America's overworked obsession

The less you go to the theater the dance hall the public house the less you think love theorize sing paint fence etc the more you save the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour your capital the less you are the less you express your own life the more you have i.e the greater is your alienated life the greater is the store of your estranged being everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity he replaces for you in money and in wealth all passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice the worker may only have enough for him to want to live and may only want to live in order to have that these words penned by karl marx in 1844 are no less true today than they were 170 years ago and nowhere on earth do they ring more true than in the united states as the wealthiest nation on earth the u.s enjoys the privilege of looking down on the rest of the world as quote less successful our people basking in the light of glorious american exceptionalism what we fail to realize is that our concept of success is not only narrow and short-sighted but also fundamentally opposed to human flourishing our population as a whole may enjoy more wealth than some of our peer nations but at what cost our waking hours are consumed by work our life expectancy is on the decline we rate poorly in metrics like happiness and job satisfaction and those of us in the workforce today will never achieve the financial stability of our parents generation in this episode we're going to attempt to divorce the notion of success from the dogged pursuit of the accumulation of capital let's start with the core belief that animates many american workers the idea of the american dream a sort of national ethos the philosophy of the american dream can be summed up something like this everyone has the opportunity for prosperity and success regardless of their background and based solely upon their ability or achievement it's very much a pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality a phrase which is also very common in american life the idea that one should be able to succeed without any external help solely through one's own force of will and hard work this notion is of course absurd and is made even more ridiculous by the fact that the phrase has been adopted by so many in a manner completely opposite to its original meaning to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps is obviously impossible and that was the original meaning of the phrase to attempt something that is completely absurd of course in america nothing is impossible so we refitted the expression to better suit our dogmatic obsession with self-reliance america is an interesting case study because unlike many other countries when settlers first arrived here there seemed to be an endless expanse of land to explore and claim this frontier lifestyle gave birth to the restless nature of the american dream one governor noted in 1774 that the americans forever imagine the lands further off are still better than those upon which they are already settled he added that if they attained paradise they would move on if they heard of a better place farther west this sums up the american relationship to work pretty well what we have is never enough we need to accumulate more and more wealth never satisfied ever striving over the last couple centuries the american dream has evolved into what we see today work hard save money send your kids to college so they can live a better life than you did retire to florida in a lot of ways this is a noble goal the desire for your children to live a better life than you did is what we should expect of ourselves but more recently over the past 50 years or so the benefits of hard work have been stripped away and the things older generations took for granted have all but disappeared jobs are harder to find and pay far less money than our parents were paid for comparable positions pension plans and retirement benefits are rarely offered these days we have some of the worst vacation and parental leave options in the world much of the economy has shifted to gig work which doesn't have to provide health insurance or any other benefits and domestic and global perception of the us is on a decidedly downward trajectory but don't just take my word for it let's look at a few statistics back in the 1960s only 20 percent of american mothers worked this was partly due to the perceived role of the mother as the primary homemaker and caretaker but it was also largely because most households only needed one source of income to provide a financially stable and upwardly mobile life today 70 percent of american children live in households where both parents are employed most families simply can't get by on a single source of income at least 134 countries have laws that cap the maximum length of the work week the u.s does not in the united states almost 86 of men and over 66 percent of women work more than 40 hours per week you've probably heard that japanese workers are some of the most overworked in the world the average american works 137 more hours per year than the average japanese worker we work 260 more hours than the british we work 499 more hours than the french according to the bureau of labor statistics productivity of the average american worker has increased by 400 since 1950. if we're producing value at four times the previous rate that would mean we could earn a comparable living to our grandparents in one quarter of the work hours right obviously that's not the case we're working longer hours at a drastically increased rate of productivity but we don't benefit from that labor well at least we're rewarded with generous vacation and parental leave oh wait no we have the worst rankings in the developed