Stop the “Hard Work” Obsession

Hard work works, especially in 1st world countries. I know that hard work alone would not make anyone successful. Luck plays a lot of factor as well, but the harder you work in general you increase the chance of you encountering turning point(s) that lead you to living a comfortable middle class life in 1st world country. Be rich (i.e, billionaire)? Maybe not, but not everyone can and should be rich.

Of course no system is perfect, and you can't save everyone. There will be some people who fall through the cracks. But to setup a system such that no one will ever fall through the cracks is giving diminishing returns while taxing to the whole system.

Rich people will always be with us, so does poor people. So does ignorant people who thinks pandemic is a hoax, so does lazy people.

I grew up in a 3rd world country. Competition and social mobility in the USA is relatively way easier compared to my home country. Or I should say, a piece of cake, really. I'm not obsessed with hard work, but I'm not lazy either. I'm willing to Leetcode for 3 years, failed many interviews to finally got into a high paying tech company. Leetcode for 3 years non stop is way way way way easier than hauling bricks all day.

I know what a hard work is, and I also know what useless futile hard work looks like. I worked through low paying jobs such as cleaning service, deli worker, laundry worker.

My most back breaking work was cleaning an entire restaurant who got shutdown by a health department by myself. I only lasted 5 days. I had to scrub rat poop of walls and floors kneeling down with bleach everywhere by myself (yes that was minimum wage). The next back breaking work was an 18 hour shift non stop working at a deli during Christmas/New Year in a really busy touristy location.

And like the author. My single mother was the one that pushes me through many educations. She said "I can't give you anything other than education, the rest is up to you".

Talking about luck is often instinctively interpreted as a method to avoid responsibility and cultivate laziness, but try as I might, ignoring this aspect of the world feels like a type of wishful religious thinking that is torn apart after even the most cursory investigation and thought. Generally, people will tend to attribute the bad things to luck and the good things to their own efforts, but in reality both seem to fall under the same purview.

What I like about the Nordic countries, is that workers there are productive. When they're at work, they work - but at the same time, they have a healthy relationship to their workplace, due to strong workers rights / laws.

Another thing to keep in mind, is that social conformity there, is on par with countries like Japan.

In some countries, you're almost applauded if you manage to screw over your boss / company, by simply getting paid without doing much at all. For many, it's the dream situation - to just clock in at work, do nothing, get paid, and go home.

That's not at all the case in the Nordic countries, where you're expected to work hard and produce.

Strong sense of work ethic, labor laws, balanced with expectations of healthy work/life balance.

(But with that said, there are some serious drawbacks. If your only goal is to accumulate as much wealth as possible, at all costs, and as quickly as possible - Nordic countries is not the right place, IMO).

Last year I saw a chart posted on imgur with habits and traits of lower, middle, and upper class people. I’m sure many saw that and thought “oh I need to act like X so I can stop being Y.” What I saw was contentment that I am in the social tier that feels right to me. I don’t need “more,” I would struggle with “less.”

So deep that in the recent "i was fired from X" articles, the subject points out that their colleagues were lazy and they worked hard. Whereas a southern (or culturally Catholic) European would see that this shows their colleagues also hated the place, and that there's no shame in being lazy.

It's not an obsession and not something that can be stopped. It's utterly integral in all of American society even the left wing radical side.

Progressivism is basically the belief that doing hard good work brings Good things.

(A non protestant culture would emphasise belief and being a better person more than doing good works)

I remember studying for multiple 16 hour days over the years while others partied hoping for a C+. I have to remind myself of this sometimes when it feels like my job is ‘too easy’ compared to my past jobs of washing dishes or moving inventory by hand.

Norway is probably the least good example example, due to the relative dominance of the oil & gas sector, but if you look at the stock market index of Denmark or Finland, for example, you'll find that the top companies are in different industries, exporting globally and world leaders in their respective niche. I've included a Nordics fund in my global stock market portfolio, since this small part of the world economy is disproportionately diversified in high tech.

