I remember as a child growing up in the eighties, that haggard, self-obsessed, workaholic parents began to people serious evening television. Thirtysomethings who had lost their way and who were about to lose their families, would struggle to recapture the balance they once had in life.
As the child of people who were far from yuppies, I found these television characters to be hateful, selfish monsters—clearly pure fiction. Who would allow work (of all things) to dominate one’s home life? When you grow up in a blue-collar home (or sometimes no-collar home), it is difficult to grasp how a person might have trouble leaving work at work. Bus drivers don’t frequently sit at the dinner table, moaning on about the day’s stressors, checking traffic reports and multitasking between Blackberry, newspaper, and kids. Typists don’t usually drift away from family conversation to strategically plan the coming week, corporate intrigue, or ways to capitalize on concrete deliverables. Unemployed men may sit in a recliner, figure lottery numbers—and obsessions with gambling and alcohol may take over. But addiction to whiskey, cigarettes, and betting on the horses is understandable—compulsion to fixate on work’s daily tasks—that is inconceivable.
Working merely to earn money for survival can be a hollow thing. You fear your supervisor—you toil, and toil well because losing your job would mean losing your home, your ability to buy groceries. For the working-poor, work certainly is something to take pride in—and it is a step less stressful than poverty from unemployment. But you always have a pit in your stomach. You are a step away from losing it all.
I sense that for most middle class workers (those in cubicles, those who don’t love their jobs, but who don’t hate them), work is a weekday necessity, but it does not define them. They do what they must for eight hours each day, make friends with co-workers who are seated near them, find a like-minded individual to eat lunch with each day. Then at five o’clock, they go home and live. Home has family and other goals—work is merely a means to support the rest of life.
Donning a white collar for the first time, I have a new kind of monster curling its tail around my belly at night. I know we have enough—enough money to pay bills and perhaps buy some nice things (if I had time to waste shopping). But I have ulcers which seem fed by thought—worried thoughts about fiscal stability (at work), about pressures I feel to perform, about the quiet strain I feel attempting to fill a position once held by two (down-sizing), and the crippling sense that I can’t make a mistake. They are depending on me.
That’s job number one. The second job, the night-job, the thing I do which I truly love has suffered because my mind is infected by worried thoughts from the day. I cannot free myself of work, and so I cannot function when my time is my own (and not on the company clock).
Finally, when I’m home, I talk about work. I continue doing my work. I obsessively sit in the corner tapping into my laptop. Work grows exponentially to fill every gap in time I’ve got left. It pours into my mornings, drifts over my sleep and makes me wrestle though paperwork in my dreams.
I cease to see what is in front of me—a man whom I love, who is dear to me, more dear to me than the daily deposits and potential shortfalls—but because I know he loves me, I feel free to love him later.
I want children, but I can’t imagine juggling them with work. Frighteningly, I actually think children are a thing to be juggled. I imagine tossing baby, briefcase, and laptop through the air. If I lost this syncretic battle, this artful show of timing and skill, which would I choose to catch? The kid would heal—but god, everything is on that laptop.
Working in this way has made me a caricature.
Human beings seem to have a need to labor—something that can fulfill us, rather than the curse from god that Adam’s children were meant to suffer. But our culture’s new forms of work can make us beholden to a larger system, a world of faster, faster, faster. It wears a time-clock that measures efficiency rather than happiness. We’ve redefined a principled life. Being conscientious means never being five minutes late—rather than never being cruel. We are measured by our success in truly trivial things.
And passively, quietly, between all of the rushing between deadlines, we have chosen this for ourselves.
Work can be a sickness. The workaholic may be the worst kind of addict, because that to which you are beholden is merely a twisted measure of your own failing self-worth. I’m not rich enough, I work more. I’m seeking approval, I work more. I have lost my way and don’t really know who I am anymore…and in working more, I stumble further into the darkness.
Collectively, we have created wealth (though not shared) which generates emptiness. We have learned a certain kind of blindness. Moving so fast, we fail to see one another, and like the worst kind of sitcom parody, we fail again and again to learn life’s lessons. We hardly do unto others—we move so fast we can barely see them. Rather than the man who blindly pursues riches, stepping on everyone who gets in his way; the truly sick among us pursue labor for labor’s sake, multiplying our duties to work, and forgetting our duties to one another.
It is doubtful that the workaholic can be a truly moral creature. Her sense of obligation has been bent away from the rest of humanity. Her mind, her goals, have become twisted in on themselves, and in fearful blindness, she continues plugging away at her meaningless tasks. Work, rather than a discrete part of life, thus becomes a maze.
