If You're So Successful, Why Are You Still Working 70 Hours a Week?

I used to work in a senior position as a programmer making quite a lot, and of course, everyone around me including friends and family considered my successful.

But, a few years into that job, I considered it to be the most unhappy time of my life. I quit and became independent. I started building a series of passive income streams. I'm not really working very hard at it, and I certainly make hardly any money compared to before. But I'm a lot happier.

Now I "work" maybe 10 hours a week, and I spend the rest of my time chillin', working on projects that migth be profitable or might not be, reading, writing about whatever I want, etc. But I've got enough and it's the best time of my life.

Yes, I don't have kids and that's partly what enables my alternative lifestyle. But it just goes to show that private land ownership coupled with the family lifestyle necessarily leads to increasing wage-slavery, especially once areas become saturated and land becomes scarce.

What we need to do is move towards a system where private land ownership on a mass scale (not talking about your house) goes away and owning land for yourself to live and eat on is no longer an investment strategy but a way to establish a relationship with the biosphere. The current system is broken....

Hustle culture is absolute poison.

I'm absolutely unsurprised people are working themselves into ill health when 'gurus' are telling people "by all means work 7 hours a day, but the guy next to you is working 22 - who do you think will succeed..?!" We've normalised this to a point people fill their days with busywork just to feel like they're achieving. It sucks.

I say this from experience. But I much prefer life with 7 and a bit hours of solid sleep, exercise, making time for a social life, and actually walking away from my desk when I'm just pushing around the cursor.

There was once a businessman who was sitting by the beach in a small Brazilian village. As he sat, he saw a Brazilian fisherman rowing a small boat towards the shore having caught quite few big fish. The businessman was impressed and asked the fisherman, “How long does it take you to catch so many fish?” The fisherman replied, “Oh, just a short while.” “Then why don’t you stay longer at sea and catch even more?” The businessman was astonished. “This is enough to feed my whole family,” the fisherman said. The businessman then asked, “So, what do you do for the rest of the day?” The fisherman replied, “Well, I usually wake up early in the morning, go out to sea and catch a few fish, then go back and play with my kids. In the afternoon, I take a nap with my wife, and evening comes, I join my buddies in the village for a drink — we play guitar, sing and dance throughout the night.”

The businessman offered a suggestion to the fisherman. “I am a PhD in business management. I could help you to become a more successful person. From now on, you should spend more time at sea and try to catch as many fish as possible. When you have saved enough money, you could buy a bigger boat and catch even more fish. Soon you will be able to afford to buy more boats, set up your own company, your own production plant for canned food and distribution network. By then, you will have moved out of this village and to Sao Paulo, where you can set up HQ to manage your other branches.”

The fisherman continues, “And after that?” The businessman laughs heartily, “After that, you can live like a king in your own house, and when the time is right, you can go public and float your shares in the Stock Exchange, and you will be rich.” The fisherman asks, “And after that?” The businessman says, “After that, you can finally retire, you can move to a house by the fishing village, wake up early in the morning, catch a few fish, then return home to play with kids, have a nice afternoon nap with your wife, and when evening comes, you can join your buddies for a drink, play the guitar, sing and dance throughout the night!” The fisherman was puzzled, “Isn’t that what I am doing now?”

When I worked in public accounting, the idea was that you slaved away as an associate making relatively nothing but would reap the fruits of your labor at the senior level (and increasingly more so as you promoted higher). Most wouldn’t make it to senior or would but would jump ship as soon as they were promoted. There was a built in turnover rate at the lower levels that was very high.

My cohort hit senior in 2020 right when we shifted to work from home. The business made the decision that the economic environment was too uncertain and skipped the annual raises across the board, including for promotions. Suddenly, we were seniors with the pay of associates. 2020 saw record revenue for the firm (they didn’t reveal expenses), and it also saw the largest productivity increase ever. I couldn’t believe it. People were working almost twice as much with their pay was frozen around $70,000 while working as seniors with a masters degree and CPA license.

When things opened back up, that period did a lot of lasting damage to the people that had been “brainwashed” by the system. I saw many people who I think would have become mindless robots change their outlook completely and leave. For me, it was the catalyst to switch into software engineering where I no longer felt like I had to play the game of working more and more to keep up with the others who seemingly never slept, particularly in busy season. Staying up at the office until 2am on my birthday is something I hope I never have to do again.

I’m sure the firm recruited more bright-eyed kids who are ambitious yet insecure like the article mentions, and the partners are making more money than ever while working more hours than ever. I’m happy to be a software engineer that doesn’t have to put up with that level of commitment in exchange for such a small wage. There’s performative theater at the office and then there’s public accounting.

Exactly. I'm not a rich man, I make about 50k SEK /month. But I work when I want, where I want, travel the world with my dog, no obligations on office hours, dress code, and I realistically work 20-30 hour weeks.

I'm a senior consultant at a large well established partly state owned european telco. Life isn't about work, it's about living.

> "Insecure overachievers are exceptionally capable and fiercely ambitious, yet driven by a profound sense of their own inadequacy. This typically stems from childhood, and may result from various factors, such as experience of financial or physical deprivation, or a belief that their parents’ love was contingent upon their behaving and performing well."

It's all there.

The worst thing is that I saw the same principle applied to people that make hardly enough money to live. At least the people of this article seems to have high income, so as soon as they realize their aren't in a bad position they could have an happy exit. But for people that everywhere they look, they will experience the same tragedy, this is horrible and a big problem in some categories.

I imagine that if you have to work more than a sustainable pace to achieve a role, that it can be difficult to return to a sustainable pace and feel that you are "giving" the same. So, there is this self-imposed pressure to continue your behavior.

Even if the entire time one convinced themselves that the plan was to "get to the top and give 90%", it's probably hard to suddenly change. At least, this is my experience as a 35 year old who worked a lot, telling myself that the delayed pleasure was the right thing. Now, (sometimes) I genuinely do not enjoy "fun" things as much because I have conditioned myself to not enjoy it.

Suppose then, in that whole "life has many buckets" idea, you have some control over bucket size. Perhaps it is learned and intentional.

People who truly love their work will have to stop themselves from working 70 hours a week. Sadly not all of us are that lucky, but some people truly love working, and I can't say that's a bad thing, considering our current societal structure. In fact, I'm quite envious.

Billions in currency won't give you one single second of life more.

I've known a couple really successful people. Sold companies, CEOs, etc.

Just talked to a guy last month. 73 years old. Works non-stop. Worth hundreds of millions in his 40's.

He doesn't work 80+ hours per week because he has to. He does it because he wants to.

These people aren't common but they are out there.

I'm not. Except for time-limited emergencies, I have never worked more than 40 hours per week for others. That's never been part of the business deal I agreed to.

In my own ventures, however, I work insane hours. I'm willing to do that because I'm making a bet/investment that benefits me. I'm not going to kill myself in order to benefit someone else's business. The very idea seems crazy to me.

I think it’s hard to generalize this. I would get sick not working all the time. I love it, and while the domains might change, the amount of work likely wouldn’t change based on the amount of success.

Selling expensive intangibles that are hard to value/with an effect that is difficult to attribute is just a tough proposition.

Computer money is easy money, not grief.

addiction

The meritocracy trap, David markovits.

Answer: "Because you can't think of anything better to do."

Just to be clear, this has a double meaning. ^_^

It would change if more people would realize employers can be sued, and not via any union, but directly.