Essay 1

Less hours for work, more time on Earth: Why a four-day working week is good for you

(https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/healthy-living/four-day-working-week-less-hours-good-healthy-a9242321.html)

Many people around the world experience chronic fatigue from working or studying five or six days a week. People forget about importance of having a rest and getting enough hours of sleep, and put relationships and care of their health on hold due to lack of free time. From my point of view, this is a significant problem of our time. That is why this article in the Guardian caught my attention. In my essay I would like to give some arguments for a four-day working week.

First of all, reducing the amount of work hours might lead to increasing people’s productivity. Constant workload and stress cause apathy and depression. People can only dream about the rest, making their work in a careless manner and having no desire to grow professionally. Also a fatigue from too much work can cause poor sleep and many diseases such as heart disease and diabetes, as Steve Taylor, an author of the article, notes. 

The next argument is that a person needs to develop himself not only in a professional way, and it obviously requires time. People need to have relationships, make families and even have children. Beside that people need to have some hobbies to make their lives more meaningful.

Finally, people in their historical development have never worked as many hours as in the last few centuries. Modern people have created a comfortable world which is full of technologies, but we are in a kind of the trap of progress nowadays. We must constantly work and develop ourselves due to be better than others in a professional way and earn enough money.

                To sum up, the idea of a four-day working week seems to me a good solution to the problem of chronic fatigue from work.