I'm sure this can be duplicated elsewhere, through education and increasing the reliability of institutions. It's the kind of non-zero-sum development that would leave the world better off as a whole.

In fact, I'm a bit frustrated that Norway lags behind the other Nordics in this respect. There's something about our country that slows us down when it comes to building profitable export industries.

There’s constantly this exhortation to “work hard” and “overcome the obstacles”. People work ALL THE TIME. There’s an underlying pressure to be on constantly.

And I’m asking “why?” I’m an IC. I am by no means invested in the company. If some big event happens, the C-levels and investors may pay out. I might be lucky and keep my job. I’ll bet money that the good health insurance we have and “unlimited” PTO goes away when that happens.

So again, why should I put in extra to make someone else rich? I have no problem with working within reasonable bounds and trading my skills for a salary. I don’t want to start my own business.

There isn't something inherently different about people in the nordic countries that makes them work well. It is the social systems and contracts we live in/with.

I can be secure in the knowledge that I can not be laid off if I am doing good work, unless my employer can truly justify it (the myth of employers not being able to lay of employees is just that. There has to be a justifiable reason though). I know my healthcare is taken care of by the state, I get financial support if I want to start a family, get paid leave to be with my new born child, get most of my education for free, have high trust in the capabilities and fairness of the justice system and on and on.

All of this creates a relaxed environment where most of the base needs in Maslow's pyramid are taken care of, and I don't need to worry about them. Similar to the Harvard study that showed that there was a sweet spot for the ratio of performance to salary increase, having these social norms & contracts in place leaves most of us free to get on with the work with a focus of doing the best we can each time without financial/health/education worries.

And, ofcourse there are plenty of problems in the nordics! Let no one ever sell you a utopian fairytale telling you otherwise.

Who knows if people from Bangladesh had found oil in the 50s, maybe today some Bangladeshi would have written a post about hard work and good quality of life, ignoring this particular ingredient.

I accept the notion that simplistic glorification of "hard work" is unhelpful and often counterproductive, but most people understand that "hard work" doesn't just mean physical exertion, but also good decision-making, sensible investing, scaling your impact, etc.

Any concept is easy to write a disparaging essay about if you just focus on the most reductive interpretation.

A far more useful essay on the topic would focus on what ability an "ordinary" person (particularly one without substantial inherited wealth) has to influence their life outcomes, and what kinds of things can be done at the individual and societal levels to improve the present situation.

I have worked construction jobs. The body is exhausted at the end of the day, but it is always satisfing at the end of the day to look back on what you have done. However because anyone can do it there isn't as much value in it and so it doesn't pay as well. What hard work you do is more important than how hard you work. However once you have picked the area to work hard work is a second key to getting more.

Of course eventually you need to decide how much is enough. This is a personal question and there is no right answer.

What doesn't work is for zero people in society to work (at least not at out current automation technology level). Someone needs to grow food and make shelter. Someone needs to act in the latest TV shows (even though there are enough reruns to fill a lifetime so this work could be eliminated, and it has always been possible to live without TV).

I think we often experience disappointment in life when we seek much wealth. I don't want to be mega-wealthy and I don't to be poor.

I hope my government try to do their best for my society. On a personal level I also try to help those less fortunate than myself.

The US is one the worst Western countries when looking the actual metric of Social mobility. As of 2020 the US is 27 after Lithuania in Social mobility[1].

[1] https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index...

Seth Godin has a riff on how to think about hard work to get the most out of it: https://seths.blog/2019/02/hard-work/

A lot of the political dialog is also about how more people can have access to quality education. In my own state, we spend around $20k per student per year in the poorest school districts, so I don't think the story that the US just ignores poor communities and tells them to work harder is quite so simple.

ie, we seem to care more about our colleagues'/employees' blood, sweat and tears than the achievement of our (joint) goals.

The economy, on the other hand, doesn't give a damn about anything except hard results.

I think this is more of a problem with our evolved social instincts not being well adapted to modern industrial capitalism than a quirk of American culture.

Oil.

Stopped there.