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Sebastien's avatar

Many great points here Thomas. I think we all agree that the toxic hustle culture comes mostly from the American Protestantism - after all, they're the only ones in History to have upholded "work until exhaustion" as a value in itself. The preachers of the Old books have always looked at Idleness with contempt, but the Puritans went a step futher, as everything that was not work was immediately associated with idleness and sloth, which is a sin in itself.

To me, this current "mindset" could be explained by 3 more points, a bit derived from your take:

1. The competition is broader than it ever was. Even 100 years ago, your direct competitors would be from your own region/state, to the exception of a few sectors. So there was less incentive to break your back at work. Nowdays, esp. with the service economy, your competion is all around the world. For many of us, we don't only need to "outwork" the guy from the next village, we need to outwork Chang from China, Rishabh from India and so many others. The burden of performance is just too high.

2. Most people have jobs that are neither high value nor really creative. Everyone will understand the need to rest for a creative job, and usually if you're good at your (high-value, creative) job, you have some leverage and are not that easily replaceable. But if you're just crushing un-ending excel sheets for 8 hours straight or working as an average sales account manager, you're mostly doing production/management tasks all day. People are less tolerant with your downtime or your needs to "recharge" because that's not fundamentally required in order for you to perform. And if you end up burning out, the company doesn't really care because you're not that irreplaceable anyway.

3. The atomization of society and the end of "male-spaces" has left most men in a state of loneliness and the only collective hobbies left for them are at best working out, and at worst drinking together or playing online video games after work. "Hobbies" even bear a bad reputation, as if it was some childish whim, eventhough they've always been held in high esteem in the past.

Just a few thoughts here. Anyway, I gotta get back to work....

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Gaz's avatar

I love some good serendipity. A quote from last night's book, "It is not the business of gentlemen to have occupations."

I wonder how much the fall of the aristocracy has impacted the general view of work/life balance. When the upper echelons of society were respected and imitated, leisure, their principal occupation, was valued. Now society has a need for the rags to riches story. Even a small inheritance is enough to snuff your story of 'self-made' when the reality is we have all inherited the best time to be alive and no one can rightfully claim to be purely self-made. It seems to me that it's this obsession with and glorification of 'pulling yourself up by the bootstraps' has killed the value of leisure and rest for the general public.

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