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You actually cannot in most of the white collar world, it's extremely inflexible. Also, it's supposed to increase human flourishing and give us more time to spend on things we want to do! Ideally help people grow.
Imagine this attitude back when work was 7 days a week, 12 hour days. Work is a necessity, ideally we live as well or perhaps work on projects more aligned to our souls when we have more free time.
I do agree that there's always more work to do. I think our modern economy doesn't value the type of work left to be done very well, namely spiritual / emotional / community work.
Working in the white collar world is a choice, primarily done for money. If you don't care about the money, you can already go to a different sector with less rigid hours. If you do care about the money, it's not clear how a four day work week will make as much as a five day work week absent fiat government transfers, such as UBI.
This is an evergreen argument that has always been made regardless of the tech level. Why was it not compelling enough before, aside from the need/desire for more money?
Note the lack of limiting factor here. What [necessity] makes four days a week of drudgery any more reasonable than seven days, beyond current attitudes? Why should it not be viewed as soul-crushing and the [necessity] of work be paired back to 3 days of work a week?
And rightly so. People terribly interested in other how other people organize their spiritual / emotional / community affairs tend to be petty tyrants on how others should value such things if they themselves are not preoccupied.
If you want to work for money you can also work 6 days a week over 5 and get more money, and yet very few people, even those who enter the white collar world for money, do this. If there's a societal shift working Fridays is going to end up looking as quaint to Westerners as working Saturdays does to the right now (plenty of parts of the world where working Saturdays is normalized). We keep it at 4 days to start with because we need to take baby steps, it's a small move of the Schilling fence and once its normalised and if productivity has gone up so much we can shift over to a 3 day week as a society then we'll do that, the down to 2 days and so on if general societal productivity allows it.
I assume this was meant to be some combination of Schelling point and Chesterton’s fence; otherwise I’m not sure what the pre-Euro currency of Austria has to do with fences.
Schilling fences are a recognised term going back to the Great Scott himself: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes
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See "Schelling Fences on Slippery Slopes" by Scott Alexander.
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The white collar world is exactly that place that's dominated by frictions that scale with the number of employees.
People don't value it -- or if they did, they would pay for it.
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