Take a look at this picture. It's the

Ford assembly line in 1913. These

workers lined up in rows placing nuts

and bolts on wheels were working 12

hours a day. 12 hours a day standing in

the same spot repeating the same

monotonous task. Who wouldn't lose their

mind doing that? Well, it turns out a

lot of them actually did. Before 1926,

reports of Ford assembly line workers

getting injured and in the most severe

cases dying were not uncommon. Henry

Ford needed a way to keep his workers

productive without killing them. After

all, dead people can't build cars. So

that year he introduced the 40-hour work

week, an 8 hours a day, 5 days a week

schedule designed to give his employees

enough time to recover and keep their

cognitive faculties on the job. For a

century, the 40-hour work week has

remained the norm in many developed

countries across the globe. All based on

the idea of a single CEO of a car

manufacturing company. And even though

technology has continued to make our

work ever more efficient, we've only

added more hours. To let the 40-hour

work week persist in the present day is

a recipe for angry workers and for

business owners, less profit. Yes,

that's right. Not more profit, less. So

why are we still following this outdated

protocol? Why aren't we working 30 or

even 20 hours a week like some

economists predicted over a century ago?

And what are the better alternatives we

need to start establishing? Ah, the

Industrial Revolution. The end of many

ancient problems, but the start of just

about every modern one. Around 1870, at

the dawn of the Second Industrial

Revolution, a new household standard was

growing. One income, one homemaker.

We've all heard the story before. The

husband goes into the office for 8 hours

while the wife stays home and cooks,

cleans, and runs other necessary errands

to keep everything running like a

well-oiled machine. The 40-hour work

week was established during a time when

this was the norm, but the world we live

in today follows a much different

standard. Among employed US adults aged

25 to 64 who are married, the total

amount of paid work between both

partners amounts to 83 hours. That

leaves 12 hours per week for caregiving

and only 7 hours for housework, which

women still do the majority of. Now,

common sense would tell you that this

surge in paid work among married couples

would result in an economy where

everyone has more than enough money to

have their basic needs met, but that has

been anything but the case. Families now

contribute far more paid labor than the

households the 40-hour work week was

originally designed around. Yet, instead

of translating into a ton of more

leisure, much of the financial advantage

of that second income has been offset by

rising costs in housing, child care,

health care, and education. This seems

totally backwards. If we're producing

more than ever before, and families are

putting in more paid work than when the

40-hour work week was built around,

shouldn't we have eventually gotten to

the point where we needed to work less?

Well, there was actually a time when the

United States tried to make that happen.

In 1933, Senator Hugo Black and

Representative William Connery

introduced the Black-Connery bill,

proposing a mandated 30-hour work week

to combat Great Depression-era

unemployment. The Senate passed Black's

30-hour work week bill 53 to 30 in a

bipartisan vote. Supporters claimed it

would create 6 million jobs. It was

expected to pass the House and Secretary

of Labor Frances Perkins was publicly

supportive, but business leaders were

not. According to historian Benjamin

Hunnicutt in his book Work Without End,

instead of looking at the increase in

leisure as inevitable or as potentially

beneficial, they feared that if workers

got a taste of a 30-hour work week, they

would never want to go back and the law

would become permanent. The wealthiest

business owners held emergency meetings

in Chicago and Philadelphia, and

Perkins, who also supported a federal

minimum wage, was flooded with messages

of opposition. This eventually led to

President Roosevelt changing his mind

about the proposed bill, and support

from others for the 30-hour work week

collapsed. Roosevelt was more interested

in building out a recovery plan using

public works like dams, bridges,

hospitals, and schools to supply

employment, stabilize buying power, and

help revive the economy. So, what did he

do? He basically said, "Hey guys, I know

you don't want a federally mandated

30-hour workweek, so let's compromise."

That compromise eventually became the

Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which

banned most child labor, established a

federal minimum wage, and made 40 hours

the national benchmark. Now, here's

what's really fascinating. 40 hours

isn't even a scientifically optimal

number. Research consistently shows that

humans can maintain 3 to 4 hours of

cognitive focus per day. After that, our

cognitive faculties start getting

progressively worse. So, how did this

arbitrary number stay unquestioned for

so damn long? The answer has everything

to do with what is called the leisure

scare. Finding a job that actually

respects your time and aligns with the

impact you want to make can feel

daunting right now. Whether it's ghost

jobs or 50-plus hours a week, it's as if

these companies hate the idea of you

having a life outside work. If you're

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coaching session. The dominant cultural

