The Mound - #33 - The Right to Disconnect

Welcome to The Mound, a weekly newsletter in which we at Good One Creative pitch— for free — our solutions to the world’s problems.

In an absolutely devastating blow to corporate culture, therapists, and the bottom line of that guy who replasters my wall whenever I punch it, a proposed amendment to the 'Closing Loopholes' bill could soon see employers fined for impeaching upon their workers' "right to disconnect". Under the proposed law, any employer reported for contacting an employee outside of the hours agreed upon in their contract would first be warned and then fined an as-of-yet unknown amount.

It feels like something of a win for Gen Z, proving that maybe we are the youngest child of the working, Western world - with the middle children, Millennials, paying the ultimate price for being born sometime between MSN Messenger and our collective realisation that, in part due to white collar working conditions, South Korea's birth rate is falling at a rate of about 3% per year.

It seems that our spiritual and literal survival as a species may in fact depend on our ability to set boundaries - which is great news because, as a longtime believer of you leaving me the hell alone, I can report with total clarity as to the line's location.

Here's how we fix it:

That employers can no longer infringe upon our personal time is a wonderful start; the burnout we're all encountering more deeply, more frequently is absolutely a by-product of our never really shutting off. All it takes is for a laptop to chime in another room and the hours-long process of unwinding from a long day is undone immediately. Suddenly, despite the quirky decor and the weird smell in your apartment, you're at work again. The lines are too blurred and we'd best legislate that no one can reach out to and ruin our personal lives. But this is not just a scheduling issue:

To truly mitigate the risks of work poisoning our personal lives, we'd like to suggest another amendment be made to the bill that would effectively outlaw asking about a co-worker's weekend - with incredibly severe punishments being handed out to anyone who'd dare ask the question before 9AM on a Monday morning, a time when most Australians are still in the process of sanitising the story of their weekends for corporate consumption. Either that or trying still to remember the weekend themselves. This will drill into our brains that the office is a place of business and that everywhere else is one of nunya. Productivity would undoubtedly increase as we all cut-out the chitchat - but so would the camaraderie amongst genuinely friendly co-folks whenever a slightly forgetful member of the team lets slip that they had a beer on Friday and we all wink at them, sincerely promising not to say anything to FairWork.

To take things a bit further, though, we'd have to admit that sometimes it's not even work that ruins our weekend: sometimes the weekend ruins our weekend; like with pre-agreed to social events; or whenever a friend calls us at 2PM on a Saturday and we realise that it's too early in the piece to say that we just "totally missed" their call and in all likelihood they're about to spend the next four hours calling and texting with variations of come onnn, don't be like that, i know ur home, im outside etc. etc.

For these occasions we'd propose either the destruction of Find My Friends - an app that allows the socially anxious to live the dream of any lockdown puppy by revealing the exact location and, maybe soon, the latest bowel movement of their loved ones - or the creation of a new app, Lose My Friends.

Lose My Friends would actually tie-in to the existing Find My Friends interface - but instead of revealing my actual location to friends, it'd tell them all I'm at a sales conference in Shepparton. Using artificial intelligence, the app would also provide me with doctored images of myself at said conference that I could post directly onto my Instagram story. The only difficulty with employing such tech though would be that, in a few weeks' time, a friend (perhaps your most boring) would likely ask about the conference, by which time you'd have absolutely no idea as to what they are referring. For this reason, we'll also ask that the 'Closing Loopholes' bill criminalises any and all talk about work amongst friends.

So - if we can all agree to this - we might soon live in a world where absolutely no one can talk to absolutely anyone about what goes on between Mon-Fri, nor Sat-Sun. I can feel myself unwinding already.

You're welcome, Australia.