The joy of being underemployed
As opposed to being fully or unemployed. Imagine this dream scenario: a 25(ish)-hour work week, but with a satisfactory salary and a pretty decent quality of life. Or a four-day work week, same conditions. And when I say ‘dream scenario’, I mean it for mere mortals like us – we’re not talking the 1%, the fabulously wealthy, the Bitcoin or Dogecoin millionaires. I’ve been thinking about this recently and I know that it’s not an original idea and with the reading I do I often forget where and when I’ve come across something. I was certain that it was Daniel Kahneman who mentioned this in his masterpiece of behavioural economics, Thinking, Fast and Slow. A simple search turns out I was right. And it was his long-time collaborator Amos Tversky, who played a major role in Kahneman’s 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics, who said it: “[T]he secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” Think about when your best i...