Why do we work so hard?

This will sound moralistic, and I don't mean it that way, but I think this relates to our general lack of clear values as a society. With religion absent in many people's lives, not much has stepped in to take up the slack and say "what really matters is being a good person" or "what really matters is wisdom" or "what really matters is family". So we're left with the messages we ARE getting, which are from a combination of advertising (what really matters is having a lot of money/nice things), Hollywood (what really matters is being good at shit) and the news cycle (which focuses on careers and especially major careers). "Mom gets home from work and has a fun late afternoon with her kids, spending no money and getting nothing much done" isn't a story we ever see upheld as a great, positive way to spend our time. So we pursue the things we do see people praising and talking about - promotions, money, milestones, important-ness.

I moved to SF in 2008 as a poor college grad. Since then, I've spent all of my time in startups. It's an unhealthy addiction and it's going to kill me.

I was the third engineer at Eventbrite, and I spent years working many extra hours. After 4 years, it felt like I worked 10 years.

I quit and moved to Europe to try to leave the startup scene, but a month later, I found myself the CTO of a startup in London. The addiction continued. Eventually I found myself back in SF. I'm on my 3rd CTO role now. We're about to raise a series B.

More than I'd like to admit, I want to stop this madness and just enjoy life. Hang out with my family. Perhaps move to Denver or Austin to maintain some semblance of tech life, but get out of the madness. I've been looking at houses in Denver for over a year. And it depresses me.

I know that it can't happen. I know that I'll be working like this until my health prohibits me.

You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell me why?" "I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.

-Dickens

I enjoy designing RF/Microwave hardware and I am paid well to do it. I plan on doing it till I keel over. I have a state of the art lab at work, and a nice lab at home. I'm passionate about electronics and really wouldn't know what else to do.

Excellent article; at 3,860 words, it's a bit long, but recommended.

Here's a much shorter response, with more pathos:

"Oh. And if your reading this while sitting in some darkened studio or edit suite agonizing over whether housewife A should pick up the soap powder with her left hand or her right, do yourself a favour. Power down. Lock up and go home and kiss your wife and kids."

-- Linds Redding, "A Short Lesson in Perspective"

Read the whole thing: http://www.lindsredding.com/2012/03/11/a-overdue-lesson-in-p...

Competition. It's not that we really have to work that hard to produce a product or service. It's that we have to work really hard to beat the other people trying to do the same thing.

Increased productivity doesn't help, because everybody is still running flat out to compete, at a higher level.

The only reason I work hard is to surround myself with people I respect.

When I find myself pushed into situations where irritating people have crept into the mix, and no one seems to be willing or able to do anything about that, I look for an exit.

Boss' nephews. Obnoxious assholes who constantly talk about getting laid. Bitchy careerist ladies who constantly demand bullshit, and seem to foment panic with every breath they can muster. Narcissistic retards dumb as a bag of hammers, but smug to the core about everything they do, which usually turns out to be sitting on their asses all day, looking up trivia about sports. Weirdos who can't seem to bathe themselves, even though they're like 40 years old?

I work hard to separate myself from these people.

I wish I wanted to work a lot. I just kind of force myself to do it, even if it's something I'm excited about.

> "Of all things, hard work has become a virtue instead of the curse it was always advertised to be by our remote ancestors... The necessity to work is a neurotic symptom. It is a crutch. It is an attempt to make oneself feel valuable even though there is no particular need for one’s working."

— C. B. Chisholm

Work is a good excuse around which to build your life. The excuse approaches perfection in occupations such as programming which is getting paid for what would basically be your hobby. And―as any excuse―it is, as lovingly ever-favoured by your mind, easily used to avoid facing things in life, and edges in yourself. Staying busy is the opposite of having enough. It is doing versus being. When you do, you're trying to achieve something. When you be, you're liable to realise that you aren't missing anything, and that the keys to your life are found within yourself. People need both flavours but work rarely offers the latter.

Because in a poor economy the most job desperate set ceilings for themselves they dare not touch. I know people who produce millions in profit a year, on 50-60k salary with any bonus over 3k for xmas is unheard of. Disparate power between employee and employer. I personally the problem is people dont understand the correct process of negotiating a contract.

In essence, making people desperate makes robots that are handy, but the lack of reward incentive creates demonstratably worse worke product.

What about getting laid? It's no secret that women tend to find rich men attractive. Or men with a high social status. I wonder how many men work hard because of this?

I worked hard -- or, long -- because I had a shit personal life and neighbors who made it miserable to be at home. And, I was taught early and thoroughly that there was nothing I could do about such things.

Let me tell you, it is a terrible way to live.

Working hard and smartly and with fun, which I occasionally got to do, was something different and immensely satisfying.

But, if you are "working hard" because life sucks. Get your life in order. The sooner the better, not just for you, but ultimately, for your career.

Anyone who says you can't. Or that you have to "pay some sort of dues"? Fuck them.

