Life Outside The Workplace

Focusing on just one or two of the individual ways someone is forced to structure their lives around professional work will not give them a full awareness of just how much people are pressured or expected to make work the predominant outward activity of their life.  Beyond the conventional "8-5" or "9-5" working hours, with the mandatory unpaid hour for lunch somewhere around the middle, there is so much that the typical worker is forced to do around their professional schedule instead of the other way around.  For instance, in mornings alone, those who work standard full-time hours in offices might have to bathe, eat, dress, and then drive for up to an hour or more all by a fairly early point in the morning--just to get to work.

Upon finishing the workday, in many cases people have to spend around the same amount of time driving back to their living space, only to cram in health, leisure, or relationship-oriented things to the fleeting hours they have left after devoting the majority of the day to professional labor.  With livable compensation, excellent benefits, and a workplace full of rationalists, some of these things would not be anywhere near as crushing, but in the norms of American capitalism, someone who does not gleefully want to frame their life around work to fit into a work-obsessed culture might be invalidly thought of as irrational or selfish.

What is really irrational and selfish is just how much control some employers can exert over things irrelevant to the success of their workplace, which itself only matters if it is not a den of greed-fueled gratuitous jobs only meant to enrich an undeserving, irrationalistic boss.  How you look, how you dress, when you can eat, what you can eat (people with special diets might need to have more flexible options for cooking or eating), when you can sleep, whether you can reply to messages from friends or family, and when you can see doctors are among the things that many businesses dictate.  At the least, some employers and managers try to dictate whatever their whims would compel them to pretend is under their domain.

How many philosophical discoveries, friendships, marriages, or relationships with God suffer because of an asinine fixation on working for the sake of work, or for the sake of continuing traditions that distract the masses from the deeper aspects of reality?  So many people spend more time with their coworkers than they do with their own closest friends outside of the workplace or their own significant others.  So many people are expected to forfeit free time for the sake of the social construct the workplace amounts to, and to enjoy the opportunity to do so because it delights the fools who think professional work matters except as a means to an end!  Though effort could always sidestep this potential obstacle, this emphasis is one of the greatest modern cultural barriers to more people becoming rationalists.

No one has an excuse for failing to pursue perfect rationalism no matter their professional or relational circumstances since reason is universally accessible due to its inherent veracity, but if it was possible for people to be "justified" in their irrationalism because work occupies so much of their attention (and as a necessary truth of reason, it could not have been the case that this truth was any different), then they would still be in error for not sacrificing work for the sake of philosophical awareness.  However, it does not help people to have to labor, especially under oppressive circumstances, when they have not even discovered or savored things far more foundational and substantial than any kind of work could ever be.