narrative of work in America revolves

around the Puritan or Protestant work

ethic. Emerging from the teachings of

reformers such as Martin Luther and John

Calvin, this philosophy held that work

was a moral and even spiritual

obligation. Labor was seen as a way of

honoring God, while discipline,

diligence, and careful stewardship of

one's earning were viewed as a virtuous

way of living. These beliefs were

especially influential among the

Puritans who settled in North America

and helped shape early American

attitudes towards work. In the early

20th century, sociologist Max Weber

argued that this cultural mindset played

a major role in the rise of modern

capitalism. So, rather than treating

work as something to minimize,

Protestant societies came to regard hard

work as a virtue in itself. And when

economists started to predict a future

in which Americans could no longer

exercise this virtue with as many hours

in a day, business owners and political

scientists started to panic. Most

famously, in 1930, British economist

John Maynard Keynes gave a lecture in

Madrid about the future of work. John

Keynes believed that by 2030, humanity's

greatest challenge would no longer be

producing enough wealth, but figuring

out how to spend an abundance of free

time. Man, if only. Assuming governments

avoided major policy failures, he

predicted that living standards in the

West would rise to at least four times

their 1930 level within a century. With

technological progress driving

extraordinary gains in productivity,

Keynes expected the average person to

need only about 15 hours of work each

week to maintain a comfortable standard

of living. But once we got to 1960,

optimism about a future filled with

leisure began to give way to unease.

Some scholars started wondering whether

people would know what to do with so

much unstructured time. Pulitzer

Prize-winning political scientist

Sebastian de Grazia expressed that

concern in an interview with the

Associated Press, warning, quote, "There

is reason to fear that free time, forced

free time, will bring on the restless

tick of boredom, idleness, immorality,

and increased personal violence." A

decade later, the US Interior Department

echoed a similar sentiment, stating in a

1974 report that leisure, thought by

many to be the epitome of paradise, may

well become the most perplexing problem

of the future. That was the leisure

scare, the mid-20th century anxiety that

automation would give Americans too much

free time. As I was doing this research,

I kept wondering why. Like, what's the

real reason why political scientists and

economists would be scared if people had

more free time. You can disagree with me

here, but I believe they subconsciously

knew deep down that more free time would

lead to Americans becoming more than

just consumers. And it turns out some

economists and sociologists thought the

same thing. In her book, The Overspent

American, Juliet B. Schor writes about

the insidious cycle of work and spend in

America. Here's what it looks like.

Businesses continue producing an endless

stream of goods that depend on people

buying them. Advertising fuels demand by

promising that each new purchase will

bring greater satisfaction or

fulfillment. Many households take on

debt to afford things that quickly

become ordinary, leaving them with

larger monthly payments and a greater

need to keep working. As the excitement

of each purchase fades, another product

promises to fill the gap, and the cycle

begins all over again. Additionally,

Schor writes, "Many potentially

satisfying leisure skills are off-limits

because they take too much time.

Participating in community theater,

seriously taking up a sport or a musical

instrument, or getting involved with a

church or community organization." This

is something I touched upon in my video

about why Gen Z doesn't have any

hobbies. There is a serious time

commitment to require to actually become

skillful in a certain hobby or spend

enough time around people doing

something in order to develop

relationships with them. Filling every

ounce of free time with a consumerist

activity is the easiest and most

frictionless way to make sure you are

never bored, which a lot of us are

subconsciously afraid to do, partly

because that's what this Protestant

culture ingrained into our thinking, but

also partly because being alone with

yourself and facing the looming

certainty that you actually have no idea

who you are or what you want to do

outside of work is terrifying. So, what

do we do to hide from this fact? We talk

about leisure as a waste of time.

>> STOP WASTING TIME. Urgency kills. That's

how you'll get paid.

>> We promote hustling 24/7.

>> Let me tell you what, when you work for

yourself, there's no Christmas [music]

and no Easter. There's none of

that. You work for yourself.

>> We make ridiculous claims like this.

>> Slaves worked all the hours they were

awake for their entire lives.

In American history, in Egyptian

history, in the rest of the world that

had slaves, which is most of the world

at some some biblical point.

I think like if they can do it, so can

I.

>> And all a lot of Gen Z can do by now is

just roll their eyes at this type of

because by now we understand how

insane it is to be living in a system

like this. To have basic tasks done so

quickly in a modern office setting that

most people just sit around for several

hours towards the end of the day, but to

have your boss still insist you need to

be there for that many hours because it

looks good on a time sheet is absurd.

