An extra hour a day is, if anything, a temporal tonic that most people deserve — in fact, need.
There is a lament among the chronically busy, a cliché really, that “there aren’t enough hours in the day”. As it turns out, the 24-hour limit isn’t going to be around forever. A study conducted by scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has found that as the Moon drifts away from the Earth, slowly but surely, it will impact the latter’s rotation. In effect, millions of years from now, there will be a 25-hour day. As with most things, those caught up in the grind miss the forest for the trees.
An extra hour a day is, if anything, a temporal tonic that most people deserve — in fact, need. In an era where plutocrats and tech bros speak casually of 70-hour work weeks, when is the worker — whether his collar is blue or white — meant to just be? Even with the more usual eight-hour day, it’s not as though there is a neat division between work and non-work. It’s not just the emails and calls from the overbearing manager. There are children to be taken care of, relationships to be worked on, parents who may need looking after. And as everyone who runs a house knows, there is nary a Sunday when some crucial appliance doesn’t break down and requires either repair or servicing. An extra hour, then, may well be swallowed up. But it need not be.
Long ago, Virginia Woolf wrote, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Perhaps it’s time to add that a woman — and even some men — need an hour to themselves to just be (the pressure to write has its own demons). Of course, the day doesn’t need an extra hour for that. Just a more flexible cult of productivity.
© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
First uploaded on: 08-08-2024 at 07:45 IST
