unit 4, Pg 114, Yooran Kim (200903992)

Key to work less and more leisure 200903992 Yooran Kim   'We buy more, but enjoy it less. More conveniences, but less time.             More experts, but more problems. More medicine, but less wellness. We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We've learned how to make a living, but not a life. We've added years to life, not life to years. More leisure, but less fun.' This is the excerpt from the poetry 'The paradox of our time in history' by Jeff Dixon. It shows how different we are now from the past. No one can deny that we now have more timesaving devices in our homes. So are we working less and having more fun? It makes our life convenient and better in many ways so that we can work less and have more leisure time. I guess most people would not want to work more than they have to even though they like what they do. Actually many people want to work less except few. If we have more time to spend for our selves and our families, the life would not be the same as it was. You will be able to find the reason you are in this world. But the problem is we're not really feeling that we work less and have more leisure time. Have you ever wondered why? Because using time is relative. Some people might say that people today are working harder and longer. I don't agree with that. The only reason they felt that way is because they take everything for granted. Now we have very many 'smart devices' that shorten the time we have to use to do the work. We take them for granted and manage our time based on that. This is causing the feeling that we have less time than we actually do. For example, we have a computer, so we can buy stuffs in online, or can send a card or e-mails to our friends. All those stuffs would have taken us so many time if we were in the past. You have write down your message on the letter, and you have go to the post office to mail it. To reply back, you have to wait several days until your letter arrives to your friend and her letter arrives to you back. But these days, you can just type and click. You can reply right back even few minutes later if your friend checked it. So you can send a lot of short e-mails that does not really necessary which you would have never done if you were in the past. But nowadays, you can even sue a person on the Internet. Cheaper and easier means you would do it a lot even though it's not necessary. People now and back then have same 24 hours. Again, I can't say we work harder than the people in the past. Maybe it is true that we do more work in quantity in shorter time.  Today we can go some place that would take 2 days for walk in one hour. We have  cars, airplanes, and lots of other vehicles. As time zone gets wider, our range of activity becomes wider, too. It means we can care more than we could in the past. It means we have to put more stuff in our plan, the list to do. Also, lots of fast interaction devices make us anticipate much faster respond. For example, there are few people who don't have a cell phone these days. Some studies show that over a half of students are addicted in cell phone and many people feel nervous if they don't have cell phone with them. You can get anything you want right now with a small thing in you hand. It certainly shortened your time to be wasted, but if you can't use it wisely, you can't enjoy the more time you've got from using the convenient devices. There were few examples I pointed about why people feel they work harder and longer even though they have timesaving devices. It is true that those time devices save our time, but we definitely have problems using them wisely and appreciating the time we've got more from using those devices. Those devices offer us more convenient life style and more time that we can use for leisure. It is important not to take them for grant and waste the time. Also if you avoid being addicted in fast interaction, so you could feel the moment you've got, you will be appreciate that you work less and have more leisure time.