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Workism Is Making Americans Miserable
People dedicate themselves to being “good workers,” and being successful means keeping clients, customers, and managers happy while fitting into a company’s cultural norms. Unfortunately, success for the company does not always align with what is best for the person, and over time, a disconnect can emerge. This is what happened to me.
Paul Millerd • The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life
Meanwhile, as if to compensate for an increasingly precarious economy, our fantasies about work have grown, if anything, more intense. Hard work is likely the most universally cherished American value. One recent Pew survey found that 80 percent of Americans describe themselves as “hardworking”—outstripping all other traits. Work has gotten worse,... See more
The Baffler • The New Neurasthenia
Malesic, however, is interested in more than tracing burnout’s clinical history. A scholar of religion, he diagnoses burnout as an ailment of the soul. It arises, he contends, from a gap between our ideals about work and our reality of work. Americans have powerful fantasies about what work can provide: happiness, esteem, identity, community. The... See more
The Baffler • The New Neurasthenia
In most 5-to-9 videos, we get little sense of people’s actual jobs, save for the times they log back on in the evening, or the glimpses they show of their side gigs as content creators. What they highlight instead is the way a work mindset can follow you home and shape your leisure in its image. For many Americans, work is the focus of life, the... See more
The Logic of the ‘9 to 5’ Is Creeping Into the Rest of the Day
For hunter-gatherers, chiefs and shamans could, and did, moonlight as foragers and hunters. Overlapping duties preserved a strong sense of community, reinforced by customs and religions that obscured individual differences in strength, skill, and ambition. Shared labor meant shared values.But in industrial economies, lawyers don’t tag in for brain... See more