Why we WORK so much
Why we WORK so much
My name is Andres Acevedo and this is The Market Exit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng_0pVSZa6M
I was looking forward to taking control of my own time or being able to choose when, where, how much and with whom to work. I was looking forward to becoming my own boss.
But lately I’ve been reflecting over these past four years and I’ve asked myself what type of boss have actually been to myself?
Because despite my initial vision of a flexible work life, I found myself following a surprisingly traditional work schedule. I’ve worked at least Monday through Friday, at least 8 hours per day. Also, I’ve noticed that as my own boss, I’ve been quite hard on myself. Whenever I have veered off this standard work schedule, I’ve given myself both criticism and guilt.
So I decided to look into where did my inner boss get its work ethic from? And here’s what I learned.
The traditional work ethic
We humans have been around for approximately 300,000 years. And for a majority of this time, we humans have lived as hunter gatherers. While we cannot know for sure, anthropological studies indicate that as hunter gatherers, we humans have had what the German historian Max Weber refers to as a traditional work ethic.
Under our traditional work ethic, work is something that you need to do in order to survive, but it’s also something that you stop doing once you have enough. In other words, under a traditional work ethic, you hunt and gather the food you need or you earn the money you need and then you stop working.
2300 years ago, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle exemplified this traditional work ethic when he argued that working for money is useful merely as a means to something else, and that the true purpose of human life is “Eudaimonia” (flourishing) which could mean to contemplate one’s place in the universe. The ancient Romans, they shared this traditional work ethic. The Latin word for business “Negotium” literally means not enjoyable. To the educated classes in ancient Rome, most paid work was considered humiliating.
The traditional work ethic was later embraced in a slightly modified version, also by the Catholic Church, with Thomas Aquinas arguing in the 13th century that work is a duty. It’s necessary to meet the needs of family and community, but not much more.
The protestant work ethic
But in the 1500s, a massive paradigm shift started taking place - a shift that affects the way you live your life today and how I act as a boss to myself.
In the 1500s, the Protestant reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin argued that human beings shouldn’t live idly or solely engaged in spiritual contemplation within monastic life. Instead, Luther and Calvin introduced the idea that everyone has a personal calling, and to honor God, people should work hard towards this calling.
In his famous book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber explains how this Protestant reform marked the beginning of something new. The Protestant work ethic. Under this Protestant work ethic, work was no longer merely a means to an end, but served its own purpose. Through work, you fulfill your life’s calling. Therefore, you don’t stop working just because you have the money you need. Instead, you have to keep grinding. Through this reform, the philosopher Erich Fromm argues that “man developed an obsessional craving to work, which had been lacking in a free man before that period.”
This was obviously a monumental shift, but it didn’t happen overnight. Many workers held on to a traditional work ethic and they stopped working once they had enough money to buy what they needed. As late as year 1694, a businessman complained that when food prices are low and workers therefore don’t need that much money, workers refused to work more than 2 hours a week.
Oprah, Simon Sinek and politicians
Over time, however, the Protestant values of working hard towards a calling, irrespective of whether you already have what you need, were secularized and internalized by almost everyone. Today, you can find examples of this work ethic basically everywhere, sometimes explicitly, like when Oprah Winfrey asserts that each of us has a personal calling and that we need to work hard to fulfill this calling if you want to become successful.
“Everybody has a calling and your real job in life is to figure out as soon as possible what that is, who you were meant to be, and begin to honor that. - Opral Winfrey”
But this Protestant work ethic doesn’t just make us work hard. It is also been leveraged by corporations to make us consume more, which in turn forces us to work more.
As leadership guru Simon Sinek famously explained. The best way to get people to buy more overpriced gadgets is to shut up about the economic necessity of a product or service, and instead construct a story of how this product fits in to the consumer’s own calling.
“What’s your purpose? What’s your cause? What’s your belief? People don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it. This explains why every single person in this room is perfectly comfortable buying a computer from Apple. But we’re also perfectly comfortable buying an MP3 player from Apple or a phone from Apple, or a DVR from Apple. - Simon Sinek”
But perhaps most clearly our work ethic is evident in politics where creating, protecting, glorifying jobs is central to all political parties. The right wing parties want to have more private sector jobs. The left wing parties want to have more public sector jobs. The Green parties want sustainable jobs. And the nationalist parties, they want domestic jobs. Jobs, jobs, jobs.
Conclusion – Is our work ethic working in our favor?
When I mentioned in the beginning of this video that Aristotle saw paid work as less valuable and that the true purpose of life was “eudaimonia” (flourishing), I’m sure that some of you sneered that it was easy for Aristotle to say that since he had slaves to do all the actual work. I hear you on that. But here’s the thing. Today we have the equivalent of billions of slaves working for us. They are called machines, artificial fertilizer, electricity, computers. The list goes on. But instead of figuring out how we can use this technology to achieve the “eudaimonia” Aristotle talked about, our society seems to be doubling down on the Protestant work ethic.
As author and sociologist Roland Paulsen has observed: “society’s message is clear already when you start school: only by enduring the tedium of a scheduled life can you alleviate the worry for your economy and status.” That’s the message my inner boss has internalized. But I believe this Protestant work ethic isn’t serving me anymore. And I believe maybe it isn’t serving our society either.
So maybe we should replace it with something better.
Book recommendations
I was inspired to make this video based on two great books,
- The Pathless Path by Paul Millard and
- The Labor Society (”Arbetssamhället”), by Roland Paulsen.
If you like this video, I’m sure that you would like both of those books.