As I overheard in the cafe, the other day -- my paraphrase may not be as snappy as the original: There's one choice where the outcome is 100% certain: Not choosing. Making no choice, taking no action, no chance.

The young-ish fellow was advising another young fellow on whether to ask a girl out.

As someone who's ended up spending his life alone -- and, is that "not by choice", or, per the above, precisely by choice. Let me tell you, there is no more important choice.

Family, friends, lovers, work and interests that matter (however, and, big or small). There is no more important choice. "Work hard" on those.

It really depends. Most times you just need the money. Sometimes you have nothing better to do. Many times you just keep doing it because you are used to doing it. A few times is your dream job and you just can't stop doing it. Work is more than economics, is not a function of money. Work is action. My father is a 73 'retired' professional and scholar, now serving as a congressman, and already thinking what to do next. Action is life and you should never stop it: work til you drop.

Another question would be: why do we keep working so hard for money when technology could already solve many of our needs?

Whenever I read topics like this I always think of Office Space.

Bob Porter: Looks like you've been missing a lot of work lately.

Peter Gibbons: I wouldn't say I've been missing it, Bob.

Some people thrive on "solving puzzles", which is sort of what engineering is.

For better or worse, there are an infinite number of puzzles to solve.

This is what I've realized lately about job satisfaction:

Purpose, autonomy, work/life balance: pick 2

Earth is a small rocky ball among billions in the void. We don't know why we are here and what happens next. Stick your head into a mission (work, religion, family, whatever you like) and don't think about that.

There's several issues intertwined here. The easy ones are those market forces I experienced at the relative bottom of the pay-scale and at the smaller end of the company scale: you're asked to work harder and more hours because it makes more money/profits for your employer to get you to work as long as possible for as little as possible.

However, I think there's two more aspects I think I can contribute.

Firstly: some kind of social identity. I've worked in a fair number of fields and a fair number of jobs, so being attached to a job or thinking of "myself as a particular profession" seems quite alien. But a fair number of my colleagues saw/see themselves as possessing a particular identity, and work/professions defined that for them. We have a very powerful social indoctrination that you are your job: we have titles, little boxes for "profession" on forms, and many people have internalized the messages that "you are what you are employed as", and that you need this external direction/identity to tell you what to do (I don't want to retire, what would I do with myself?!), and that their social identity is formed through their work/networks. Its a bit of a self-fullfilling prophecy, because as we move away from community oriented networks, people's social networks do become defined by where they work. Even if you manage to get out of the ratrace, you discover that your friends are still in it, so they don't have time to spend with you and you can't identify with some of their everyday struggles if you aren't going through it also. I should also note that people who gained this identity through work took retrenchment and change the hardest psychologically, and its easy upon reflection to understand why.

The second aspect though is this: generating the impression of work. I don't know whether its base human psychology (I think there are good arguments from anthropology that it isn't) or a culture-bound phenomenon, but I believe two things: that most humans still have a fundamentally reptilian-brain/cargo-cult psychology that is pretty close to the marxian concept of a labor theory of value, and that in modern large-scale professional life, metrics able to easily tie a worker or professional's inputs to outputs/profits accurately aren't commonly available.

So there is a social/cultural aspect here: how do most people judge how much you're bringing to the workplace? If you're not working in a widget factory, most people's have a heavily weighted proxy to just look at "how busy you look".

Would any CEO, politician, or professional in our culture, ever, justify themselves in taking their salaries by saying everything was running smoothly, and their job was to sit there, like a good taoist-esque ruler, just sitting and facing the horizon and not interrupt? The very idea is absurd, even though we must admit, I think rationally, that in some situations at the very least, that may be the most reasonable course of action. No, instead we justify such by "hours work put in" because it seems to be both a good cultural proxy, and I suspect because, even if its pretty bad, at least its a good cultural value to motivate the lower-downs into being good workers.

But it is of course, on an intellectual level, obscene and ridiculous. And it results in the promotion and workplace culture that I've experienced now at a lot of firms and professional workplaces.

Fresh out of university (economics), I was under the belief that government was generally wasteful. And I worked there, and I saw that it was, and it is, and all was good :)

But I didn't know true waste until I worked for the larger private corporations. We'd hire 15 men, 10 consultants, 4 managers, and support staff to do in 2 years what I could probably do with a skilled team of 4 in my area in government in 12 months. Am i being a little bit hyperbolic, maybe...

When I worked in government, the 2-3 staff would tell you something was bullshit, bitch, take a long lunch break, but get something done...maybe not everything, but something. They weren't salespeople.

In private sector professional firms, people will just lie and say everything they do is productive and a success. Its a hustle, its a sale. They'll come in to the office and rather than eat with their families at home, they'll eat breakfast at work while still not doing anything. They'll go to conferences and say "how great we are!". They'll come up with as many jobs and tasks as they can, and the efficiency of what they do is totally irrelevant. They still play solitaire on their computers. They get tonnes of people to proofread documents n times with n meetings (before eventually switching back to the original version). They'll restructure before restructuring back. They'll fire. They'll hire. It doesn't matter, just do STUFF.