According to Microsoft's 2024 Work Trend

Index, the average knowledge worker now

spends 60% of their time communicating

through meetings, email, and chat, and

only 40% creating with 68% saying they

don't have enough uninterrupted focus to

do meaningful work. To think we will all

become immoral, ill-behaved degenerates

if we have more leisure time is

statistically false. And to prove it, we

can now propose what the future could

look like if we break away from this

flawed system. Imagine if you were able

to design your own schedule with certain

restrictions that your organization

sets. That's the idea of flex time, a

flexible hour schedule where employees

choose their start and end times, work

remotely, or structure their days around

their own peak performance hours rather

than an arbitrary organizational norm.

Everyone has different hours during the

day when they work best, and everyone

has different responsibilities outside

of work that take place at different

points during the day. Flex time allows

them the freedom that leads to the

employee making their best contribution,

making both them and their employer

happier. Research consistently links

flexible scheduling to higher

engagement, lower absenteeism, and

improved retention. However, I will say

that flex time can cause coordination

issues and in jobs that require mutual

decision-making and collaboration, this

type of system could get very bad very

quick. So, that is why in most cases the

best option is to just simply reduce

hours to a 32-hour work week. A 32-hour

work week involves the same 8-hour a day

structure, but with an entire day taken

out of it. So, workers would get a 3-day

weekend instead of just two. And the

evidence for the effectiveness of

something like this is overwhelming.

Across 245 organizations that adopted a

32-hour 4-day schedule without reducing

pay, companies saw higher profits, lower

employee turnover, and significant

improvements in burnout, stress,

anxiety, and overall physical and mental

well-being. Microsoft Japan observed

similar results, reporting a 40% jump in

productivity after moving roughly 2,300

employees to a 4-day work week with no

reduction in salary. Another anecdote

comes from Iceland. Iceland moved a

significant portion of its entire

workforce into shortened week pilots and

found that productivity and service

provision either maintained or improved.

Roughly 86% of Iceland's working

population has since either moved to

shorter hours or gained the right to do

so. These findings suggest that shorter

work weeks succeed because they strip

away much of the unnecessary busy work

that consumes the modern work day, while

giving employees enough time to recover,

think more clearly, and ultimately

produce higher quality work. But, I

think that in America, it would take

more than just a change in sheer hours

employees work per week to start feeling

the difference of less work. We would

have to entirely restructure the way our

culture views work. We would have to see

leisure as a necessary condition of

culture rather than a barrier to it. And

that's exactly what Josef Pieper argues

in his book Leisure, the Basis of

Culture. In his book, Pieper posits that

the real purpose of work is leisure. If

he were alive today, Pieper would

believe that our total work culture,

that is working just to work more and

working even when we're not working

through some other devices, is a form of

spiritual death. He believed that this

whole idea in our culture that knowledge

and wisdom can only be gained through

taxing hard work is false. He writes,

"The inmost significance of the

exaggerated value which is set upon hard

work appears to be this. Man seems to

mistrust everything that is effortless.

He can only enjoy with a good conscience

what he has acquired with toil and

trouble. He refused to have anything as

a gift." Instead, Pieper thinks that it

is precisely in those moments of leisure

that we connect to the highest forms of

knowledge and go on to produce some of

our best cultural works. In other words,

when we give our minds the space to

wander, to ponder, to be bored, that is

when we course correct to make sure

we're heading towards a future that is

beneficial for the most amount of

people. Then he supports an idea I

brought up earlier. Elites and business

owners would be terrified to lessen

working hours because then human beings

would have the opportunity to actualize

their own unique interests. In his most

quoted line, he states, "Leisure is only

possible when we are at one with

ourselves." We tend to overwork as a

means of self-escape, as a way of trying

to justify our existence. So, like most

modern problems, the problem of having

an unnecessary 40-hour work week still

persists because the people in power are

projecting their fear of having no

identity outside of their work onto the

general populace. What I love about Gen

Z is how much we rebuke the outdated

ideas of the old world that are leading

to the immense inequality we're seeing

right now. And I truly believe the more

that we start to raise awareness on just

how broken the work culture is, the more

motivated we will be to take action and

start implementing the changes we want

to see. Before you go, I want to leave

you with one final question. If your job

disappeared tomorrow,

who would you be?

Thank you very much for watching this

video. If you enjoyed this video, you'll

probably like my video on the burnout

epidemic and why nobody wants to work

anymore. That goes more into burnout and

what we're doing with those hours and

why it doesn't make any sense. So, check

that out right here. And now I'm heading

out. Thank you for watching till the

end. Goodbye.