Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I've always wondered why, with all the other emotional dispositions that people accuse pharma companies of "medicalizing" in order to sell them a drug treatment for, we've never seen any attempt to medicalize the Puritan work ethic.

Maybe it's because it'd mean that pretty much every medical doctor would themselves be technically (or not-so-technically) considered mentally-ill?

(Gosh, imagine a world where all the doctors got treatment for their floating guilt, and then suddenly woke up to their severe overwork, and so did a 180 on their previous push to the medical-bar to lower acceptance to increase wages, instead pushing to increase acceptance and lower wages in an attempt to increase the number of doctors a hospital can employ on a given budget, and therefore decrease hours worked per doctor?)

I don’t think a puritanical work ethic necessarily is unhealthy, but in your example I would consider the guilt aspect to be.

In your example puritanical work ethic + (irrational imo) guilt = you exceed your contractual requirements to deliver work to your employer.

Keep the work ethic but take the guilt out and perhaps instead you’d meet but not exceed your contractual obligations to your employer, and then organise the rest of your time around industriously working on something else that you’re personally passionate about.

The second example could be unhealthy depending on how you approached it, but I wouldn’t say that it necessarily is, and I would say that it’s a big improvement over the first example.

"Puritanical" is definitely meant to imply unhealthy, which is why it's got such a negative connotation. I think even in your example, you substitute "wasted" productivity (in the sense of going beyond contractual obligations) with other productivity, albeit towards another direction. I think that's what the parent's post is pointing out: this obsession/compulsion with filling in all time with productivity. Why can't time just be "wasted"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com