America’s fever of workaholism is finally breaking
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Want to do so much more? Go do it!
This kind of “work” wasn’t done with a primary goal of getting money. Dare I say, it was a “hobby”.
If you hate your job, think about upgrading your job skills to get a job that you would like.
But we also have to acknowledge that simply is not true for a sizeable portion of the population.
The point (for me) is its the moment you make it a job, it becomes drudgery. so the "job" part is what I would need to avoid.
B) My point was that it wasn't really work, hence the quotes. The leisure/aristocracy of the past did need to turn it into work. They simply did it because they liked it.
Of course now that their value has been used up, they have no outlet and just sit around.
Everyone ages differently, and if you're not spry and productive as you age you'll be pushed out regardless of if you can retire.
You know, that’s perhaps because they retired when they simply could not continue working. Perhaps they might have retired before dropping dead if that was an option.
Odd how that magically coincides with turning 65.
Perhaps we can raise people to create their own paths.
False dichotomy. Not working 60 hours a week != leading a life of indolence and sloth.
The hermits going to Alaska with an axe, a saw, and a dream to build a small cabin and live off the land and watch the bears catch salmon, those are certainly ready to make that trade. But your average Western academic talking about work-life-balance? I wouldn't rule it out as a possibility, but it'd be a first.
Yes, the adjunct professor, famous for their work-life-balance.
One solid income used to buy an entire house. Why can't I want to work less and still have a large apartment? And that's without even considering productivity gains.
People can budget for entertainment without long work weeks.
I don't demand much in terms of restaurants and travel and hotels, shrug.
Websites are not expensive to run, and the cost of social media if directly paid for would be single digit dollars a month. Negligible in terms of someone's entire budget.
Just to start, you’re assuming we are using our resources and human labor efficiently.
Which is understandable, and that choice should be theirs to make -- if they accept that it has a direct impact on everything they get, and don't rely on others working more to compensate for them working less.
Surely you have more imagination than that.
I mean - hunter gatherer societies usually had all their food gathering and chores done in just a few hours a day. Spending the rest of their time doing all those things humans like to do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer#Social_and_eco...
We could probably figure out how to remove inefficiencies from the markets and have 20 hour workweeks, if enough of us wanted to.
3) if all billionaires in the US liquidated absolutely all personal wealth and evenly distributed it, what would happen?
720 billionaires * 10B average wealth / 300M US population = 24k USD per person 1 time payment
Covid stimulus was like, 9k ish depending on your bracketing? So just imagine 2 or 3 covid payments. The conclusion should be that it's not going to change the fabric of how life in America functions. It's certainly not gonna grant GP commenter the ability to chill and paint for the rest of their lives.
"It is this way, has been this way, and you will like it or leave." With that said, it should come as no shock when various rejections of this idea take hold. How could one rationalize not attempting to critically re-evaluate the situation? What is all this progress for?
I can't imagine why the birth rate is falling in certain places so precipitously. /s We tell parents they should have expensive kids for the good of society. We tell kids they have to grow up and support themselves over a lifetime because that's the deal.
You can critically re-evaluate until the cows come home. Won't materially change anything.
I miss old school labor, or at least how they're described in the history books. Forcefully changing things for the better. Now we have a bunch of people critically evaluating everything on social media, expecting things to change as if they asked to speak with society's manager, expecting them to fix it.
However, that's a wildly simplistic view of things.
You can't just say this without realizing that there are severe drawbacks to this. We can't just all work 4h instead of 8h and expect to maintain our standards of living, all the benefits of our times, maintain scientific progress, maintain national security and many, many others.
The ultimate goal should maybe be productivity, and if 4h is better than 8h for whatever reason, then let's do that. But it's definitely not so simple.
Do you really think we are using our resources and technology efficiently? Because that’s the implication here. I think that’s frankly absurd.
Maybe the global maxima is not the standard 9-5 work day, that’s almost a given, but to claim that working dramatically less will yield better results is absurd.
> There was not time in which a common person did not have to do drudgery to get on with life.
Is hunting drudgery? Are epic food-gathering missions? Creating new towns and villages?
Sorry but your ancestors were regularly getting eaten alive by wild animals a few generations back (heck it's still an existential threat to some people). People had to resort to canibalism to survive famines. Plague, TB, polio. Just a hundred years ago there was ~1 in 100 chance a woman would die during childbirth. >40% of kids would not live to age of 5 in 1800s
The only reason you were brought into this world is because your ancestors went through shit you can't even imagine, had children, some of which survived to eventually have you.
