Are We Giving Up Too Easily? by Genevieve Fosa
Fear is not the only thing that keeps us from performing well. Often it is simple fatigue. As Americans, those of us who hold jobs, find ourselves working more hours than people in any other first world country. Yet we know that people who get enough rest, and who do not routinely push themselves to Work beyond their limits work more efficiently.
And still no matter what we do, whether we are working for someone else, or attempting to maintain businesses of our own, the push to work long hours is impossible to ignore. For most of us, the forty-hour week is little more than a dream of the past. Firms have paired down the numbers of their employees, compelling those who are left to do two to three times the amount of work employees were expected to do twenty to thirty years ago. Our living expenses are so high that people are required to work two and sometimes three jobs, just to be able to pay their rent and utilities. Rent control has been phased out in nearly every city across this nation.
So, how do we cut back on the sheer numbers of hours we are expected to be productive? Many of us have been working on treadmills for years, and if we are afraid of anything when we consider trying a new job, or building up our own business, we are afraid of increasing the load we carry on our respective treadmills ranks high among our fears.
Meditation, learning how to control stress, eating nutritious foods and getting plenty of good exercise all help to keep us fit, so that we can deal with those stresses. But what can we do to actually change our work environments?
Learning to say no to demands made on our time and resources is something each of us must do individually in order to maintain a balance that is healthful for us, both mentally and physically. But few things have ever been accomplished by people working entirely alone. If it takes a committee to organize a simple picnic for your church, how many people would it take to organize good changes where you work? How many people had to join those early labor unions in this country, and what did those people have to do, in order to win the right to an eight-hour work day, and a forty-hour work week? This is history we need to know, history we could all learn from. Why are we so meek about letting go of those rights that our grandparents and great-grandparents fought so hard to win for us? Is it because we simply don’t know how hard they had to fight for those rights?