
Ain't enough hot baths or face masks in the world will change it.
This isn’t a personal problem, it’s a systemic one, with roots in white supremacy, capitalism, and colonization.
The time famine we are living in leads to mental health issues such as burnout, anxiety, depression, physical health problems. This is all exacerbated for folks with marginalized identities.
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Branch Manager at The Best Connection
3moLooking Rusty Scott Barczewski 🤣🤣 looks fun though 😊