world and worse rankings than many third world countries among 41 studied nations the u.s ranks dead last in terms of paid parental leave we are the only nation out of those 41 that does not mandate some amount of paid parental leave for comparison the smallest amount of paid leave required by the remaining 40 nations in the study is about 2 months 2 months of paid leave in the u.s is unfathomable in 34 of the 41 countries some of the leave is allocated for new fathers there's a reason we only ever hear the phrase maternity leave in the u.s and that's because new fathers are never eligible for leave in order to spend time with their child some countries that rank higher than the u.s include mexico greece croatia even our fellow workaholic japan estonia offers 86 weeks of paid parental leave again the united states offers nothing there are zero industrialized nations on earth that don't have a mandatory option for paid parental leave except the us vacation and sick time is a similar story we don't have a federal law requiring paid sick days nor do we have a law mandating paid annual leave once again making us the only industrialized nation not to do so take a look at this graph you might notice there's a bar missing that would be the united states not mandating any paid leave whatsoever it's especially depressing when you realize that a mcdonald's employee in norway gets more vacation time than just about any american worker regardless of field or salary meanwhile in the united states we abuse our low paid workers and lambast them for being lazy and not finding a better job it's no wonder that our citizens consistently rank poorly for happiness and job satisfaction they're being worked to death are not offered any benefits get no time off and on top of that are abused for trying to earn a living what's perhaps more disappointing than wealthy older people deriding low-paid workers is other workers in precarious positions doing the same for example take gig economy workers while some of them are fully aware that their occupation is based on their own exploitation there's a disappointing subset of people who buy into the notion of quote hustle culture you'll see these people make inspirational instagram posts posting images of jeff bezos using hashtags like rise and grind and going on about how the key to success is to work all day every day until it pays off here's the thing for these people it will never pay off deifying rich people who accumulated their wealth by exploiting others or inheriting vast sums of money doesn't make you smart it means you've bought their propaganda if you drive 15 hours a day for uber you might make a bit more money but you don't have any opportunity for advancement you're not suddenly going to get health insurance or vacation time because you're working hard you're a piece of equipment to them you drive the car you make them money that's all you're worth to uber but this toxic idea that we need to give up hours days years of our lives as a sort of sacrifice to appease the gods of success is not only misguided it's actively throwing away your life hustle culture destroys your work-life balance and those who engage in it see themselves as morally superior to people working traditional jobs for a wage these sorts of false divisions among the working class are exactly what the ruling class wants the same is true of the false division between the working class and the so-called middle class it's a meaningless distinction designed solely to make more comfortable workers feel superior to their lower paid counterparts and therefore at odds with their own best interests if you feel superior to others or see yourself more like the billionaires than your fellow workers you'll never organize against your oppressors because you believe you might one day become part of this upper echelon if you just work a few more hours per week surely you'll be rewarded and gain entrance into their elite club america's cult of overwork destroys our collective imagination it removes every possible motivation beyond the desire for the accumulation of more wealth to many americans there is nothing but work and the possibility of eventual reward work is the only thing that matters but there is so much more to life than what capitalism has conditioned us to pursue if we worked fewer hours we could take time to spend with family and friends we could learn that hobby we've been putting off for years we could write novels produce art create things that enrich the lives of others on a fundamental human level we could take time to just exist when was the last time you just took a day to relax and you didn't feel guilty about it we are so conditioned to believe that we should always be working that even when we're not working it's all we can think about the american dream the obsession that anyone can quote make it if they work hard enough is thoroughly tangled up with the notion of american exceptionalism we think it's because we work so hard that we are exceptional and you know what we are exceptional we're the most overworked population on the planet our standard of living is going down our life expectancy is going down we don't get vacation days sick days or time to spend with our newborn children we're increasingly unhappy our economy is teetering on the brink of the worst financial crisis in modern history we can't protect ourselves from a pandemic that everyone else handled because we're so conditioned to believe that we always need to be working and somehow we still believe that the american dream is a reality so yes we are exceptional but we are exceptional in all the wrong ways if we don't dismantle the oppressive structures that enable this culture of overwork this is the only form of american exceptionalism that will ever exist