I’m tired of seeing folks young and old having to work their lives away. You were not born to work nor do you live to work. In school you spend hours on end working, then spend more hours at home working to finish additional assignments given to you. In high school you add a job on top of all that work. How much free time are you left with? After school and you’re an adult- how about then? Let’s break this down.
Average school day is 8 hours. For each period there’s class or lunch, and for most of those classes there is homework that you spend anywhere between 30 mins to an hour on. That’s about 11.5-15 hours total now. Add sports or band or any other club that’s an additional 1+ hours depending on practice times/meet-ups. Oh, and can’t forget a good 8 hours of sleep! But, hold on, only young children and adults can be fully rested with 8 hours, teenagers actually need more, however, they don’t have the ‘luxury’ to do so. That’s now 19.5-23 hours NOT including sports or clubs. There’s only 24 hours in a day, meaning if they’re getting the bare minimum of sleep to scrape by that’s 4.5-1 hours they have for sports/clubs. And we all know that’s not how things work out, as older teens tend to have jobs on top of it all and these children and teens are literally losing vital resting time to keep up with it all. That impacts their health, not only physical but mental and emotional as well.
Now for adults. 8 hours for sleep, then hours for work and the average American workday ranges from 8.8-9.4 hours a day. That’s 16.8-17.4 leaving 7.2-6.6 hours. Now, cooking meals or prepping food for the next day can take 1.5-3 hours on average. We’re now at 18.3-20.4 hours taken up by daily living. Now daily cleaning- we’ll say that’s 1.5 hours and errands are 3. Oh, look at that, 22.8-24.9 hours and this is all without having time to care for children or pets.
Do you see what I’m getting at here? There’s no free time. No time to just relax or socialize. That’s roughly 2,749.5 hours annually spent at school and on homework, not including sports or clubs IF you have a 183 day school year. That’s roughly 2,600 hours annually spent at work for average meaning there are people that lose even more time annually to work. There’s no time to live life with all the working and the struggling because let’s be honest here all that working is just to be able to afford to survive. I may suck at math but the fuckin calculator doesn’t lie and this shit ain’t right.
Fun tidbit- minimum wage in 1968 was $1.60 an hour. That’s equivalent to $11.76 today. But what’s today’s minimum wage? $7.25
People young and old are slowly wasting away from overworking for no good fucking reason. People deserve to be able to live their lives and enjoy them, not be chained to work just so they can survive at bare minimum.
