I think that much of the endless work is a product of a obsession with consumption. Scale back on material needs (buy a smaller home, drive a smaller car, don’t fill your house with so much stuff) and you can scale back on work.

Employees need to strictly enforce their 40 hour work week and set their boundaries firmly from the beginning, make themselves unavailable past certain times, not answering the phone or email on the weekends.

On another note perhaps all those increasing health care costs employers are always complaining about are a direct correlation to these 60+ hour work weeks, 24/7 on call availability, or working/managing folks on different time zone and continents. I fear it is a case of penny wise and pound foolish, companies save money by not hiring extra employees or outsourcing jobs in order to save pennies but are paying pounds in increased health care costs.

My wife and I gave up our mobile phones years ago. We were early adopters of these gadgets – her in the UK and me here. I even had a phone that worked seamlessly on both continents. Getting rid of them was the best thing for us (other than to get married). We have a landline at work and one at home. And if we’re not in either place – then we don’t need to be reached. They never brought any good news anyway!

We don’t take work home either. In fact, if the surf’s up you can bet I’ll be late for work or leaving early. Ask me to tell you how much money was in our checking account two weeks ago and I couldn’t name a number. Ask me about the fantastic waves I caught one morning two weeks ago on a Monday when I should have been at work and I could go on for an hour – one of many days I’ll remember.

Obviously neither of us are destined for the status job or corner office – but we don’t care about that as much as living life to the fullest. We don’t need a posh car or address to be happy. It didn’t take my mother getting ill to make us realize this – it just reinforced our desire to not let life slip by us or get bogged down by things that don’t matter.

I guess sometimes it pays to be a bit of a hippie?

Today far more people are able to do creative work which is not linked to the physical plant of a factory. Like Thomas Edison 100 years ago, people still have to make the decision of when to stop, and when to sleep.

I’ve been struck by two things: Dalton keeps referring to “Getting ahead,” but hasn’t defined what that means. I think we need to look at whether “getting ahead”, once it’s defined, is a myth or not.

He also said that each economy produces the children it needs. Ouch. I do feel that I am at a constant battle with outside forces to get my children to appreciate the simple, tactile stuff–by staying in touch with so much of the outside world, we’re losing contact with the gold standard of nature–something that we should be valuing more as the false economy implodes.

The other day, as I saw my daughter playing a video game on the upper right-hand corner of her laptop while she was watching a WestWing DVD, on her same laptop, as her phone was humming on the endtable, I had a panic. Later, we went out sledding. I’m sure that the snow and the rush of cold air is what she will remember in the future.

Emi Nakazato from Harlem, NYC

With the high unemployment rate why don’t we hire more people so everyone has a reasonable work life? In my own job search, I have often come up with the expectation that a normal work week is 60 hrs (or more). This type of expectation will just lead to social instability and high energy use in an attempt to “keep it all together.” I consider the most progressive employers to be those that give their workers a reasonable work load and expect their employees to rest and renew.

I recently read that 52% of American women over the age of 45 are now unmarried and living alone. This statistic resonates with me because I am in that lonely, heavily pressed group. As well, this group has been “targeted” by marketers as their major revenue source. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

We still have all the same basic human needs that our mothers had and no other way to meet them but to pay for own “services” and “care”. It’s the same stuff our ancestors freely GAVE to one another. Today, for us, one must pay a stranger to “care” or go without.

This phenomenon appears to have been generated, artificially, by the elevation of money and material “stuff” over community and relationships. I did not desire to become another grim statistic, personally, but here we are: divided apart and stuck on our own in a giant, vacuum-like, feudalistic system that utterly devalues life and love.

A solution framed to simply provide more time with the kids doesn’t address a deeper cultural expectation that we are our jobs. It will simply shift expectations away from married professionals and parents to the singles in the office. This can only further frusterate the ability of those who do take apropriate down time to be treated fairly. (It might also tempt a few of us singles to adopt kids simply so we can get a weekend off once in a while.)