When I was a child, my mother would wash clothes, hang them out on the clothesline to dry, then sprinkle them lightly with water all over again, to make it easier to iron all of the wrinkles out.

My father would mow the lawn with a push mower and trim the hedges with hand clippers.  We would balance our checkbooks and figure our taxes by hand.  Real operators answered telephones, and real checkers rang up your groceries.

Businesses would calculate and keep track of the books, and figure payroll, either by hand or by ka-chunking on a simple mechanical adding machine.  Manufacturing was still true to its root word "manu," meaning "by hand"; mechanized assembly lines were still in their infancy.

Today, machines and technology do a lot of this erstwhile tedious and very time consuming work for us.

Yet, somehow, rather than basking in the easy life that such mechanization had as its guiding dream, we seem to be working longer and harder than ever. 

Even to the most powerful modern computer, this inequality just doesn't compute.

Almost as if to cater to our perceived obligation to keep working harder despite today's remarkable technological and mechanical aid, a large part of our economy consists of a unidirectional work flow: produce, sell, consume, then discard.  We build cities by continually adding on new construction and infrastructure to the perimeters, i.e. sprawl, while leaving the aging cores of our cities to rot.

If we weren't constantly producing new things, buying them, and throwing them away, if we weren't building new neighborhoods and leaving the old ones to decay, where would all our jobs go?  Where would our economy go?

Maybe it's time to actually lighten our economic work life as a result of all these technological developments, instead of finding new ways to make work for ourselves?

If, instead of building things to throw away, we built things to last, to re-use, and to keep for a lifetime, all of our living, industrial, and societal needs could be sustained on a two-day work week.

Perhaps it's time to realize that, in these modern times, there really is less work that needs to be done.