(2019-02-24) Thompson America's Religion Is Work

Derek Thompson: America’s Religion Is Work. The average work year has shrunk by more than 200 hours. But those figures don’t tell the whole story. Rich, college-educated people—especially men—work more than they did many decades ago. They are reared from their teenage years to make their passion their career and, if they don’t have a calling, told not to yield until they find one.

(Grr this piece jumps from data about elite men to millenials and lower-class people (whose leisure time has increased). A muddle.)

for the poor and middle class, work would remain a necessity; but for the college-educated elite, it would morph into a kind of religion, promising identity, transcendence, and community. Call it workism.

1. THE GOSPEL OF WORK

The decline of traditional faith in America has coincided with an explosion of new atheisms. Some people worship beauty, some worship political identities, and others worship their children. But everybody worships something. And workism is among the most potent of the new religions competing for congregants.

Homo industrious is not new to the American landscape

In 1980, the highest-earning men actually worked fewer hours per week than middle-class and low-income men, according to a survey by the Minneapolis Fed. But that’s changed. By 2005, the richest 10 percent of married men had the longest average workweek.

This shift defies economic logic—and economic history. The rich have always worked less than the poor, because they could afford to.

Perhaps long hours are part of an arms race for status and income among the moneyed elite. Or maybe the logic here isn’t economic at all. It’s emotional—even spiritual. The best-educated and highest-earning Americans, who can have whatever they want, have chosen the office for the same reason that devout Christians attend church on Sundays: It’s where they feel most themselves. (Self-Actualization)

Workism may have started with rich men, but the ethos is spreading—across gender and age.

Here’s a fair question: Is there anything wrong with hard, even obsessive, work?

there is no question that an elite obsession with meaningful work will produce a handful of winners who hit the workist lottery: busy, rich, and deeply fulfilled. But a culture that funnels its dreams of self-actualization into salaried jobs is setting itself up for collective anxiety, mass disappointment, and inevitable burnout.

even the best white-collar roles have long periods of stasis, boredom, or busywork. This mismatch between expectations and reality is a recipe for severe disappointment, if not outright misery, and it might explain why rates of depression and anxiety in the U.S. are “substantially higher” than they were in the 1980s, according to a 2014 study.

One of the benefits of being an observant Christian, Muslim, or Zoroastrian is that these God-fearing worshippers put their faith in an intangible and unfalsifiable force of goodness. But work is tangible, and success is often falsified. To make either the centerpiece of one’s life is to place one’s esteem in the mercurial hands of the market

2. THE MILLENNIAL WORKIST

Millennials were honed in these decades into machines of self-optimization. They passed through a childhood of extracurricular overachievement and checked every box of the success sequence, only to have the economy blow up their dreams.

American Millennials have been collectively defined by two external traumas

The first is student loan debt.

The second external trauma of the Millennial generation has been the disturbance of social media, which has amplified the pressure to craft an image of success

The output of white-collar work—algorithms, consulting projects, programmatic advertising campaigns—is more shapeless and often quite invisible.

The problem with this gospel—Your dream job is out there, so never stop hustling—is that it’s a blueprint for spiritual and physical exhaustion. Long hours don’t make anybody more productive or creative; they make people stressed, tired and bitter.

3. TIME FOR HAPPINESS

Some workists, moreover, seem deeply fulfilled. These happy few tend to be intrinsically motivated

But maintaining the purity of internal motivations is harder in a world where social media and mass media are so adamant about externalizing all markers of success.

A staggering 87 percent of employees are not engaged at their job, according to Gallup. That number is rising by the year

One solution to this epidemic of disengagement would be to make work less awful. But maybe the better prescription is to make work less central.

On a deeper level, Americans have forgotten an old-fashioned goal of working: It’s about buying free time. The vast majority of workers are happier when they spend more hours with family, friends, and partners, according to research conducted by Ashley Whillans, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School. (Leisure)