The philosophy is just spend all the money you have and get your staff to do STUFF, expand your empire as much as possible, make everyone work, be seen to work, take credit for everything good, disown everything bad.

To them, long hours wasn't/isn't inefficient or a sign of intellectual failing, its a sign of how awesome you are, and you come in early and you stay back late not because you're doing anything (indeed, amongst the honest ones, there is a haunting realisation that your job, or at least the hours you're putting into it, maybe isn't actually producing anything, or might even be creating more work...), but because its a culturally-structurally reinforcing meme.

I'm not saying that all this culture is universal amongst us, or our workplaces, or our societies. But its there, and I think its all having a pretty powerful impact on our relationship with work, labor, and status...

It has been discussed many times why work makes us happy and the most compelling is flow: https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow?la...

It was also covered in the documentary "Happy".

I actually was thinking the article would discuss more in detail this or even just put a citation (he cited Keynes and Marx) but instead it went on a long personal anecdotal comparison after comparison.

I also was hoping the author would discuss the developing trend of people working from home and how that relates but.. nope.

IMO the article was too long for my liking. A fairly disappointing read.

The answer can be found in this excellent analysis of modern economics by E.F Schumacher from 1973:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful

It's easy to spend a few hours on work (especially in the computing field) and feel a sense of accomplishment; not so much with life.

Programming often feels like a series of little victories to me, and it's much harder to achieve that outside of work.

Alexis De Tocqueville had some thoughts relevant to this: https://youtu.be/Rzr3AOtFA8o

I'm curious: why did The Economist choose the name 1843 for its magazine? The About page doesn't say. Anybody know the significance of that year? Thanks.

I don't want to be a serf.

Working is the only way I know of for me to accumulate capital in order to become financially independent.

The more I do, the faster I accumulate capital, the more years of my life I'll spend able to do what I want to do.

It doesn't feel like a choice to me. The alternative is to live a mediocre life and always have one eye on my "responsibility" towards my capitalist overlords.

One thing that would help is if our governments, all governments, would stop spending money they don't have, and therefore stop devaluing currencies. When the Fed "buys" $4T in mortgages to relieve banks from holding any risk, where do they get all that money? They don't - they just "print" it, by clicking on a computer. And in the process, they devalue everyone's wealth.

Take a look at this chart: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/12/14/a-brief-history-of...

Yes, things are not quite as volatile since 1930, but also note that there is only inflation, whereas before, there was deflation to balance out the inflation. I know everyone says deflation is the devil. I'm not so sure about that.

There are a lot of hard work being done that is personally rewarding (money and fame) and either meaningless or destructive in a broader sense (ecological destruction, social destruction, unethical activites, fraud). Lehman brothers were very successful and was greatly rewarded before the financial crash.

Good article. I've moved a bit from the five-year-old daughter's position to the "thinking about identity, community, purpose – the things that provide meaning and motivation" stuff. Still working on it.

PG noted that getting rich is largely about running errands. In fact most of what society regards as 'work' is like this. What one needs is a hard problem to work on.

Read more Bukowski books, who knows maybe slowly you will heal yourself from this addiction. Also a great read How to Be Idle/Tom Hodgkinson

I like the explanation, but I don't like the idea of telling everybody that things where different in the past. When most people were farmers they also worked more than 12 hours a day, since you need to take care of such a big place. When most people were factory workers people also worked more than 12 hours because the boss thought it would make him more money if you worked more (and with simple, mechanical work that's actually true). The kind of work changed, as well as the reason. But we always worked too much.

And there is one reason he didn't mention: When you don't work so much, you need to figure out what to do with your time. You can't watch movies all day. Nobody can do that for a long time. So you need to think hard about other reasonable things to do. And thinking is painful and scary.

I don't. I stopped after I realised that with my skills and experience I can get a job any time.

They want to keep us busy!

"They are asking about a job. I am thinking about identity, community, purpose – the things that provide meaning and motivation. I am talking about my life."

Wow, leaving aside the complete "first world problem" approach that makes this relevant for like maybe 1% of the world population at best, this guy didn't just drink the Kool Aid, he's literally douching with it.

Get Work Done Syndrome is truely a modern notion entirely absent from the laissez faire peasant farmers of yonderyear who tilled soil in return for a long glass of summer wine at the end and maybe a 20 minute long smoke of fine tobacco. Modern notions of work involve McDramas taking place in every western household where first world problems really are a truely despotic problem indeed. Master slave relationships engender this and it leads to a domestic tilling of the soil in the fields of suburbia, working for McJobs with a McPay. The kind of real work; that of some spiritual understanding, or mastering the body, or doing shadow work of the mind; 'Dumping all your ailments on a plate for those to ponder' is entirely absent in the west, where it is assumed that only those more credentialed shall offer answers, and none else. The East might have these problems just not as severe, and I worry about the encroachment of americanisation into the Eastern mindset and rich tradition and approach to existential crises.