What About the Medium Chill?

I saw the movie The Big Chill, and thought it was pretty good. I never got that it was supposed to be about he frenzied search for the big payoff, after which you could just chill. I thought Big Chill referred to the death of their friend. Anyway, David Roberts, in a series of posts over on Grist, has recently presented his argument for the Medium Chill.

His position is that instead of working your ass off for the big chill, we could choose to enjoy the medium chill in the here and now. I never branded it so well, but I realize that his Medium Chill is exactly what I've been after. He recommends earning just enough, and working just a little less. He advocates for free time over more stuff - Hallelujah! - and spending more time with family and slightly run-down home  instead of racing on the gerbil wheel of working more hours to pay for a nicer house that you never see because you're working all those hours.

Of course, there are two big obstacles to the medium chill, that at least in my case, I have found to make it just about as inaccessible as the big chill.
1. Professional-level part-time jobs. I have never felt the need to spend 40 hours every week on one thing, no matter how interesting it is. There are just too many other interesting things that I also want to do (you know, like raise my kids). But unemployment sucks for more than just the obvious reason of having no money. Like I said, I don't want to spend 40 hours every week doing the same thing - including raising my kids.Variety people! But, I don't want to work retail or food service just because they offer flexible hours. The money there is not much better than unemployment and I do want to use my degree. Unless you are a freelance writer, it's not easy to find a 20 - 30 hour a week job, and even if you do, you still have to deal with

2. Health insurance. This is probably the reason most companies won't hire part-time workers. Health insurance is so expensive, they can't afford to offer benefits without extracting the maximum legal hours out of their employees. And qualified applicants can't afford to buy their own health insurance on a part-time salary.
My family found that we couldn't make ends meet on one salary. Every month we fell short by (oh irony) almost exactly the amount we spent on health insurance premiums and doctor's bills. I never saw an opening for a part-time job in my area, so I had to go back to work full time. Now we are doing fine financially. We're on our way to the big chill, reaching higher and higher ground. We could easily live with 2/3 of my salary now (especially with our current employer health plan) but I only see my kids at bedtime. When they are at their most charming. A three day work week doesn't exist. If it did, we'd make enough money and I'd get to see my kids in the daytime.

No matter how much we might like the idea of working less to live more, we can't always find a place for ourselves on the middle ground. I hope that more people start talking about the Medium Chill. One of Roberts' posts mentions that the German response to the economic crisis has been to implement "partial layoffs with partial unemployment."  Maybe if enough of us start pushing for it, the middle ground will be easier easier to reach.