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Why Do We Work So Hard? (1843magazine.com)
An anonymous reader points us to a fascinating piece at The Economist that tries to explain the elements that drive people to work so hard: Working effectively at a good job builds up our identity and esteem in the eyes of others. We cheer each other on, we share in (and quietly regret) the successes of our friends, we lose touch with people beyond our network. Spending our leisure time with other professional strivers buttresses the notion that hard work is part of the good life and that the sacrifices it entails are those that a decent person makes. This is what a class with a strong sense of identity does: it effortlessly recasts the group's distinguishing vices as virtues. This reminds me of an article by Om Malik, veteran reporter and founder of the GigaOm news outlet, who wrote this when announcing his retirement. From his piece: "I relate to Jeter's desire to find life outside of work. Living a 24-hour news life has come at a personal cost. I still wake in middle of the night to check the stream to see if something is breaking, worrying whether I missed some news. It is a unique type of addiction that only a few can understand, and it is time for me to opt out of this non-stop news life."
The wealthy class spends billions on propaganda to convince YOU to work harder so that THEY can make profits. The productivity of USA workers is among the highest in the world and keeps going up in general, yet our wages have been flat.
That means we work our asses off and THEY get the benefits; and they want to keep it that way, for obvious reasons.
Table-ized A.I.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I have taken a year off. Plans include travel, photography, self-development, and anything I find interesting on a day to day basis. I'm now a month and a half away from the office, and loving every moment of it.
As to why I can afford it... Because I didn't buy the biggest house I could. Because I don't own a car, TV or smartphone. Because I didn't spend every cent I earn on gadgets I don't need.
It's not just work, I know the same thing applies to sports and just about everything people do. Especially as you become good at something it draws you in and you want to go further and get better. Success at something is in a real sense addictive. Eventually you get to the point Robert Heinlein described as: "There is no way to stop. Writers go on writing long after it becomes financially unnecessary... because it hurts less to write than it does not to write."
And own your statements. Use first-person.
"We" is a first-person pronoun. It's just plural. GP didn't say "all people..." or "all people except me..." (though I suspect the meaning intended was more like "most people, but not those smart people who realize how the system works, like me..." ).
None of that is universal.
No, but GP has a valid observation about how our economic system is set up. If our society allowed workers to drop weekly hours a bit as productivity increased significantly (aa it has for basically the past century), then we could all be working a lot less while making a living wage. There were experiments back in the 1930s by some big companies to reduce the standard workweek for wage employees, and it had a number of positive benefits for everyone. Some European countries have done the same, especially in encouraging long vacation time.
But in the US, this trend stopped and is much less strong, while income disparities in classes has gone way up. Draw your own conclusions about the motivations.
A mentor of mine, consummate if ever there was one, had worked 45 years at The Aerospace Corporation. Over his career, he had saved numerous satellite programs well over a billion dollars in total. He worked long, hard hours, dedicating every ounce of energy to The Aerospace Corporation.
He was the tops. He'd call me near the end of a fiscal year, and ask if I could spend-out $250k on supplies or equipment, for my own projects, within two or three weeks. "Spend!" one of his emails stated. That level of power, combined with the above-described level of dedication and supreme engineering insight and service.
Then he had a stroke. Within less than two months, he had been forced into retirement (no 6-month Disability leave for you!). Seriously, two months! That is the thanks that he got for saving innumerable satellite programs $100M's, amounting to over $1B in his career. A little vascular oopsie suddenly ended it all, and he was unceremoniously kicked out the door. There was a tiny, awkward "retirement" party, where he was presented with a wooden box of artifacts from his greatest satellite program achievements –worthless to him in a nursing home.
I noticed that while he was examining this 'treasure-box' to the sound of fake-happy applause from everyone at The Aerospace Corporation, no one, not even his attendant nurse, bothered to take a moment to wipe away the huge, gross erupted boil on his left temple. Its core was about 3/4-inch long, and was just lolling there on his face, while everyone took pictures and pretended that it was a celebration.
That is what you get for dedication to a corporate entity such as The Aerospace Corporation. No bonuses. No overtime. And when your body has a little glitch, you are yesterday's garbage.
All companies are like this.
PS — I cannot tell you the name of the company I worked for, but perhaps you can figure it out from the hints.
Just over five years ago, my wife and I were overjoyed to bring a baby girl into this world.
By the time she was two, she was diagnosed as autistic. Not the mild kind where the kid turns out to be really into one hobby; the more severe sort where she was markedly disabled.
So we put her into therapy, into a program that uses scientifically identified treatments; which measures every goal, every progress, and charts and records every bit of minutiae to inform further therapy. We get some government funding, but my wife and I put an extra $40k/year into her therapy of our own money. And neither of us come from wealthy backgrounds, so this isn't pocket change for us by any stretch. We get by by doing without so many of the things our own peers take for granted, including basic things like home ownership. We don't get to go out much, and don't go on fancy holidays. We don't buy things that aren't essential. We have no retirement savings.
And you know what? Our little girl has made progress. She can't speak. I clean piss and shit out of our rugs several times a day. But she is very affectionate, and loves nothing more than to hug and kiss us. She likes to lead the people she loves and trusts by the finger to her favourite toys and activities so we can play together. She loves to laugh. She has an amazing capacity for processing symbols, including letters and numbers, well above her typically developing age group. She can read and spell. She is quite surprising at her ability to use electronics, and carries an iPad with software on it to help her communicate with others. She is exceptionally happy all of the time (we count our blessings that she doesn't have any of the behavioural issues often connected to children with autism).
