Why Americans Care About Work So Much

> Their work was a matter of subsistence and necessity; it was not a race for status or an existential search for meaning.

As far as I can tell, this cannot be farther from the truth. Pre-industrial people explicitly found existential meaning in their labor.

Their culture, religion and traditions enveloped every aspect of life. Their spiritual frameworks provided direction on everything like how to milk a cow, how to prepare meals, whom to marry and how to raise children.

Milking a cow and raising a child were responsibilities conveyed by a celestial benefactor. The proper execution of both paid praise and showed thankfulness to that benefactor. In this way labor was suffused with meaning.

Humans lost this for sure. This is partly why labor strife was so intense during the industrial era. People were not just stripped of their standard of living but also of a huge part of their ability to structure the world around them. Without a labor environment suffused with meaning they became desperate. It took their agency and dignity. The Luddites for example were driven more by disdain for the subservience the factory system creates than by a fear of total displacement.

This kind of modernist/progressive thinking towards history is probably the worst thing people take away from high school and undergrad history courses. It's so misleading and it creates this psychic barrier that most people never break down.

If community means “where you keep showing up,” then, for many people, the office is all that’s left. What happens when it goes the way of bowling leagues and weekly church attendance?

Bowling leagues, churches, meditation centers, hiking groups, tabletop game gatherings, music festivals, etc are alive and well! Becoming isolated from remote work, realizing one's social circle has shrank to professional acquaintances, and then finding true happiness in one of the aforementioned communities could be a net positive. Better than subsisting on a meager diet of water cooler smalltalk until retirement.

I'm 100% sure that I hate working in the current economy because the best time in my life was when I didn't have to work for 2 years, even though I was earning very little (just enough for basic needs). There's nothing better than having nothing to do and being able to choose what to do. Watching paint dry is second place, working is the worst.

It's hardly surprising that work plays an increasingly central role in everyone's lives when the alternatives are ersatz forms of sociality where people who share no common interest whatsoever get together under the pretence of 'having fun'. Anecdotally a lot of people I know who lived through long lockdowns realised that they didn't really miss having to make small-talk with strangers at parties. It might look like lockdowns greatly impaired their social life, but their social life was mostly a chore anyway. The weekend life of meeting people for drinks or hobbies etc. is failing not because people don't put in enough effort, but because that's not how humans bond, and they've in fact put in a lot of effort in an approach which hasn't paid dividends.

It's because this definition of work as this thing you do so you can do other things is some people's view. In other people's view it's fun. You are a vocateur. Why deny yourself this?

Meaning comes from many places. An objective for oneself that I think might yield joy is to find the path you prefer and to lean into it hard. Just be yourself. If it is work, then give it to yourself. If it is family, then give that to yourself. If it is gardening, do what you must so you can garden.

Of course, happiness isn't monocausal and achievement isn't solely personal so there's many views into this multidimensional problem of meaning.

Healthcare and mandatory expenses can destroy one's life in America.

I don’t know how many people died in the epic IBM vs Microsoft wars of the 90s, but I suspect the total was a fraction of the number of people who died in a single day fighting the crusades.

And last I checked, no one from Google’s Android department has ever flown a plane into 1 infinite loop.

In the US, a lot of benefits, like healthcare coverage and retirement benefits, are tied to employment. This is not equally true in all countries and helps fuel an obsession with work.

Later in the piece, it mentions work as rating above traditional values like patriotism and marriage.

Historically, marriage was largely about survival. It was an economic arrangement and people were much less romantic about it than today.

Nationalism has also been blamed as a root cause of wars Historically. With regional governing bodies emerging, such as the EU and ASEAN, we may be on our way towards a world government, but emergent rather than in a top down fashion.

I lost a bit of the thread but I think the author is trying to get at - what does the American work ethic mean in a post scarcity economy - I think is important to deal with as I think it’s a lot closer than we think. Will we create artificial hamster wheels for everyone? To what extent is the hamster wheel artificial already? Sans health care, many folks could more than satisfy their needs and wants with much less. Will the “system” as it were hold our basic needs like health care as extortion to keep the hamster wheels occupied? Or will a fundamental shift in priorities occur where basic needs are met with the plenty and people of ambition labor for the premium? What about a day when work that is today premium, thought labor, is automated with the steam engine of the mind? What labor would be the premium labor then? Ultimately I wonder if American society, particularly with its highly aggressive conservatism, can survive post scarcity.

The religion isn't new, its name is Protestantism and I find it supremely odd that the name 'Max Weber' does not show up in the article once.[1] This attitude towards work as something that is sacred isn't the invention of CEOs or managers, it's spiritual in nature and existed long before modern tech companies.

This is also important if one wants to deal with 'workism', because the fundamental issue is cultural. The religious values underpinning the American work ethic have been absorbed into secular culture to the point where most Americans probably aren't consciously aware where their attitude towards work comes from.

Another similar manifestation of religious ideas seeping into 'secular' culture is the millenarial AI hysteria. If you don't see where this stuff psychologically originates, make that explicit, and then deal with it you're never going to effectively change culture.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S...

Working hours has been consistent over the last couple decades, which is significantly less than that of the 50s [1]. People are idolizing Office Space and George Costanza types. What people are worshiping is not work, but consumption. If people worked less, they're more likely to waste more time consuming media, than they will spend it on church and community service. Of course, nobody is going to admit to prioritizing weed TikTok, despite both exploding in popularity, so they'll say that they that the most important thing is what enables their consumption, which is work.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG