The Method (Essay Outline)
Paragraph 1: using appropriate signal phrases, summarize and paraphrase Derek Thompson’s essay “The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable.”
Paragraph 2, your thesis: Develop a claim that explains how one or more of the above shows or documentaries supports Thompson’s major points about Workism.
Paragraphs 3-7 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 8, your conclusion, is a powerful restatement of your thesis.
Your last page, Works Cited, is in MLA format and has a minimum of 4 sources.
Notice the above outline has no counterargument-rebuttal. Why? Because you're analyzing the causes of Workism rather than arguing how persuasive Thompson's essay is.
Review the Causes of Workism:
Causes of Workism
- FOMO
- Reptilian competition (lizard brain wants to dominate)
- Groupthink or peer pressure
- Lack of rewards in home and community life and the seeking compensation for that disconnection at work
- Needing to justify the cost of education with "The Job"
- Fraudsters manipulate us
- The narrative the "finding our life work gives us meaning"
- Working long hours is a status symbol
- The job is part of a self-actualization myth and an origin story similar to character arcs in Hollywood film scripts
- Our "intrinsic value" is measured by our job
- Social media conditions us to curate our idealized selves to the public
- Our identity is synonymous with our job
- Ubermensch ideal
- We become "meaning junkies" at work as a counterpoint to the slacker stereotype or the "smartphone zombie"
- Diminishing religious, family, and community life make a bigger space for Workism
Alternative Outline and Thesis Approach That Focuses on an Argument
Paragraph 1: using appropriate signal phrases, summarize and paraphrase Derek Thompson’s essay “The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable.”
Paragraph 2: Develop a thesis that critiques, agrees, or disagrees with Derek Thompson's essay based on ethos, logos, and pathos.
Paragraphs 3-6: Explain your objections to Thompson's essay in terms of ethos, logos, and pathos.
Paragraphs 7-8: Counterarguments and rebuttals
Paragraph 9: Conclusion
The last page is your Works Cited with a minimum of 4 sources.
Objection #1: Failure to provide context
I concede that Thompson does a good job of showing the turnaround regarding leisure time as an asset of the rich and privileged. Leisure time used to be the main objective of success, but now Workism makes being overworked a success symbol and a way of achieving domination in one's field. However, this choice to engage in Workism needs context. For example, if a small number of upper-class workers are ditching leisure time for the status symbol of Workism, why should we care when the majority of workers are suffering overwhelming forces, such as abuse on the job, that lead to real job burnout?
Would not Derek Thompson achieve more ethos (credibility) and pathos (sympathy) if he framed Workism in the context of real job burnout?
Objection #2: Proportion Fallacy
How widespread is Workism compared to real job burnout? If Workism is small compared to real job burnout, why should we care? Should not Thompson put Workism in the context of real job burnout to gain more credibility and sympathy for his argument?
Objection #3: Monolith Fallacy
Is it lame to lump all Workism in the same category? Is not Thompson's argument weakened by his failure to discern between healthy, mindful Workism (which he himself does) and mindless, reckless, self-destructive Workism? Is not treating all Workism as one type, a monolith, a convenient way to support his argument when this monolith contradicts reality?
Objection #4: Extreme Fallacy
It is self-evident that if you give extreme cases of anything, the thing is unhealthy. Workism in the extreme is unhealthy, but so is eating.
We need food and we need meaningful work, but extreme approaches to eating and working are not healthy.
Is this not so obvious and self-evident as to not even require our attention?
Objection #5: Mountain out of a Molehill Fallacy
Is not Thompson creating a false issue, making a mountain out of a molehill, to write a clickbait essay for The Atlantic? How much should I care about professionals choosing to work themselves to death when there are greater numbers of workers with less privilege suffering job burnout for reasons they cannot control?
Objection #6: Failure to Blame the Primary Cause
Thompson cites the fall of religion and community as the cause of a spiritual vacuum that is filled with Workism, but what if there is a cause behind the fall of religion and community? What if the failing American dream causes workers to burn out and leaves them no time for religion and community? We could conclude that Workism is not a moral choice but a survival necessity.
Building Block #1 Assignment for Workism Essay
The Assignment: Summarize the Major Points in "Workism Is Making Americans Miserable" due on October 8
Using appropriate signal phrases, summarize and paraphrase the major points of Derek Thompson's "Workism Is Making Americans Miserable," which will be your essay's introductory paragraph.
Workism Sample Thesis Statements
Strong Thesis Should be Demonstrable, Defensible, and Debatable
Demonstrable: The information in the thesis generates body paragraphs or “reasons” for supporting your thesis, which will be the bulk of your essay.
Defensible: You can defend your thesis with logic, reasoning, evidence, facts, statistics, and credible sources, and as a result, achieve logos, pathos, and ethos.
Debatable: Your argument has two sides; therefore, you are not presenting a claim that is so obvious and self-evident as to be fatuous.
Sample #1
Derek Thompson in his essay “The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable” makes the persuasive case that the current work environment pushes young employees down a rabbit hole of being overworked in the name of “Workism,” an oppressive phenomenon characterized by Groupthink, fraudsters who effectively manipulate their workers, social media popularity contests, and college debt.
Sample #2
“The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable” is Derek Thompson’s compelling clarion call that urges us to pull out of Workism, a false religion that will lead to our ruin evidenced by ______________, ___________________, ______________, and _______________________.
Sample #3
As Derek Thompson and expertly and deftly illustrates, in our current zeitgeist we are being tempted by the deleterious allure of Workism, a phony religion defined by __________________, ____________________, ___________________, and _______________________.
