Working Ourselves to Death
A necessary questioning of the primary human obsession
I recently came across a LinkedIn post that caught my attention.
The post’s creator said something like, “My company has a policy where every five years that you’re with them, you’re awarded a one-month sabbatical. I’m taking mine in Italy this year, and it will be the longest I’ve spent away from work in as long as I can remember.”
Then he continued, “Shoutout to (company name) for having such a great policy. Life is meant to be lived.”
Life is meant to be lived.
That one hit me weird.
Huh. Is it? Really?
Because the thought of associating 30 days out of 1,824 with “life” seems a little odd to me.
But then again, when you start to think about the typical worker’s life–mainly here in the US–there’s a lot that seems counterintuitive to the concept of a “lived” life, let alone one with any honest semblance of balance.
To be fair, I do think that’s a cool policy for a company to implement.
I’ve actually seen a lot of press lately showcasing companies–usually either startups or progressive tech companies–implementing decreasingly-archaic policies for their employees.
Four-day work weeks, longer maternity leave, paternity leave, unlimited PTO, and mental health days have all just narrowly escaped the realm of the taboo, and some have even become–dare I say–common.
Twentieth-century Americans would have likely considered these ideas science fiction, but–especially in a post-pandemic world–heightened work flexibility has become a primary goal for companies looking to attract dedicated workers.
It’s true, as well, that a day spent working a job is not necessarily a day not spent “living.”
Many of us are fortunate enough to find genuine joy and purpose in our daily work, and even those of us that don’t are still humans with a breath, a pulse, and dreams–with or without a laptop in front of us. We can build families, participate in hobbies, prioritize our fitness and physical health, and enjoy leisure time, all the while succeeding in a full-time role.
My qualms with the modern work climate, however, are not directed at specific companies or policies, or even at the resulting lifestyles of the affected employees. I take issue, instead, with the entire culture of work that we’ve all come to accept as normal, and practically without question.
The average individual’s life–and I cannot emphasize that word enough: LIFE–is mostly designed around work. Working a 9-5 from Monday to Friday and retiring at 65 sounds pretty normal these days, but allow me to phrase it a bit differently:
One third of our lives are spent at work.
That is, for all the time we spend on this earth…
having thoughts, forming relationships, experiencing emotion, planning, worrying, dreaming, living and breathing, all from the second we’re born into it until the second we pass on from it…
a third of it is spent working a job.
How did we get here?
As much as I’d love to be able to blame the issue on something recent and more tangible, dedicating our lives to our work is not exactly a new concept. In fact, average weekly hours worked has pretty drastically declined over the past couple of centuries.
Thanks in large part to Henry Ford’s leadership in popularizing the five-day workweek–a decision that, at the time (1926), was highly controversial–the concept of labor-free weekends is now commonplace. Before then, average time spent working (at least in manufacturing) had been on a steady decline from an estimated 69 weekly hours in 1830.
Following Ford’s decision, a few events shaped the standard workweek through the first half of the twentieth century.
Just a few years later, for example, the Great Depression forced many large companies to reduce workers’ hours to an average of 30 per week (five days per week, six hours per day).
This then spurred an entire movement pushing to standardize the 30-hour workweek, but its momentum quickly dissipated due to pushback from government agencies and industry leaders alike.
Years later, the demand for labor during World War II helped to once again secure the 40-hour workweek as the default1.
Though popular opinion of the subject has shifted nearly every which way in the decades since then, this is roughly the same format we know and love (or loathe) today.
In as mental-health-oriented an age as the 2020s have proven to be, it seems strange to me that more of us don’t question this still-massive emphasis on work as a top priority of life.
I think of Paleolithic humans. Life before irrigation, language, legislation of any kind, modern technology, knowledge of geography, modern medicine, and, of course, work (as we now think of it) was not exactly superior to the life we enjoy today.
It does, however, prove that a life dedicated to a day job isn’t fundamentally human.
Who’s to say that play, leisure, conversation or relationship-building couldn’t have evolved with humans as the “main thing” in place of work? Starting from as clean a slate as the one that lasted for most of early human history, it seems at least possible that work could have evolved alongside us as a part of life, but perhaps not nearly as substantial of one as it did.
I can’t claim to articulate how exactly this hypothetically could have happened (a civilization founded on play, for example, does seem a bit far-fetched), but then again, we’ve only ever known a world reliant on work, so we can’t help but be victim to our own reality in trying to dream up something of this nature.
At any rate, I’d say it seems conceivable that the way we’ve evolved to incorporate work in the human dynamic is excessive, and not for any reason more relevant than that’s how we’ve always done it.
A less obvious factor in the history and shaping of our work life, though, has been the influence of two phenomena in particular:
consumerism and hustle culture.
