Workaholic society

I woke up at seven yesterday, had a quick breakfast, started working on my German presentation. I continued the day with about half an hour of work on my undergraduate project and then a rush to a lecture. Then a return home, a bowl of soup of lunch and back to work. The soup didn't quite fill me up (how would it, it was literally one potato, half a leek and some water!) so despite my worry about not having time to cook because of all the work that has to be done I decided to make something and chose a full stomach over more work. The day was followed by more work – first at home, then in the library, then just a bit on a lawn in college, and now I’m back home, not feeling like work anymore, despite the fact that it’s not even 7pm yet and that I’ve really not been that productive today. Or at least I don’t feel like I was – after all, considering the quantity of work, I didn’t reach any massive progress with my project. Yet, if I count the hours of work I’ve done, excluding my lecture, I’ve been working for nine hours, or seven not counting German in.

Many, if not most, of my days are like that – some are a bit freer mostly because of my extracurricular activities, such as choir, gymnastics, violin, running, German and this blog (where the last two still demand a lot of intellectual effort and concentration and are thus not exactly relaxing). Today, for example, was a really lovely day, and I wanted to go for a run, but thought that I didn’t have time (perhaps I could have gone instead of my lunch?). And ironically, I don’t even have any deadlines (and when I have them, I’m usually way ahead them, working for the next one before the first one has even passed). It seems that I just can’t stop.

I’ve always pride myself with my diligence, especially as it seems to be such an important quality to have in a modern society. Work, work, work hard, and you’ll achieve your dreams. To be fair, hard work has brought me far, to Oxford at least. But I’m wondering what the costs of working hard are, is it really worth it? Are the dreams we achieve really worth the hard work, or would we be equally happy even if we didn’t achieve them, simply living a different, but in a way an equally good life?

Our society seems to be saying, work hard and you will be reach everything you want, you will be happy and free to do whatever makes you happy. It kind of reminds me of “Arbeit macht frei”, and considering what happened in that place it doesn’t sound like the right solution to me. Working a lot your entire life has a lot of consequences and can lead to both physical and mental health problems. These can include the common back problems that so many people have from simply sitting too much (we rarely have a choice to walk around when working and in this way taking care of our daily exercising requirements), as well as burn outs. Whatever sort of problems they are, it can take very long for a person to recover or may permanently damage them for the rest of their life. And even when they don’t change your life long-term, they may make you very unhappy for a certain short period of time. It’s ironic if you think about it, if anything hard work is also supposed to contribute a lot to the society, but all the problems that occur because of it might even be costing the society more than the benefits it is receiving.

Another problem with working a lot is that we obviously only have one life that has to be enjoyed. So we can either choose to not work that much and enjoy every moment of it, or work hard and hope it pays off one day, when we can enjoy it more than we can at the present moment as we will be better off materially, so that we can afford to spend more and have to worry less about how to survive the next month. I have a friend, for example, who is taking his life in quite a chill way, doing some work but really not too much, and he seems to be doing just fine even financially and can enjoy his life and do what he wants a lot. Perhaps all this work really isn’t needed in order to have a decent life neither now nor in the future.

On a side note, I watched an interesting Ted Talk a while ago given by Dan Gilbert about how relative our happiness is – people who, from our perspective, should be unhappy because of the things that happened to them (such as becoming disabled, losing a lot of money or being cheated on) are in long-term equally happy as anyone else. When things happen to us in real life, we usually can’t reverse them, thus we accept them and are happy with them, and it is the same with the decisions we make. It is only when we can change our minds and reverse the decisions that we start to re-thinking them and becoming less happy with them. So, we are always told that we should work hard and thus, in the future we will be happier than we would otherwise be. But from what I’ve said above, that can’t be true – we don’t know how our lives would be if we did more or less work and we can’t reverse our lives, so we are just happy with where we’ve got with our work. We therefore think we are this happy (indirectly or directly) because of the work we’ve done, but that’s not exactly true, we would probably be equally happy whatever trajectory in life we took.

In a way then, perhaps, we should stop placing diligence and really hard work on pedestal as the way to go, as the real virtues, and focus more on valuing people who really know how to enjoy life – who work to the extent that they enjoy and that allows them to pay for their living, but really focus more on enjoying their life instead.