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Thought for the day - 26/08/2013 - Rev Professor David Wilkinson

Thought for the day with Rev Professor David Wilkinson

Good morning. While the cause of the tragic death of Mortiz Erhardt, an intern at Merrill Lynch, is not currently known, it's led to the bank launching a review of working conditions for junior staff amid concerns about the culture of overwork. How much work can you do without a break? While interns may be particularly driven by and susceptible to the hope of job offers with top salaries, there's a deeper question of how today's culture impacts more widely on work/life balance.

In the early 1980s, I remember attending a conference where a speaker predicted that technology would increase human productivity to such an extent that the problem of the 21st century would be too much leisure. Yet globalisation, the digital environment and the demands of growth and recession have contributed to a much more complex culture where work and the pressure to achieve can take over the whole of life.

Knowing that my deluge of emails never stops, and people expect immediate answers, I find that even on holiday there is the temptation to try and reduce their number by the time that I'm officially back in the office.

Now to adapt a quote from Doug Larsen, if all the cars in the UK were placed end to end, it would probably be a Bank Holiday. Yet days such as today were created in 1871, when they were recognised in an Act of Parliament authored by politician and banker Sir John Lubbock. People were so grateful for the breathing spaces and breaks from the routine of work that in England some called them St Lubbock's Days.

Breathing spaces of holidays and rest seem to me to be important in the rhythm of human life. Within the Genesis story of the creation of the world, it is surprising that on the seventh day God rested and indeed blesses the day, as He normally blesses living things. Biblical scholars point out that God's blessing gives fruitfulness and therefore the meaning here is to associate rest and fruitfulness...

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3 minutes