Dear Mr Hardy —

I don’t wish to discount either your very useful advice or the wealth of information which you’ve provided here. And I can imagine any number of readers connecting profoundly with your descriptions of the overworked and technologically addicted.

BUT (you knew that was coming, didn’t you?) — and to comment only about the first two sections regarding work and technology — it is not the average reader or going-to-work Joe who is mandating 80-hour weeks and cellphones glued to each eye so we can answer email, or worse, confirm our availability to text 24/7 (text being the current iteration of email, just with no down-time, tinier keys, worse spelling and more vapid content).

It is our EMPLOYERS.

Until the system changes, the entire model which considers only the bottom line, calls people “human resources” and is unconcerned with the effects these demands make on their work force; until we create an economic system that is sustainable and ensures that people are adequately housed, fed, have health care and a universally applied basic income unrelated to a job and therefore are truly free to say “no” — until that time, your advice can be implemented only by that fortunate minority who are already secure enough.

All you are doing is blaming the victims, and I have to say that I am heartily fed up with chirpy, well-meaning articles that exhort us to disconnect while ignoring the underlying truth: that many of us are plugged into a rapacious, soul-destroying machine that is bigger than us, bigger in fact than even those who employ us: a machine that treats us like fodder and from which many of us will never be able to disconnect as long as it exists.

Give me your advice on that.

Sincerely,

David Roddis
Toronto