A study published by Solitaire Bliss in mid-January revealed the best and worst states for work-life balance, giving spoiled westerners their latest thing to complain about.
While the study makes a very compelling argument in favor of a work-life balance that favors the life portion, it only takes a few seconds to realize how utterly stupid and spoiled we’ve become as a society. I wanted to go off about how difficult life has been for Americans until maybe as recently as the last 30 years, but my Editor-in-Chief Geoffrey Ingersoll put it far better than I ever could have.
“I gotta be honest, I really think all this concern over ‘work life balance’ is a signal our society has hit its peak and will soon be on the decline. At no other time and place in human history has our species been required to do so little to survive, and yet here we are, discussing ways to maximize the time we spend gabbing with friends over bottomless mimosas, framing the perfect Instagram story, and planning dinner parties,” he argued. “After 100,000 years of dying somewhere around 40, I guess we deserve it, but honestly, it’s the lack of perspective that annoys me most; 25-year-olds who think they deserve 80k a year to work from home 20 hours a week. It’s highly, highly annoying,” he noted.
I couldn’t agree more with Ingersoll’s perspective. Go and watch just one episode of “1923” and you’ll see how far we’ve come in the last hundred years. The fact we just automatically take at least one or two days off per week, plus a bunch of random national holidays, proves we’re more spoiled than any time in history.
To add what little I can to Ingersoll’s borderline poetic commentary, I must also note that people complaining about work proves we are in a state of moral and ethical decline. (RELATED: Dear Kay: I Watched ‘Ancient Apocalypse’ And Now I’m Scared We’re Going To Die Before 2025)
We are a society that is fed by hands we’ll never touch. We’re clothed by children enslaved in the developing world. If we want anything, all we have to do is open an app on our phones and order it directly to our home.
If anything, our decline will come when these external forces for our modernity collapse. Anyone in 2023 who wants more time off to relax instead of ensuring they have complete self-sustainability is sure to become the food for any future apocalypse.