I've done this thought exercise many times, traveled extensively, and continue trying different types of work. The truth is that most of us (HN users) have pretty comfortable lives and would be making huge quality of life sacrifices to live the dream of the romanticized past.
There is definitely something to sort out around "what does the high paid knowledge worker do when they no longer have hardship defining their life for them" but I don't know if artificially handicapping yourself and LARPing struggle is the answer.
If you do find the answer then please let me know.
If you aren't happy in your current position you have two choices. You either choose to solve the problem and start taking steps, or you choose to be distracted from the problem.
I know the best times of my life is when I got outside of my comfort zone.
Fear is a cage. The only way out, is through.
Can you articulate the attitude you're reacting against? Because you don't appear to be addressing the OP, who never made a claim about their ancestors having a tough go of it.
> I was not brought into this world to work for 60 years in a job [...] It’s a shame so much of us are forced to spend the best parts of our lives chained to a desk.
Our ancestors would kill for the ability to replace their existence by a desk job.
Likely many of them did kill for the ability to make sure their children had a better life than they did.
But also, why would we need to be sensitive of their feelings?
Man of our ancestors didn't survive the winter, or the plague, or slavery...that doesn't mean I want or necessarily need to wear my self out for someone else's portfolio.
I've had years where I was only present the last 5 minutes before passing out each night. the other 23:55 of the day spent in a mad rush, eat/sleep/work/repeat.
That's nothing to be proud of, especially if you don't have to.
I have to admit that's a new one when it comes to defending the status quo of our work culture
Stating that life should be hard now because your ancestors had it worse is completely missing the point. They all strived to make life better for their progeny. We need to be doing the same. That means refusing to accept things being worse than necessary.
I have nothing against wanting to improve your condition or striving for better - but expecting something just because you were born or a human - really needs some reality checking.
Also your notion that human condition constantly improves through history is not a given - things can very much regress and humanity can disappear.
It's very probable that your highest contribution to society is 9-5 and supporting >2 kids - but it's not very popular to say that I guess.
Everyone is entitled to fight for better conditions
>things can very much regress
That was gp's point
Which life is better on the whole? That of an apex predator in its natural environment or that of livestock?
There is a case to be made that modern humans have been progressively turned into domesticated livestock, abstracted from their ancestral, natural habitat since the neolithic revolution.
It is unclear that cell phones and modern medicine increase net happiness when many work soul sucking, unhealthy sedentary jobs and suffer a long gray existence in nursing homes and hospitals.
Justify wasting your life however you want but calling those who don't agree with your cope "delusional" is rich.
However, the basic human "I don't want more then this" was present in all of them.
It is nit like everyone in history was simultaneously subject of famine, tuberculosis and then died in childbirth.
I'm not sure how this counters the idea that we should not dedicate our lives to menial jobs. It seems kind of unrelated.
> That attitude is so delusional it's hilarious.
I wish we turned down the snark a little bit at HN.
The existential angst you feel is the price society pays so a few can reap clear benefits while many keep pace with the hedonic hampster wheel.
I mean clearly it is a price worth paying so we can watch people do silly dances on tiktok or summon an uber at 2 am to take us home from the bar.
We are here because the human race improved itself, its conditions, to lessen and adapt to environmental limitations and even our own political issues. Not because we worked 50 hour weeks in dead end jobs.
The universe doesn't owe you a life of leasure and following your passions and lofty ideals. It doesn't even owe you a life free of starvation and debiliating sickness, yet that is what you and far, far more people today have, compared to pretty much any time in the past.
A 5 day work week of 40 hours desk work is very light compared to what people 100 or 200 years ago had. Labor unions fought very hard for it. There's memes about medieval peasants working only 150 days a year, but those are bullshit (that is the work they had to do for someone else before they could start to make their own food and necessities). Allegedly, hunter-gatherer societies really did a lot less of what could be called work, but often had to compete violently for hunting grounds or face starvation, and didn't have all that much opportunity to test their creative capabilities either.
If you want to show that you're capable of so much more, go ahead and find a way to do it. I can pretty much promise you that it will involve working more, not less.
Or if you want to fix inequality so that everyone has to work less to make a living, fine, very commendable, I totally agree that is a desirable outcome. But I can also guarantee that people will still have work, and not that much less than now.
so please stop whining like a spoiled child.
Btw, that 5 day work week was fought for by people who were ALSO likely called spoiled children at the time.
If you want a better life, find a specific and achievable way in which it can be better, and work towards that. Quite possibly involving a labor union.
But don't moan poetically about how it's such a shame having to work for your living.
