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Imagine
(slrpnk.net)
“Imagine if we worked less. Imagine if we walked around our communities, talked to our neighbors, spent time in nature, played. Imagine if we could read, write, fall in love, without that nagging feeling of ‘needing to do something’; imagine if your life was your own.”
If you cut out consumerism, this is entirly possible with modern technology. Even better, if you are from a rich country, it is possible to do this today, if you are willing to be unconventional. The key to this is to lower your expenses drasticly and have or had a well paying skill(you can do it with investments as well). This works as we did have pretty good economic growth in terms of efficency since decades. So if you are fine with a US 1960s lifestyle the average US-American could lower their spednign by 2/3s. Obviously most of the growth went to the upper class, but it showswhat is possible. Even crazier GDP and primary energy consumption are fairly closely linked. Currently 19% of US primary energy come from low carbon sources. So if you would lower US GDP by 2/3 you end up with a third of energy consumption. If you are able to keep all low energy sources running and are reduce energy consumption by 2/3 you end up lowering fossil fuels cosnumption by over 80%. This is more or less true for all high income economies, but obviously requires a lot of planning on a national scale. On a personal scale it is certainly possible to have more free time, if you go for it.
Wage slavery is the only thing preventing the utopia. Way of life is only half the problem. If you take down consumerism and bullshit jobs you can probably have a current working society for 2 or 3 days of work per weak.
An important thing to note is that women are many more to work now than in the 60s, and laundry machine, washing machines etc saved a lot of time taking care of the house.
But today on a personal scale? You need to be rich compared to society for the initial investment, and you'll live exploiting the work of other people. This way of life doesn't scale.
Building up and investment and living of it, is basicly retirment and it is done all over the place. Government run retirment schemes are pretty common around the world and basicly work with the promise of everybody getting some of it, once they reach a certain age. Hence there is a fairness factor in it as well.
Other then that the 40h per week is a somewhat recent change as well and it could be lowered to say a 24h per week. Obviously you need to be able to renegotiate contracts for that and earn enough, to be able to live from less work.