WTF is going on?
A pertinent question considering the world we’re living in
News from the work front is that one day a week is optimal for personal happiness. The University of Cambridge says it is so.
It has been running an “employment dosage” project premised on the idea that many psychological studies have shown that for “most people in most jobs, paid employment generates higher levels of physical health, mental health and wellbeing than unemployment”.
Given the downsides of abject poverty, they may be onto something.
But how much work is enough? Professor Brandon Burchell, lead on the project, says the results are in and working more than one day a week is bad for your happiness outcomes.
That will delight companies like PwC, which have recently introduced software that can track how much time workers spend away from their screens.
Now that the pandemic has made working from home an unavoidable reality for so many of us, many companies suspect that people are spending more time on maximising their “happiness” quotient than on the bottom line.
Obviously PwC’s worker bees’ happiness is front of mind, which is why they want to monitor how much time they’re spending in front of their computers. Don’t want to tip the scales or anything.
In this vein many companies have introduced key-stroke technology to monitor happiness. And workers are rising to the occasion with smart office hacks involving contraptions like empty coffee mugs that press down on the keys — to ensure constant and regular stroking of the capitalist industrial complex.
Look, the boundaries between home and work have been blurring for a while. I blame the tech start-ups. In their bid for unicorn status they set the tone — and living with your colleagues all bunkered down in one house 24/7 became a thing. Perhaps the thing that promised the billions. And on the plus side you don’t pay rent, because you never really leave the office. A perk.
It certainly ensures that your life is your work and your work is your life. It puts a new spin on concepts like “work wife” and “work husband” when your colleagues are your roomies and you even plan your vacations together.
Makes the Google campus look like amateur hour. And what, I wonder, would Elon Musk — whose newly minted, totallywithout-irony working title is “TechnoKing” (his CFO is rebranded as “Coin Master”) — say about the one-day-a-week work dose?
Cambridge University is doing the research because apparently robots and AI are going to take our day jobs. But the “TechnoKing”, who is working on the AI takeover night and day and often clocks in for 24-hour working shifts, may have a solution for this work/life balance thing.
Wild horses.
They are a work perk at his Nevada Tesla plant. “Come work at the biggest & and most advanced factory on Earth! Located by a river near the beautiful Sierra Nevada mountains with wild horses roaming free,” the TechnoKing wrote on Twitter.
And I can see the benefits.
Wild horses, albeit seen from the distance of your work cell, are definitely a visual improvement on the nets — the ones used to catch the workers when they jump, like the handy ones they’ve have apparently installed at the Apple factories in China.