We work too much.

We are what we do. And we do it more often now than we did 50 years ago. We do it more often even though it takes us half the time and energy to produce things as it did then. We do it even THAT we recognize the toll it takes on health, family, sanity.

Despite a supercharged economy and its formerly middle-class millionaires, we still do it, ignorant of the predictions of futurists and technological utopians who once foresaw such a period of prosperity as entrée to a "leisure society" in which work would become secondary to the pursuit of filling our ample free time.

That dreamy scenario bit the dust as bytes sped up life (and didn't make it easier, as technophiles predicted) and the marketplace overflowed with stuff we didn't really need but bought anyway. Labor experts say the average U.S. worker put in 80 more hours in 1999 than in 1979. The problem is even more pronounced for married working couples with kids, whose collectively put in seven more weeks a year in 1999 than they did 10 years earlier.

Like manageable work hours, the visionaries and agitators behind our leisurely future disappeared too. A few academics (former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, economist/alarmist Jeremy Rifkin) have taken weak stabs at the ballooning workday, but they're drowned out by go-go work-is-life management theorists. The labor movement is more focused on making sure those longer hours are put in by union workers. The traditional political benefactor of working folks, the Democratic Party . . . well, enough said. And nary an optimistic futurist can be found who will say, "You've worked hard enough and now you're super-productive. It'll soon be time for your reward: A shorter workweek!"

So, who will step into this void and lead us to a shorter day of toil? Who will deign to rescue us from our frenzied workweek and the fraying lives it can cause?

A state-employed machinist from Towson, that's who.

Gabe Sinclair believes he's the man who can lead us back to labor Eden or halfway back, at least. With The Four-Hour Day, a book he self-published in December, and his foundation of the same name, he aims to kick-start the moribund American trend of making