Most of our adult lives are spent working. If a person works outside the home for eight hours a day and five days a week, then you work 2,080 hours a year. There are only 8,760 hours in a year, and if you spend the same amount of time sleeping as you do working, you only have 4,600 hours remaining. In other words, half our lives are devoted to sleeping and working! In a lifetime between the ages of 18 and 65, a person can work around 97,760 hours!
“Social scientists tell us that there is a relationship between the importance of a cultural concept or issue and the number of words used to describe it.” (Boa 1997, 12)
Think of all the words we have to describe work: fix, clean, manage, supervise, labor, toil, build, construct, develop, maintain, administer, sell, perform, organize, operate, cultivate, make, etc. The list goes on and on! The reason we have so many words is because it is important to us. I am not saying everyone likes their jobs, but work is so important to us that our lives revolve around it.
Boa, Kenneth, and Gail Burnett. Wisdom at Work. Colorado Springs: Navpress, 1997.