Regarding the former, while we tend to view an obsession with making-more-money-as-a-means-to-buy-more-stuff as a recent one, many of the proponents for longer working hours in the mid-twentieth century were of this same mindset.
Similarly, the glamorization of work and the tying of one’s productivity and output to his or her self-worth is also not new. Americans 70 years ago seemed to have decried laziness (defined as not devoting one’s life to work, apparently) all the same.
It seems as though while much of the population has lately leaned into a more progressive view of work–one in which more of it isn’t automatically a good thing–the majority have been more deeply influenced by one or both of these perspectives.
That is, for all the pitfalls inherent in working more and/or harder, individuals (and Americans, in particular) are willing to opt for doing so in order to be able to earn more money, buy more things, and bind their identities to a hustle and grind mentality.
I’m not so sure I know exactly why this is, but I do have a guess.
As non-fundamental to human nature as is a 9-5 desk job, greed, ambition, and social competition are, dissimilarly, about as human of traits as they come.
Whereas our internal rewards systems have somewhat evolved to value pleasure (hence my bias for a less work-oriented world, for example), they’ve evolved to become even more effective in obtaining said pleasure–as well as comfort and security–than in actually enjoying it.
So although a life of greater flexibility and less stress (A.K.A. one in which work is not occupying 1/3 of one’s living hours) could be viewed as one source of happiness (pleasure), the more familiar and precedented source of happiness–or at least of security–is money…
And in seeking pleasure and security via money, we’ve established work as a main focus of life.
More simply: we’re built to seek rewards, money is the ultimate reward, and work is the primary vessel through which we earn money, so we obsess over work.
Simultaneously, we’ve adopted tangential objectives that only further perpetuate this prioritization of labor and of working longer hours…
…such as consumerism (EX: Buying more stuff = signal to others that I have greater financial security = heightened social status [another core human desire])…
…or subscribing to hustle culture (EX: Working harder/more intensely/more publicly = signal to others [and myself] that I’m more capable of earning money = heightened social status AND heightened internal sense of security).
The result? We’ve designed not only our entire societal framework, but even our own belief systems and much of our culture around work as a primary channel for human output, value, and attention.
I’ll be the first to admit that my entire perspective in this essay is especially cynical.
Objectively speaking, average hours spent working does vary a lot these days; factors like location, age, industry, remote vs in-person, family situation, education, and more all play a role in the time an individual dedicates per week to their job2.
Also, not everyone works, not everyone works more or harder than they’d like to, and certainly not everyone feels actively dissatisfied with their current work situation. In fact, half of Americans are currently satisfied with their work situation, with satisfaction (naturally) increasing in relation to income3.
Considering all the other problems our species faces on this planet, maybe working too much isn’t necessarily the worst one.
As a firm believer in critical thinking, however, I find myself not angry, but intrigued by the lack of objectivity around such a core piece of our life on this planet. For something on which such a high percentage of us spend such a high percentage of our lives thinking and acting, we sure don’t question it much.
I also wonder why we don’t place a greater value on other, non-work, facets of life. Shouldn’t we be encouraged to explore more of our planet? Or to learn as much as we can? Or to meet more people, enjoy ourselves more often, test our physical potential, or seek to define the meaning of life? Should one of these goals not be the “main thing” in place of our careers?
I can’t imagine work is going anywhere anytime soon, and truthfully, I’m very much ok with that. I’m fortunate enough to be one of those Americans who’s very happy in his professional life, and who does find a sense of purpose in daily work.
But I’m also ok with pushing for a less stigmatized and more outside-the-box discussion around what work should mean to us, and the role it should play in a diverse society of humans with varying goals, skills and values.
The one-size-fits-nearly-all approach we’ve been using has served its purpose as the default for, well, a couple thousand years. Now, in a society that has proven itself to be more introspective than ever, perhaps it’s time we re-evaluate what we want out of our brief moment on this planet.
-Max
P.S. If you enjoyed this post (or any of my previous ones), I’d love for you to share it with one friend whom you feel might also enjoy it. Thank you!
Whaples, Robert. “Hours of Work in U.S. History”. EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. August 14, 2001. URL http://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/
“How Many Hours Does the Average Person Work per Week?” Indeed Career Guide, Indeed, 2022, https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/average-hours-worked-per-week.
“How Americans View Their Jobs.” Pew Research Center's Social & Demographic Trends Project, Pew Research Center, 28 Sept. 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2016/10/06/3-how-americans-view-their-jobs/.
i read really slowly... but i truly like the idea of play week instead of work week. and i will add, i really haven't found a job that i love. i'm pretty starting to detest my current job... complain complain. that consumerism thing... needing to work to get stuff or maybe just have a place to live. i definitely think about "living" around work. thanks for your thoughts