Society started to glorify the entrepreneurs who said they wanted to change the world, and told us how they structured their (very long) days for maximum greatness. Afterward, in the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, workaholics started to be identified not by blazers but rather hoodies, as tech start-ups grew into giants like Google and Facebook, and power shifted to Silicon Valley. Sally Maitlis, professor of organisational behaviour and leadership at the University of Oxford, says that "later, the drive for efficiency that arose out of the Industrial Revolution", as well as the way we prize productivity, have "further embedded the value of consistent hard work, often at the cost of personal wellbeing".įast forward to the yuppie age of Thatcher and Reagan, when spending long hours at the office to support the upwardly mobile lifestyle and the rampant consumerism of the decade became more commonplace. The roots of this phenomenon can be traced back to the 'Protestant work ethic' in the 16th Century – a worldview held by white Protestants in Europe that made hard work and the quest for profit seem virtuous. So, where did our tendency to glamourise overwork come from? Why, in rich, Western countries, like the UK and the US, is there a sense that working yourself ragged is something to brag about? "We glorify the lifestyle, and the lifestyle is: you breathe something, you sleep with something, you wake up and work on it all day long, then you go to sleep," says Anat Lechner, clinical associate professor of management at New York University. In 2014, the New Yorker called this devotion to overwork "a cult". Romanticisation of work seems to be an especially common practise among "knowledge workers" in the middle and upper classes. Some of the earliest researchers on burnout in the 1970s asserted that many people in jobs geared toward helping others, like employees in clinics or crisis-intervention centres, tended to work long hours that led to emotional and physical exhaustion – a trend that's shown up in the pandemic, too.īut millions of us overwork because somehow we think it’s exciting – a status symbol that puts us on the path to success, whether we define that by wealth or an Instagram post that makes it seem like we're living a dream life with a dream job. Reasons for overwork also depend on industry. In Arab League countries, burnout is high among medical professionals, possibly because its 22 members are developing nations with overburdened healthcare systems, studies suggest. In Japan, a culture of overwork can be traced back to the 1950s, when the government pushed hard for the country to be rebuilt quickly after World War Two. People work long hours all over the world, for many different reasons. Overwork isn't a phenomenon exclusive to Silicon Valley or Wall Street. Could the post-pandemic world be our chance to try? Given how entrenched our admiration for high-stress work culture is, however, halting our overwork obsession will require cultural change. Yet, one thing is different: we understand far more about the consequences of overwork, and the toll burnout can take on our mental and physical health. In spirit, we're not so far from the Gekko years as we think. And since the pandemic hit, our work weeks have gotten longer we send emails and Slack messages at midnight as boundaries between our personal and professional lives dissolve. Billionaire tech entrepreneurs advocate sacrificing sleep so that people can "change the world". Co-working spaces are filled with posters urging us to "rise and grind" or "hustle harder". New studies show that workers around the world are putting in an average of 9.2 hours of unpaid overtime per week – up from 7.3 hours just a year ago. In fact, it is expanding into more sectors and professions, in slightly different packaging. If you live and breathe work (and toss in some moral flexibility), the message was, the rewards will be exciting – and immense.Īlthough many of us associate overly ambitious workaholism with the 1980s and the finance industry, the tendency to devote ourselves to work and glamourise long-hours culture remains as pervasive as ever. The movie – ultimately a cautionary tale – depicted work and wealth-obsessed executives putting in long hours in sleek skyscrapers to seal deals and boost their pay packets, at the expense of whoever got in their way. In 1987 Gordon Gekko, the unscrupulous cigar-smoking powerhouse in the film Wall Street, told the world: greed is good. When you’re done with this article, check out our full list of the year’s top stories. As we head into 2022, Worklife is running our best, most insightful and most essential stories from 2021.
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