A reminder: the people in the past who went through these things and strived for something more (like the above commenter) are a big part of the reason we have it so easy today.
Agreed. Advancements happen because someone somewhere was dissatisfied with the status quo. It's a prerequisite.
Well, because someone was dissatisfied with the status quo and did something about it. Just complaining doesn't count.
No one's forcing you to do anything. Do all that "so much more".
The problem is then you might want food and shelter and goods and medicine - the results of other's labor. To get that you will have to provide them things of value, i.e., the result of your labor in some form.
If you can do "so much more" then do it and trade for the other things you cannot make.
The reality is that to produce things others want so you can trade for things you want takes work, and that work is not simply having all the fun you feel like every moment.
You sure sound like one, by the level of entitlement ;)
So I take it you provide your own food, build your own home, and do your own healthcare; or find volunteers who love their jobs to do them for you? I hear farming wheat, putting up drywall and examining rashes are jobs that people "only tolerate", it's not generally a calling.
> I am a human being and I am capable of so much more than I can even imagine
Do you happen to be capable of anything useful to other people, as defined by other people themselves? If yes, is it as part of a job you only tolerate, or as part of "so much more"?
Contrary to the rhetoric of the anti-work movement, I think work is bound up in self-expression, and to meaningfully contribute to the creation of something beneficial to others or to yourself is a deep human longing. I just think that we speak of work in a very crude and superficial way here in the US.
This is because it's about working effectively, i.e. getting things done. Working hard doing things that have little to no value is a waste of effort.
So in that light, it's about oracle, or luck, directing your hard work towards efficacy.
"Work Hard" is the only advice you can give without perfect knowledge of the future. We usually just leave out the depressing second half of the aphorism: "but sometimes it won't matter."
[0] I can hear the entire finance industry starting to interject all at once
You are correct that nothing is guaranteed. Now reconcile that with your position. What is "smart work" in light of risk?
Just what I said. Do things that create value.
And by complement then, does some un-smart work get rewarded?
If I flip a coin and say, "it will come up heads", was the act of flipping "working smart", when it does? Is it feckless hard work when I get tails instead?
I can choose which programming languages and other technical skills I learn based on current use, as well as estimates for their future. I could become an expert in the wrong JavaScript framework, but learning Typescript and React is far more likely to be valuable than learning to be a telegraph repairman.
But beyond that, I think the conversation here is around output being sacred. By the definition of "value" I think we're all sort of taking as implicit here, Facebook would be just as valuable over telegram as it is over the internet.
Obviously that's ludicrous in its particulars, but I just mean to say that the "value" doesn't necessarily correlate with the tools used to produce it in this context. It's not the craftsmanship that's "rewarded", it's the sale.
Maybe sometimes you can sell better if you're invested in better tools, but I could work for a decade on a completely novel and beautifully crafted and executed widget that absolutely no one wants.
The upstream conversation centers on individual workers and how much they get paid for their labor. Learning in demand skills likely to stand the test of time will get a worker higher pay, due to employers needing those skills to produce value for their customers. This also means the worker keeps track of what skills are desired, and acts accordingly if things change.
In the case of someone working for a decade on something novel, but ultimately unwanted, there are still many ways to work smart. Did they try to validate their idea with a test audience? Could they have built a lesser featured minimal viable product in half the time, to test if it has value? Did they properly plan resource allocation, in both time and money? Or did they burn everything they had, well past their original plan?
I agree that “working smart” is not a foolproof way to achieve success, but the conversation up the thread focused solely on luck.
It's about getting things done if you're a business. If you're an employee, and your goal is to have money to afford a nice life, it's about extracting money from the business - which, strangely, is often maximized in ways that don't involve "getting things done" i.e. delivering the business any actual value.
If you want to get ahead in your career or financially - the WORST thing you can do is mindlessly do a good job at what you're told to do or what you think (after spending much effort) is the best use of your time.
It's about very specifically checking the boxes that get your more pay or moving up in your career or whatever it is you're after.
> it's about extracting money from the business - which, strangely, is often maximized in ways that don't involve "getting things done" i.e. delivering the business any actual value.
Businesses that pay people who don't provide value are soon to go out of business.
Beg to differ. Nobody does this better than Fortune 500 companies.
Tossing a five gallon jug on your shoulder and running up and down a flight of stairs for hours is REALLY hard work. And yet you don't see people take this on as a job and then complain about it.
So instead someone goes out and gets an entry-level position. The options are limited, because they have no skills. The problem now is they never invest in building skills, so they are stuck in shit-tier jobs forever.
