Just before leaving my last full-time teaching gig in 2005, I shot off an email to the head of the charter school organization for which I worked explaining that I was leaving my position as a humanities teacher because I felt the job had become completely unsustainable. I could no longer work the 10- to 12-hour days that it took to get all of the work done while remaining sane and healthy. I had no time for my relationships or for my own creative projects, much less for healthy living.
Honestly, the work usually drove me straight to the liquor bottle on the weekends as a quick and easy way to escape the stress. I could not be a good teacher to my eighth-grade students if I didn’t have the time to take care of myself. I never received a response to my email, but I never regretted sending it.
Rather than returning to full-time employment, I’ve spent the last five years whittling away at my consumption habits, learning to be more self-sufficient in my cooking and food growing and developing a love for bike riding. I have also spent the last few years justifying this decision to myself and others, staving off the guilt that arises when I see my husband get up each morning to go to his 40-plus-hour-a-week job while I sleep in and make my own schedule as a writer and very part-time online instructor. But a few recent books and studies have begun to make me feel that the ongoing process of shortening my workweek in a manner both sustainable and economically feasible is actually part of a 21st-century zeitgeist rather than an idler’s cop-out. Read more here.