As the child of people who were far from yuppies, I found these television characters to be hateful, selfish monsters—clearly pure fiction. Who would allow work (of all things) to dominate one’s home life? When you grow up in a blue-collar home (or sometimes no-collar home), it is difficult to grasp how a person might have trouble leaving work at work. Bus drivers don’t frequently sit at the dinner table, moaning on about the day’s stressors, checking traffic reports and multitasking between Blackberry, newspaper, and kids. Typists don’t usually drift away from family conversation to strategically plan the coming week, corporate intrigue, or ways to capitalize on concrete deliverables. Unemployed men may sit in a recliner, figure lottery numbers—and obsessions with gambling and alcohol may take over. But addiction to whiskey, cigarettes, and betting on the horses is understandable—compulsion to fixate on work’s daily tasks—that is inconceivable.
Working merely to earn money for survival can be a hollow thing. You fear your supervisor—you toil, and toil well because losing your job would mean losing your home, your ability to buy groceries. For the working-poor, work certainly is something to take pride in—and it is a step less stressful than poverty from unemployment. But you always have a pit in your stomach. You are a step away from losing it all.
I sense that for most middle class workers (those in cubicles, those who don’t love their jobs, but who don’t hate them), work is a weekday necessity, but it does not define them. They do what they must for eight hours each day, make friends with co-workers who are seated near them, find a like-minded individual to eat lunch with each day. Then at five o’clock, they go home and live. Home has family and other goals—work is merely a means to support the rest of life.
Donning a white collar for the first time, I have a new kind of monster curling its tail around my belly at night. I know we have enough—enough money to pay bills and perhaps buy some nice things (if I had time to waste shopping). But I have ulcers which seem fed by thought—worried thoughts about fiscal stability (at work), about pressures I feel to perform, about the quiet strain I feel attempting to fill a position once held by two (down-sizing), and the crippling sense that I can’t make a mistake. They are depending on me.
That’s job number one. The second job, the night-job, the thing I do which I truly love has suffered because my mind is infected by worried thoughts from the day. I cannot free myself of work, and so I cannot function when my time is my own (and not on the company clock).
Finally, when I’m home, I talk about work. I continue doing my work. I obsessively sit in the corner tapping into my laptop. Work grows exponentially to fill every gap in time I’ve got left. It pours into my mornings, drifts over my sleep and makes me wrestle though paperwork in my dreams.
I cease to see what is in front of me—a man whom I love, who is dear to me, more dear to me than the daily deposits and potential shortfalls—but because I know he loves me, I feel free to love him later.
I want children, but I can’t imagine juggling them with work. Frighteningly, I actually think children are a thing to be juggled. I imagine tossing baby, briefcase, and laptop through the air. If I lost this syncretic battle, this artful show of timing and skill, which would I choose to catch? The kid would heal—but god, everything is on that laptop.
Working in this way has made me a caricature.
Human beings seem to have a need to labor—something that can fulfill us, rather than the curse from god that Adam’s children were meant to suffer. But our culture’s new forms of work can make us beholden to a larger system, a world of faster, faster, faster. It wears a time-clock that measures efficiency rather than happiness. We’ve redefined a principled life. Being conscientious means never being five minutes late—rather than never being cruel. We are measured by our success in truly trivial things.
And passively, quietly, between all of the rushing between deadlines, we have chosen this for ourselves.
Work can be a sickness. The workaholic may be the worst kind of addict, because that to which you are beholden is merely a twisted measure of your own failing self-worth. I’m not rich enough, I work more. I’m seeking approval, I work more. I have lost my way and don’t really know who I am anymore…and in working more, I stumble further into the darkness.
Collectively, we have created wealth (though not shared) which generates emptiness. We have learned a certain kind of blindness. Moving so fast, we fail to see one another, and like the worst kind of sitcom parody, we fail again and again to learn life’s lessons. We hardly do unto others—we move so fast we can barely see them. Rather than the man who blindly pursues riches, stepping on everyone who gets in his way; the truly sick among us pursue labor for labor’s sake, multiplying our duties to work, and forgetting our duties to one another.
It is doubtful that the workaholic can be a truly moral creature. Her sense of obligation has been bent away from the rest of humanity. Her mind, her goals, have become twisted in on themselves, and in fearful blindness, she continues plugging away at her meaningless tasks. Work, rather than a discrete part of life, thus becomes a maze.
