2 . Businesses are now in cost-cutting mode. Title inflation (通胀) has crept into the workplace. Layoffs, hiring freezes and concerns about a recession (经济衰退) are plaguing employers.

To balance this unique economic environment, employers have figured out a way to comfort employees and job applicants without spending more money. They are offering impressive titles to soften the blow of not providing a raise to internal employees or big compensation to job candidates.

An employee’s title is their identity. It gives them credibility in the office and makes them feel more powerful. In this sense, the policy is a sensible way to help keep staff and attract top candidates.

But if you don’t really deserve the new title, it could come back and trouble you. Recruiters will be pleased to find a candidate who is a perfect fit for a significant, well-paying position in terms of skills, background, and previous experience. However, a stumbling block arises when they notice the candidate has a higher title than the client offers. Since a recruiter wants to make a placement and earn a fee, they won’t waste time and will seek out other candidates who are a better fit.

Even if the recruiters decide to contact the candidate, there’s a good chance the candidate won’t accept. Because most people aren’t aware that their title was inflated and believe it was a reward for their outstanding performance. Understandably, they would be offended if they received a lower-level post. Now that you are at a certain level, you don’t want to go backward.

What’s more, if your current title is too high, it raises red flags. For example, when searching for a new job, if your title is “director,” but the new role is under that level, the interviewer will curiously inquire, “why do you want to go down in title?” There will be an assumption from the hiring manager that something isn’t right. They may feel that the job seeker is leaving before being fired and willing to downgrade. Rather than trying to figure out the motivations of the candidate, they’ll move on to others who have a cleaner story without any baggage.

4 . Online jobs have opened the door for many people to earn a living or make some extra money from the comfort of their homes. This includes teens as well. If you’re looking for such a job, here are some choices you can consider.

If you are 16 years old and over, you have a chance to work with U-haul as a customer service representative. You just need to have good-quality USB headphones and high-speed Internet in order to apply for and do this job. Basic pay starts at $7.50 an hour.

Selling things online is one of the easiest ways to make quick cash, and teens can turn it into a good business by selling things on Bonanza. It’s best to start sorting through things that are no longer being used at your home and list them for sale.

Another easy job teens can do to earn money is to take surveys online. You don’t need any work experience to do this and can be as young as 13 years old to get started. Survey sites like VIP Voices, Swagbucks, Harris Poll, E-Poll, and PaidViewpoint allow teens to start taking surveys for cash and gift cards. And your opinions should be expressed clearly in English.

Do you love to make new things? You can open up an Etsy shop to share your creations. Etsy is great for DIYers who can create new products. If you are under 18, you just need a parent who is willing to help manage your shop.

5 . People have been curious for centuries about a future without work. Some imagine that the coining work-free world will be defined by inequality: A few people will own all the wealth, and the masses will struggle in a wasteland. A different prediction holds that without jobs to give their lives meaning, people will simply become lazy and depressed. But it doesn’t necessarily follow from findings like these that a world without work would be filled with dissatisfaction. Such visions (想象) are based on the downsides of being unemployed in a society built on the downsides of employment. In the absence of work, a society designed with other ends in mind could provide strikingly different circumstances for the future of labor and leisure.

These days, spare time is relatively rare for most workers. “When I come home from a hard day’s work, I often feel tired,” says John Danaher, a lecturer at the National University of Ireland, adding, “In a world in which I don’t have to work, I might feel rather different” — perhaps different enough to throw himself into a hobby with the enthusiasm usually reserved for professional matters.

Daniel Everett, an anthropologist (人类学家) at Bentley University, studied a group of hunter-gatherers in the Amazon called the Piraha (拉哈人) for years. According to Everett, while some might consider hunting and gathering work, hunter-gatherers don’t. “They think of it as fun,” he says. “They don’t have a concept of work the way we do.” Everett described a typical day for the Piraha: A man might get up, spend a few hours fishing, have a barbecue, and play until the evening.

Does this relaxing life lead to the depression and purposelessness seen among so many of today’s unemployed? “I’ve never seen anything like depression there, except people who are physically ill,” Everett says. While many may consider work a staple (主要部分) of human life, work as it exists today is a relatively new invention in the course of thousands of years of human culture. “We think it’s bad to just sit around with nothing to do,” says Everett. “For the Piraha, it’s quite a desirable state.”

7 . I was 6 years old when my father told me we were leaving the Big Apple Circus (马戏团). Until that point, I had spent most of my life on the circus lot, playing with the other circus kids. The circus, by its nature, is one that has a loose structure. So the early years after my leaving the circus to sit in a classroom all day felt more like a prison.

But years later, I found areas that interested me. I took the skills I had learned from being onstage and applied them to broadcasting. And so when Boston’s news station WBUR offered me a job out of college, I jumped at the chance. Along the way, I found I really enjoyed the work. I became WBUR’s news reporter. The flexibility and adaptability I’d learned in the circus as a child helped me do my job naturally and easily in a stressful situation — whether it was a destructive tornado outside Boston, or the Boston Marathon bombings of 2013.

But then a serious infectious disease appeared. Suddenly, for the first time in my adult life, I went for a year without doing any shows. But it became clear to me that performing was what I truly wanted. For me, the circus symbolizes who I am. And stages have always been where I’ve felt the most free. Some people get nervous before they go onstage, but by assuming (扮演) the character of Jacques ze Whipper and drawing a stupid moustache on my face, all my social anxiety disappears.

Circus performances go beyond age, socioeconomic status (地位), and even language. It’s the type of performance where you can go anywhere in the world to entertain anyone — help anyone forget their troubles for 5, 10, and even 30 minutes. And most importantly, for me, it means coming home.

8 . In 1926, US automaker Henry Ford shortened its employees’ workweek from six eight-hour days to five, with no pay cuts. It was something workers and labor unions had been calling for. Ford wasn’t responding to worker demands; he was being a businessman. He expected increased productivity and knew workers with more time and money would buy and use the products they were making. It was a way of encouraging consumerism and productivity to increase profits, and it succeeded.

Since standardization of the 40-hour workweek in the mid-20th century, everything has changed except the hours. If anything, many people are working even longer hours, especially in North America. This has a severe influence on human health and wellbeing, as well as the environment. Until the Second World War, it was common for one person in a family, usually the oldest male, to work-full-time. Now, women make up 42% of the world’s full-time workforce. Technology has made a lot of work unnecessary, with computers and robots doing many tasks previously performed by humans.

Well into the 2lst century, we continue to work the same long hours as 20th century laborers, using up ever more of Earth’s supply to produce more goods that we must keep working to buy, use and replace in a seemingly endless cycle of hard work and consumption. It’s time to pause and consider better ways to live like shifting from fossil-fueled lifestyles with which our consumer-based workweeks are connected.

The UK think tank, New Economics Foundation, argues that a standard 21-hour workweek would address a number of interconnected problems: “overwork, unemployment, over-consumption, high carbon emissions, low well-being, and the lack of time to live sustainably, to care for each other, and simply to enjoy life”.

Economic systems that require constant growth on a finite (有限的) planet don’t make sense. It’s time for a change in our economic thinking.