Britian's work - life balance

Have we here in Britain lost sight of what is and isn’t important in our lives? Has modern British life lead us to the point where we are no longer living and are merely just existing?

Currently the average person’s day begins by waking up. You brush your teeth, have some breakfast, kiss someone good bye perhaps, then go to work. You spend 8 hours working, probably sitting fairly stagnant at a desk without much physical movement or exercise. For the majority of people, whilst they don’t hate their jobs, they certainly wouldn’t list it as one of their passions. There are exceptions to this, some people have jobs that are also their hobbies and love doing it, others truly hate their jobs but feel they have no way. It is fair to say that most people are in the middle of being fairly ambivalent.

Once they finish work, they go home, kiss someone hello, make/eat some dinner and watch a little television. By the time this is all done, they rarely have the energy to go out and do anything. As it is they probably have jobs to do in the house whether that is cleaning or paper work.

This goes on from Monday through to Friday. On a Friday or Saturday night, in Britain one of the traditional things to do is to go out on the piss. This is considered great fun, but means you loose half of the next day recovering. Sunday morning generally involves a lie in to recover from the week, and a late night is out of the question given that you have work the next morning.

In Britain we are a time starved people who live for the weekends. Again, I am making generalisation here, you may be reading this thinking what is he talking about. I urge you then to look at out current set up. We have little time to do anything during the week but work and rest. We have so little time, we have in fact built infrastructure to allow us to do normal things quicker. If you’ve ever bought a book or CD on the internet rather than go to the shops because it is quicker and easier you will know what I am talking about. We have no time to interact to meet partners so we have invented email marketing software to allow us to contact multiple people in a very short space of time. We have little time to get to know and bond with our colleagues, so company now run team building events in order get their worker to know each other. Why do they do this though? So that the people are more productive.

We have become a work driven people here in Britain. I’m not saying we should change our ways – but is this really living?