Beyond the therapy, we set money aside in trust for her for when she is an adult. It's unknowable at this time whether she'll be able to function independently when she's older. My wife and I are very well aware that we won't live forever, and barring any sort of tragedy she'll easily outlive us. So on top of the therapy expense, we put away what we can into investments in her name for the long term -- we're talking 15 - 80 years (based on current life expectancy). We have to plan way ahead, as we can't stomach the idea of her being placed into an institution with nothing when we're gone to dust.
(She has no siblings to help take care of her when we're gone. When your first child is disabled with a disability that most probably has a genetic component, you start having to have conversations and make decisions you would never ever have to worry about otherwise. Will the next child also be disabled? Will they be even more seriously disabled? How could we ever afford to care for two disabled children, when we just scrape by with the one we have? Can we afford to take that risk, knowing that both children may suffer because of it? The idea of having a baby shouldn't be fear inducing, and yet that's what the concept holds for my wife and I. There is currently no genetic testing the can be done for autism. We as parents can't be tested. A gestating fetus can't be tested. It's a crap-shoot, and we don't even know the odds).
So why do I work hard? I do it for her. It's her one and only chance at ever having any sort of life. I'll probably never be able to retire -- I fully expect to die at my desk. This wasn't at all what I had planned for my life, but it's the life I have before me. What's more, she's worth it. My reward is when she knows it's time to go to bed, and she leads me by the finger to her bed for a story, a song, a cuddle, and a kiss goodnight.
(Posted anonymously for obvious reasons)
Yeah, things are way more complicated than that.
I'm near or at the bottom. I can't tell anyone what to do. I manage nothing, even the use of my own skills or time without talking first with my supervisor (who to his credit is likely to accept any ideas I might have - up to and including small software projects if it'll improve the workflow.)
This is normal, I'm not complaining.
My supervisor manages me and a few others in our department. His job is really stressful, in part because a lot of the time the people asking him to make stuff happen don't fully appreciate the amount of work involved, nor the time necessary to complete the task. That gets delegated to us to some degree, though he has a lot of similar work to handle as well. He manages us, but is also one of us.
He's not my ruler, but he is my boss.
His boss is also my boss, but not all of his bosses are also my boss - the one I answer to often speaks directly to me, and the ones my supervisor has to deal with often involve tasks that don't involve me. This is kind of a relief, because my boss's boss is a cool guy and we get along fine. He's probably rich, but he doesn't flaunt it and he's not at the top or anywhere near it - not that I care about that sort of thing.
HIS boss - my boss's, boss's, boss, I rarely speak to and does work I don't fully understand. I think he communicates with the people we do business with - the property owners we work for. These owners are what I consider the real bosses. Donald Trump "builds" his buildings the same way these guys do - with people like us. We never see them, not at my level anyway. We just make their desired thing happen - but I'm okay with that. These guys aren't the ones responsible for time management.
If your gripe is that all your time is spent working, it's probably a middle manager's fault (or yours). Not some distant "ruler", and definitely not an actual one (unless you live in North Korea). Though admittedly I work in a relatively flat organizational structure and a small one at that. I can and do see where the real time constraints occur - when other people make promises of performance on your behalf. If they do it poorly, you're just as f-ked as if you were the one to make that promise.
Amen. I wouldn't say I love my job, but it's a branch of the kind of work I like to do (3d modeling and programming). I work the hardest when I work a full 8 hour day, then go home and instead of watching TV, work on my own projects. It is in these days I feel the most fulfilled. The days where I just work 8 hours and then veg out watching cartoons are the days I feel the least fulfilled.
Sometimes I'm needed to work on a crunch time schedule. I hate those, but I'm almost never alone in this and we're always happy at the end. It's like defeating a dragon. It didn't eat us alive, we're proud of ourselves, and now our boss's are really happy with us too.
Hard work in life is normal. What isn't is when you're too far removed from the fruits of your labor and are unable to take pride in it (like fast food or low-end retail). When you have pride in your work, and you can take credit for your part in it, it feels good.
I think it's all down to the protestant work ethic that's been drilled into the minds of all westerners for generations. "Work hard in this life, and you shall receive your just rewards in the next life" and so on. This was dreamed up by royalty, nobility and particularly the church, in order to keep the masses complacent and too tired to effect a proper revolt.
And then there's the just-word fallacy, that those who work hard also earn the rewards, which is demonstrably false and always has been.
Eat the rich.
We work so hard because it's in the best interests of our rulers that we do, because they get to gather the fruits of our labour. That's all there is to it.
That's the worst reasoning I've seen on the internet all day long, and that's really saying something.
There's a good argument that he's "right", though not about his summary sentence. There's a bit more to it. Our rulers have managed to get control of almost all of the resources, and we work so hard because they have enforced artificial scarcity over the rest of us, and if we don't then we will become poor. Then we will be criminalized for being poor, and driven into poverty. It's illegal to live in poverty (child protective, mandatory insurance with secret formulae, etc) and it drives people onto the street, which is even more illegal. If you end up there, the system either murders you or drives you insane.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
We used to pay people to do things we do now: pump our gas, do our laundry, etc. Not only do we work our job, we do jobs other people used to.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/