I want to have some empathy for this. But if I go to a convenience store and somehow it takes the cashier 10 minutes to checkout 3 people, that empathy becomes hard to find.
At the end of the day, every person getting a paycheck needs to produce more value to the business than they get paid. The only other way is to tax people who DO actually contribute and spread the money around. There are some serious concerns of fairness about that.
Too many people believe in the labor theory of value, meaning one should get paid according to how hard and long one works. This theory is a false god, because employers do not care how long or hard you work, they only care about the value produced.
Being smart means applying your efforts at producing value, and finding ways to produce more value.
Do you believe that most hard workers don't believe they are applying their efforts towards producing value? Do you believe that everyone who receives reward for producing value , did?
It works to what end? For whom? Certainly for some individuals, but does it work for them by the rules of its own narrative? For some concept of "Humanity"? Maybe, but I'm not sure the apparent demographic distributions at play here resemble "Humanity" in any meaningful statistical sense.
But they don't pay for "value produced" either and instead pocket as much of the surplus value as possible. The game is rigged.
2) your points about self identity being intertwined with work is an important one, and something I struggle with quite a bit.
Life's too short. I've lost two of 4 parents and working more hours aren't going to bring them back.
I find this a very strange idea, and I think it's mostly formed by looking at something without understanding it. The people's motivation the author finds is "they've replaced religion with work". Why isn't it more practical: there's a lot of stuff to do and they want it done, so they do it?
Maybe it's just a divide where neither side understands the other, but I've never understood people who see a big task they want done and don't sink their teeth into it and work hard to get it done. I guess on Orwell's Animal Farm, there's Boxer and there's Napoleon, and Napoleon wonders why Boxer works so hard.
Why they do it though? What's this deep longing that causes them to be more productive instead of, you know, enjoying life?
There will always be lots to be done, and the more that is done the more work will be created to be done on top. I do agree with the point that losing some sense of spirituality (not necessarily a religious/supernatural one) has removed at least one facet of facing life as a human.
Doing work for the sake of feeling accomplished by completing a task seems very meaningless when you are aware you only have one life to experience whatever your soul will be able to, digging your teeth into an endless stream of stuff to do don't really aggrandise your soul, it just makes you a more efficient little human machine.
I'm convinced that there are many things that need just raw manpower thrown at them to make society run as well as it does, and if we all did what in Germany is called "Dienst nach Vorschrift" (aka only do the minimum contractually required), we'd quickly end up with things falling apart. To me it roughly boils down to Kant: act in a way that could be made into law. To prioritize ones leisure and comfort over the needs of society doesn't feel like something we could make into law and still keep being a society.
I'm originally from one of these poorer countries. People do work longer because of survival, because if they don't work as long someone else will and given the lack of employment it become a cutthroat environment for survival of the one willing to sacrifice more, the bosses exploit that even further by dangling the guillotine all the time, "work longer or I will find someone that will". This isn't beneficial to a society, at all.
It's a system of oppression.
> I'm convinced that there are many things that need just raw manpower thrown at them to make society run as well as it does
And we are constantly working to automate or create machinery that makes those more efficient, requiring less manpower when labour gets more expensive. The whole goal should be to work less, not more, work smarter and more efficiently so it requires less hours of someone's life to perform a necessary job for society.
Prioritising one's leisure and free time should be the main driver to work smarter, I've seen so many human lives being wasted away in bullshit jobs and inefficient work at my home country that I wouldn't ever propose that work by itself should be prioritised, workers are not the ones gaining the most out of their work and while this system is in place it will be an eternal struggle between being a servant to some capitalist because you depend on that for survival and living your life to the fullest. I prefer to prioritise my life over someone's else bullshit vision for how to accumulate more capital.
If you are going the Kantian way, this could be made into law: benefits and gains of a worker's work should be directed to other workers, to invest in whatever is needed for workers having to work less.
So I'd say I'm much more into Bertrand Russell's philosophy camp on this topic.
That's my point. It's not just because of oppression (but certainly can be), you'll see the same in subsistence farmers. They don't do a 9-5 with a 1 hour lunch break and frequent chats with colleagues, they toil away because they have their work cut out for them and when whoever does the cutting did it, they took them to be much bigger than they are and cut them a large piece.
I agree with you: we should work less and smarter. But society needs to be kept upright, and too many people are deciding not to work (or to work against it), and then it quickly becomes a game of chicken where those who care the most/can stand the situation the least will pick up the slack.
