How Much Should We Work?
“I work 16 hours a day. Is that a problem?” The answer depends on what we count as work, and on who is doing it: the body, or the self. Here is a way to decide how much is right.
“I work 16 hours a day. Is that a problem?”
Most people would say yes, immediately. Sixteen hours sounds like burnout, a neglected family, a body running on coffee. But the answer depends entirely on what we mean by work.
Here is the definition we use: work is every action required to live a fulfilling life. With that in mind, “how much should we work?” becomes a question we can actually answer.
This may sound like a way to justify overwork. It isn’t. Long hours of earning that harm the body or the family are still harmful, whatever we call them.
Two meanings of work
The narrow meaning of work is earning: the hours someone pays you for. The wide meaning is everything a full human life asks of you. Cooking for your family. Teaching a child to read. Mending what is broken. Growing food. Sitting with a friend who is struggling. Thinking something through until you understand it.
Madhyasth Darshan describes labour (श्रम) as the act of giving useful and beautiful value to things, through the body, with skill. Earning money is one way of doing that. It is far from the only one.
We have built a world that mostly trains the narrow meaning. We spend years preparing children to make a living. How much time do we spend helping them understand living?
Who is working: the body or the self?
Madhyasth Darshan describes a human being as two things together: the body, and the self (जीवन) that runs it and keeps it alive. The self is the one that hopes, thinks, decides and understands. The body is its instrument.
Each has its own needs. The body needs food, rest, movement and care, and its needs are limited. You can count them. The self needs understanding and happiness, and no amount of food or rest can supply those.
Much of our tiredness comes from mixing the two up. We feed the body when the self is hungry for meaning, and we push the self to keep going when the body needs to stop. Madhyasth Darshan describes freedom from this confusion very simply: knowing the self as the self, and the body as the body.
Step 1: Count all your work, not just paid hours
Write down a normal day, hour by hour. Then mark each item with one of three letters: L if it was required to live a fulfilling life, B if it was something your body needed, N if it was neither.
Most people find a lot of L they never called work, some B they skipped, and more N than they expected. The Ns are usually where the hours went that we thought we didn’t have.
Step 2: Know how much earning is enough
Earning is the part of work that most easily grows without limit, because “more” never arrives on its own. It needs a number. Work out what your family actually needs for a year, as we describe in How to Calculate Enough for a Family, and you can work out roughly how many hours of earning that takes.
Hours beyond that are a choice. They may be a good choice: to produce a surplus to share, or because the work itself is meaningful. But they are no longer a necessity, and knowing that changes how they feel.
“Health is a body fit to demonstrate what you understand.”
Step 3: Give the body what it needs
If the body is the self’s instrument, then health is not an end in itself. It is not just the absence of illness, and it is certainly not fitness for display. It is what lets the self show, in action, what it has understood.
Madhyasth Darshan describes a healthy body as one fit to express and demonstrate understanding in the life we share with others. So sleep, food, movement and rest go into the day first, not into whatever is left over. Rest is not time stolen from work. It is part of the work, because it keeps the instrument fit for what the self needs to do. Overwork that breaks the body isn’t more work. It is less, delivered later.
Step 4: Check whether the work is yours
The last test is not about hours at all. Is this work something you understand the purpose of, and agree with? Or is it work you do only because you haven’t yet asked?
Many of us came to K4M2A from other work, to understand one thing properly. Together, it has turned out to be the work that is truly ours to do. That is perhaps the best test of any work: not how many hours it takes, but whether it is yours.
So, is sixteen hours a problem?
If those sixteen hours are all earning, beyond what the family needs, and the body and the family are paying for them, then yes.
But if the sixteen hours include the cooking, the teaching, the thinking, the conversations, the care for the body and the people around you, then it isn’t a long working day. It is just a full life. The problem was never only the number. It was a definition of work so narrow that most of living fell outside it.
Two cautions. A full life also needs rest, play and time that doesn’t have to justify itself as useful, and calling everything work shouldn’t crowd that out. And many people work long hours because they have no choice: on shifts, in more than one job, or caring for someone. For them the useful question is less what to call the hours than what would lighten them, and who could help.
And the planet?
When work means only earning, more work usually means more production and more consumption, whether or not anyone needed it. A great deal of what the earth gives up goes into things made to keep the earning going.
The wide meaning of work changes that. Cooking, mending, teaching, growing food and caring for one another are among the most valuable work there is, and most of them ask very little of the planet. Labour as Madhyasth Darshan describes it, giving useful and beautiful value to things, points the same way: work judged by what it adds to living, not by how much it turns over.
A protocol to try
Tonight, write down today’s activities, hour by hour. Mark L for an activity that contributed to a fulfilling life, B for bodily needs such as sleep or food, and N for neither. Activities may fit more than one letter. Use the record to notice patterns, not to judge every hour as productive or wasted.
Then answer one question: if you knew your family already had enough, which hours would you keep, and which would you give to something else?
Limitations
- For many people long hours are a necessity, not a choice, and a wider definition of work doesn’t change their situation.
- Calling everything work could make even rest feel like a task.
- The distinction between the self and the body comes from Madhyasth Darshan. Readers from other traditions may understand the self differently.
References
- Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, श्रम (labour), p. 222
- Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, जीवन (the self), p. 77
- Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, शरीर में जीवन्तता, p. 218
- Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, जीवन मुक्ति, p. 79
- Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, शरीर स्वस्थता (health), p. 218
