The Rat Race: The American Dream-Work Until You Die

Editor: Vladimir Bajic | Tactical Investor

The Rat Race

Forcing staff to start work before 10 am is making employees ill, exhausted and stressed, an Oxford University researcher has claimed.

Before the age of 55, the circadian rhythms of adults are completely out of sync with normal nine-to-five working hours, posing a “serious threat” to performance, mood and mental health.

Dr Paul Kelley, of Oxford University, said there was a need for a huge societal change to move work and school starting times to fit with the natural body clock of humans.

Experiments studying circadian rhythms have shown that the average 10-year-old will not fully focus on academic work before 8.30 am. Similarly, a 16-year-old should start at 10 am for best results and university students should start at 11 am. Dr Kelley believes simply moving school times could raise grades by 10 per cent. He was formerly a headteacher and he changed the school start time from 8.30 am to 10 am and saw the number of top grades rise by 19 per cent.

American Dream or The Rat Race

Similarly, companies who force employees to start work earlier are likely to be hurting their output, while storing up health problems.

“This is a huge society issue,” Kelley told the British Science Festival in Bradford. “Staff should start at 10 am. You don’t get back to (the 9 am) starting point until 55.”

“Staff are usually sleep-deprived. We’ve got a sleep-deprived society. It is hugely damaging on the body’s systems because you are affecting physical emotional and performance systems in the body.

“Your liver and your heart have different patterns and you’re asking them to shift two or three hours. This is an international issue. Everybody is suffering and they don’t have to. Full Story

The Rat Race: Why 9 to 5 is Bad

A 9 to 5 Job Destroys Your Most Precious Asset: Time

Time=Life.

Time is your most precious asset. At a 9 to 5 job, time is a liability, not an asset.

Unlike money, time is not a renewable resource. When you run out of your time on the earth, you die. Nobody ever managed to escape from this reality. But, it’s a human weakness to act as if our time on earth is unlimited and corporations exploit this weakness to the end.

You Constantly Worry About Losing Your Job

A myriad of reasons can cause you to lose your job.

A bad performance review, an economic recession, upsetting the wrong people, your skills going obsolete, your line of work getting abolished due to automation and so on. You’re expected to put your heart and soul into a job where you can be fired for reasons completely out of your control.

You Will Never Get Rich or Retire Early by a 9 to 5 Job

A 9 to 5 job is not designed to make you rich. You work to make your boss rich.

It’s a law of economics that the entrepreneur gets all the profits and the worker gets survival wage. You can acquire degrees and skills to increase your salary beyond survival wage, but that doesn’t get you too far. When the system is designed to pay you survival wage, there’s only so much you can do about it.

A 9 to 5 Job Reduces You to a Cog

A corporation never wants to depend on individuals because this makes the business vulnerable to the whims of the employees. Even the CEO of the company is expendable.

No matter how hard you work, they don’t want you to be indispensable. You can be easily replaced, and you know it. Full Story

Work Smarter Instead of Working Longer

Time has become a measure for productivity because it’s an easy metric to measure. We constantly try to jam in more hours during the day because we feel like we accomplished something by the end.
But time is a vanity metric when it comes to measuring productivity.

In today’s creative economy, how long we work per day isn’t what is important. It’s what you do with the time you have.
According to Sara Robinson, referring to various studies done by businesses, universities, and industry associations:
“On average, you get no more widgets out of a 10-hour day than you do out of an eight-hour day… [In fact], every hour you work beyond 40 actually makes you less effective and productive over both the short and the long haul” Full Story