I'm pretty sure that most advances in productivity will be eaten by growing desires. We have plenty enough to get everyone 20sqm/2000kcal but now we want 70sqm and exotic foods during local winter, and we want to travel the world etc etc.
The article however is about the upper-middle class men. So, these arguments are really irrelevant to them (except maybe the caring bit, but I doubt career-oriented people are unaware of how little companies care about them - they can, after all switch, companies). In tech, I've met tons of people who work a lot because they like it and people who could have obviously retired (startup exits) but keep working anyway, in not-so-glamorous jobs, some even as ICs with all the attendant BS.
Apparently less people identify with work and want to work, for a reason that Atlantic fails to tease out. Atlantic claims it's better this way but I'm not so sure. Better for whom? I'm not even certain it's better for the upper-middle class men themselves - would they get some better ways to self-actualize instead? Not a given. It's unlikely better for the economy, or for anyone else really.
Everyone has different preferences. Based on those they get different outcomes. I actually have also met, and read on HN tons of people in tech who kinda resent people who work a lot because it makes them look bad. But many cannot admit this to others (or themselves) so they invent all kinds of justifications about how it's bad for people to work hard for an uncaring company not being a founder, or how it's better to have kids or go surfing and be a balanced person, or whatever. And really this outcome of getting more done is bad and maybe even fake and they are not better than me!
It's like the books about athletes, where they always emphasize that people who realize their genetic potential are the ones who love the grind and train a ton in a structured way (practicing serves, reading chess books, doing drills, whatever it is). If you don't like the boring repetitive training, and don't force yourself, you won't get as good. Then you can either say "well, I am not as good at training so I'm not going to get good at this sport, it's my fault only, and that's ok". Or you can come up with some excuses or devalue others' outcomes.
This article is just the latter "oh I was too lazy to practice serves so I never got good at tennis, but all those tennis players kept practicing even after making a bunch of money. Well now they are stopping and it makes me feel better, so I conclude it's better for society"
The reason people resent folk who work crazy hard isn't because it makes them look bad (though it's probably factor to an extent). It's because that that preference has become the default for the whole of society in the West. The article points out that both policy in the US and social norms/values have become highly preferenced towards those who work crazy hard. The point isn't that it's bad for certain individuals to value work over everything else, it's that it's bad for society as a whole.
As you say everyone has different preferences but due to this shift people whose preference isn't to put work/career before everything else are being penalised. And despite the rhetoric here it's perfectly possible to value work and work hard without it being your top priority in life.
Why is it bad specifically?
> As you say everyone has different preferences but due to this shift people whose preference isn't to put work/career before everything else are being penalised
Imagine you want to remodel your bathroom. Or, also, imagine you have a bad water leak in your bathroom - after all, on-call is one of the major things people in tech complain about with regard to work-life balance. You call up two otherwise similar plumbers, and one tells you that he can be there ASAP to fix your leak, and he'll do the plumbing for the remodel in 2 visits next week. The other is a balanced person so he won't fix your leak until Monday, and he doesn't like to work for a long stretch of time, so the remodel's gonna take 4 visits, sometime next month. Cost's the same, so you hire the 1st plumber. How would you feel if the 2nd one calls you back and complains he's unfairly "being penalised for his preferences"?
That's the thing. Everyone (ok, most people) would prefer to hire (or work with) a workaholic, other things being equal. But in abstract, some mysterious "society" should apparently prefer otherwise.
I didn't even know workaholism was a word. Good on me, I guess. :)
Some people need to be given a purpose because otherwise they don’t have one. There is a lot of middle ground between the two extremes of total work and no work.
Retail Marijuana sales have only just started in NYC around the same time as remote work, plus outdoor smoking was legalized barely a year ago, so that might be a factor to the increased prevalence of of smelling Dank in the City. Beats hotboxing your apartment or car.
Your evidence is ridiculous. I'm frequently out and about in NYC and I can smell pot every once in a while but not "constantly". I would also imagine that the # of folks smoking pot during work hours is minimal and I don't see an issue with it if you aren't on the clock.
I have never seen porn through someones window either lol. Also most people install window coverings.
If one were born into a Star Trek utopia and never had most of their spark of creativity/curiosity extinguished by a school system designed to pump out worker drones and never had the majority of their waking hours sold off just to exist, I believe they’d be a lot less likely to be a couch potato. There’s no reason the go nuts with burning personal time with “junk food” recreation when personal time has never been at a shortage.
I would argue we are currently at the working constantly extreme and hopefully moving toward a better balance. Cooking soul food is still work that needs to get done. It would be nice to have a little more time each day to cook a proper meal and to have time for more purposeful driven work.