Funny how a workday can seem so long and a lifetime so short, eh?

I’m sure many have voiced the same thought before me — though, maybe not so many with the word “eh” in it. (But I digress again.)

When you factor in the amount of time we spend sleeping in our lives, life seems so much shorter than the proverbial three score and ten average.

Subtract the amount of time we spend working and travelling back and forth to our jobs, and we’re not left with a lot of time for leisure activities.

And even then, during our so-called “free time,” many of us spend time working on various projects around the house or elsewhere.

WTF?

How is it that man has enslaved himself to such degrees that he only gets snatches of “free time” throughout his lifetime?

I mean, we could have created a paradise here, far surpassing any Eden models, in which a workweek would be no more than, say, two days.

Instead, the vast majority of us are little more than cattle being herded night and day by the underlings of an elitist group of capitalists who are, no doubt, living high on the hog and getting to enjoy far more leisure time than the rest of us in opulent surroundings.

Yes, we slave so that the elitist few can spend their lives playing.

Will it ever change?

Will capitalism be overthrown and the economic system thrown out with it?

At what point will we work collectively toward creating more leisure time for all of mankind?

Eden, of course, is a statement about man’s innocence and ignorance. It was a paradise because he didn’t know any better, much as many animals of the forest can’t imagine anything else now.

But Eden is also a model held up by later men as a metaphorical paradise that we could knowingly create.

I’m thinking it is an impossible dream, and that man will one day soon have no leisure time at all, because the human species will be extinct.

We seem much closer to wiping ourselves out through war, famine and disease — oh, yes, and man-induced climate change — than we are to creating any sort of paradise on Earth.

But perhaps that is the way it is meant to be in the grander metaphysical scheme of things. Perhaps Earth was never meant to be anything more than a schoolyard where we learn valuable lessons before we can progress to more paradisical planes of existence.

Or perhaps we delude ourselves by thinking there is any meaning at all to our lives.

It seems so cruel that we can question the nature of our existence and, more important, what comes afterward, but we can’t answer the questions definitively.

Who or what is to blame for that? If the answer to that question is “no one” or “nothing” is to blame, do we really want to know that?

Do we want to confirm that life is a one-off, and that everything is ultimately irrelevant?

File this under: Day 5 of My Workweek.

— Jillian

Photo: Thomas Cole’s The Garden of Eden. (Wikimedia Commons)