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Work/Life: What If They Paid Us To Be Less Busy?

• So Delta and Northwest merge, and Arby’s is buying Wendy’s.  JPMorgan bails out Bear Stearns and a Brazilian sugar company has purchased ExxonMobil.   It’s hard to say what the advantages to the consumer will be.  In the first case, perhaps more leg room in the waiting area (which is where we spend most of our time during flying now anyway), in the second, maybe chili with roast beef gravy.  But the main point here is that one group of people, having seen another group of people failing and troubled, swallows up that other group of people in the hopes that, together, they can operate more efficiently.  Well, if this doesn’t point up a missed opportunity to the American family, I don’t know what does.  It is time for Life to finally step up and merge aggressively with Work.  A hostile takeover, if need be. 
• Money is a language the work-obsessed understand.  Raising enough for Life to overthrow Work will not happen overnight, but look at how much Obama generated off his Website.  There is nothing that can match the determination of those who are fed up with the workaholic in their lives and are willing to plunk down a few bucks to make it stop.  So, let’s say millions of concerned citizens eventually raise 100 million dollars for their hostile Life/Work takeover.  Initially, it would have to be parsed out among those families determined to be the most deserving (a variety of criteria for these first test subjects will apply; everything from hours spent holding dinner to amount of times the overworked person in their life has had to rely on name tags to remember the names of their own family).  Each family will be given 500 thousand dollars to essentially “buy back” their never-present loved one for a one-year period. 
• No longer will excuses such as “but I only work this hard for you” be able to fly.  It can hardly be a valid reason not to spend time with one’s family if, indeed, it is now the family themselves who are paying the salary.   Overtime, dinner meetings and business trips will take on a whole new meaning, as each will now apply to the person’s new job—that of being around, enjoying and appreciating his or her loved ones. 
• Basically, the person who works too much becomes the equivalent of the struggling company that is increasingly irrelevant and can no longer gain the proper foothold in their chosen field. The family, then, acts as the benevolent bailer-outer, ushering in a new era of success for both parties.  Life operates more efficiently because it has taken the best qualities of the company it has acquired and used them to increase its own efficiency.  And Work is happy because it is being paid to labor toward something more important and meaningful.  
• I think it is time to start fundraising for this revolutionary idea.  How much you got on ya?