Decolonizing the 9-5 — Rethinking Work & Time Structures 

Act 1: Work Was Never Meant to Be This Way

The 9-to-5 is a scam. A relic of violence dressed up as normalcy. People treat it like a natural law—like gravity or death—when in reality, it’s an invention, an imposition, a system designed to extract as much labor as possible while making you believe you chose it.

The standard workweek isn’t some inevitable evolution of human progress. It was built on forced labor, slavery, and colonial rule. It’s not about efficiency, and it sure as hell isn’t about human well-being. It’s about control.

Work as Domination

Before European colonization restructured time itself, labor in many societies was flexible, communal, and tied to the seasons. People worked in ways that made sense for their survival, their families, and their communities. Work wasn’t something you did for a corporation; it was just part of life, interwoven with rest, rituals, and celebrations.

Then the colonizers arrived. And they didn’t just steal land; they stole time.

On Caribbean sugar plantations, enslaved Africans worked from before sunrise to well past sunset, with strict schedules enforced by the whip. In the Belgian-controlled Congo, people were forced to meet rubber quotas under threat of mutilation or death. British-controlled India locked entire generations into indentured servitude, their lives dictated by the never-ending demands of tea and textile production.

Colonialism didn’t just force people into labor; it reshaped how they worked, introducing rigid schedules, quotas, and punishments that turned human beings into nothing more than cogs in an economic machine.

The Industrial Revolution: Refining the Exploitation

Fast forward to the 19th century, and the Industrial Revolution didn’t invent the 9-to-5, it just repackaged colonial labor practices into factories. Industrialists saw what plantations had done and thought, let’s make that more efficient.

Children as young as five worked 12-to-16-hour shifts in British factories. The air was thick with soot, their fingers raw from machine work, their lives measured in output. Productivity was enforced through exhaustion, punishment, and starvation wages.

Eventually, workers fought back. The push for an eight-hour workday was hard-won, with strikes, riots, and blood spilled in the streets. But the reform didn’t dismantle the system, it just put a bright mask on it. The 9-to-5 wasn’t liberation. It was a compromise. A way to make exploitation more palatable.

And the core of the system—this belief that your worth is tied to how much you produce—remained intact.

Act 2: The 9-to-5 is an Inheritance of Alienation

The 9-to-5 didn’t just restructure how people worked, it rewired how people lived. It severed labor from community, from rest, from relationships. It turned time into something you sell rather than something you own.

In pre-colonial and Indigenous societies, work was woven into life, not something that existed in opposition to it. You worked alongside your family, your neighbors, your community. It was seasonal, reciprocal. Harvesting, fishing, building homes; these were collective efforts, often punctuated by meals, music, storytelling. Labor wasn’t a thing you clocked in for; it was simply part of existing together.

But colonialism and industrial capitalism shattered that. Work became something you did for someone else, often in isolation, cut off from your loved ones. In plantations and factories alike, workers were forced to adhere to schedules that prioritized profit over human connection. Parents and children were separated by shifts. Communal traditions were destroyed. People were made to believe that their value was measured in how much they could produce in a set amount of hours.

And now?

That alienation is still with us.

Your Life is Being Stolen in Real Time

You wake up before you’re ready. Drag yourself through a morning routine designed to make you presentable to an employer. Commute to a place you probably don’t want to be. Sell eight hours of your life—your energy, your focus, your creativity, your time—to a company that will replace you in a heartbeat. You come home exhausted, drained, barely able to do anything other than recover just enough to do it all again the next day.

This isn’t a glitch in the system. This is the system.

Work isn’t structured to allow for creativity, deep relationships, or genuine leisure. It’s structured to keep you exhausted enough to not fight back.

And if you’re an artist? A writer? A musician? Good luck. The modern economy expects you to fit your creative life into the slivers of time left after you’ve worked yourself to exhaustion. Hustle culture tells you to “grind” after-hours, to monetize every skill, to turn even your joy into a side business just to stay afloat. The reality is, most people don’t lack discipline, they lack time. And that’s by design.

Capitalism doesn’t want you to create. It wants you to consume.

It doesn’t want you to rest—it makes guilt the price of every unproductive moment.

It doesn’t want you to dream of something better. It wants you to accept that this is just “how the world works.”

But it’s not.

Act 3: Reclaiming Time is an Act of Resistance

If time has been stolen from us, then taking it back is revolutionary.

Across the world, people are rejecting the idea that work should define life. The movements rising up today aren’t just about working less—they’re about undoing the deep colonial logic that tells us that our value is tied to our productivity.

Alternative Models That Challenge the Grind:

• The Four-Day Workweek 

Countries like Iceland and companies in Japan have experimented with shorter workweeks, proving that people don’t need to work five days a week to be productive. But the real revelation? When people work less, they live more. They sleep better. They spend more time with their families. They remember what it feels like to exist outside of labor.

• Spain’s Siesta Laws

While much of the world races through their lunch break (if they even take one), some places still enforce mid-day rest. In Ador, a town in Spain, everything legally stops from 2-5 PM. People nap. They eat with their families. They breathe.

• The Slow Living Movement 

A direct rejection of hustle culture, slow living embraces leisure, deep connection, and mindfulness over capitalist urgency. It’s a return to pre-colonial ways of structuring time, where rest isn’t laziness, it’s necessary.

• Indigenous Wisdom

 Many Indigenous cultures have never subscribed to the rigid, linear work schedules of capitalism. Andean communities practice ayni, a form of reciprocal labor where work is based on community needs, not arbitrary schedules. African traditions like Ubuntu prioritize collective well-being over individual productivity. These aren’t just alternative ways of working, they’re better ways of living.

Act 4: The Future is Ours to Build

Decolonizing time isn’t just about cutting work hours. It’s about dismantling the entire framework that says labor is the center of human existence. It’s about unlearning the guilt we feel for resting. It’s about remembering that life is meant to be lived, not just worked through.

Imagine a world where your time isn’t measured in billable hours.

Where your ability to rest, to love, to simply exist isn’t dictated by a paycheck.

Where exhaustion isn’t the default state of being.

This world isn’t a fantasy. It has existed before. It can exist again. The only question left is:

Are we bold enough to take it back?