Sample #4
While Derek Thompson makes several helpful insights about what he sees as the false religion of Workism, his essay is severely flawed in several respects.
Sample #5
While Derek Thompson makes several helpful insights about what he sees as the false religion of Workism, his essay is severely flawed in several respects, including the fact that he treats Workism as an oversimplistic monolith when in fact there are several Workism iterations in gradations of good and bad; he doesn’t acknowledge that certain types of Workism are necessary for innovation and success, and he fails to acknowledge that Workism is less a false religion than a necessity in today’s brutal “Squid Game” competition.
Sample #6
Derek Thompson has falsely framed Workism as a fake religion when in fact the drive to make work a place of meaning and societal change is a noble and worthy endeavor that defies Thompson’s attempts to demonize it.
Sample #7
Derek Thompson’s 2019 thesis that Workism is a disease that is stealing the lives of American workers collapses under the weight of the post-pandemic work trends, which point to The Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting, societal waves that render Thompson’s thesis both irrelevant and obsolescent.
Sample #8
I find it rich that privileged, highly educated, and highly successful public intellectual Derek Thompson, a man whose life has borne fruit from Workism, is eager to find clickbait for an online article that bemoans the very type of all-consuming work that he himself is beholden to. “Don’t do as I do; do as I say” is the lame and fitting epitaph to his grotesque and obsolescent essay.
Sample #9
While I will acknowledge that Derek Thompson’s essay has many flaws, including the hypocrisy that he himself is a disciple of Workism, his essay is a helpful and insightful anodyne to the wave of fraudsters who are hellbent on using the trappings of Workism to oppress their employees.
Sample #10
Derek Thompson’s notion of Workism as this “superman” approach to work is presented as a novelty, some kind of new and remarkable phenomenon that signifies the ascent of the tech industry, and yet it is precisely the way Thompson frames Workism as all-consuming work that shows his grotesque failure to acknowledge that tireless work is nothing new at all, but rather a key feature of immigrants coming to America. Therefore, Thompson’s thesis smacks of ignorance and a tendency to dismiss immigrant work, which as a whole diminishes the ethos of his claim and makes his essay contemptuous and unpersuasive.
Sample #11
While I acknowledge the Thompson critic in Thesis Sample #10 who is chafed and irate that Thompson failed to acknowledge the herculean hard work of immigrants who come to America and while I acknowledge that this immigrant contribution to the American workforce would have provided valuable contextualization of Thompson’s essay, I must defend Thompson’s thesis because there is nothing about the undeniable hard work of immigrants that contradicts Thompson’s claim, Thompson’s essay has a very specific focus on rich tech entrepreneurs and to cover the hard work of immigrants would have caused him to stray and meander off topic; finally, the oppression that results from Workism is a warning that helps immigrants and non-immigrants alike. Therefore, the Thompson critic who wrote Thesis Sample #10 needs to “cool it,” put an end to his self-righteous rhetorical excesses, and assess Thompson’s essay on its own terms.
In Support of Derek Thompson: The Pressure to be an Employee Ubermensch
Being an Ubermensch is parodied in the YouTube video “How I Became an Adult.”
Workism Lesson #3: Work as Religion
1C Essay #2 Due October 22
Workism and Groupthink Compromise Critical Thinking and Exploits Employees
The Assignment
Read Derek Thompson's essay "The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable."
Then compare the idea of Workism, especially how employers rely on manipulation and Groupthink to exploit their employees, in relation to one or more of the following documentaries and TV shows: WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, and Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, and Severance. For your comparison of Thompson’s essay and the documentaries or TV shows, develop a thesis that addresses the claim that fraudsters rely on Workism and Groupthink to create a colossal breakdown of critical thinking that causes employees, investors, and customers to become dangerously gullible to the false promises of these mad grifters. As a result, the employees are exploited. Is the following claim legitimate? Why or why not? Explain. Be sure to have a counterargument-rebuttal section in your essay before you reach your conclusion.
Suggested Essay Outline
Paragraph 1: Summarize Derek Thompson’s essay about Workism.
Paragraph 2: Your thesis: Develop a claim that the causes of Workism are the following:
- The rise of the fraudster who relies on a mythical origin story about creating disruptive change that makes for a better world.
- The prevalence of Groupthink in the workplace makes workers malleable.
- The prevalence of toxic positivity in the workplace is used to manipulate workers.
- The prevalence of pseudo-spirituality in the workplace tethers employees to work while they disconnect from family and community and this creates a vicious cycle.
- The prevalence of the Ubermensch ethic as described by Anne Helen Petersen chains employees to a burnout work cycle.
Paragraphs 3-7 address the above bullet points.
Paragraphs 8 and 9: Counterargument and Rebuttal
Some will argue that economic necessity in a hyper-competitive field that makes success a zero-sum game to be the real reason of Workism, not the above. Do you concede that point? Do you reject it? Why? Why not?
Paragraph 10: Conclusion, a reiteration of your thesis.
Works Cited with 4 sources in MLA format.
In Support of Derek Thompson:
Work Pray Code Study Guide Part 1
Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley
Part 1
Work as a Religious Community
Carolyn Chen writes that work has become the new religion, a place where employees go to find meaning, transcendence, and deep connections with others.
This meaning quest seems like an excuse to abandon family and community and become a workaholic. As workers find “meaning” at work, they become more disconnected from family and community, and this compels them to insulate themselves into even more work, thus creating a vicious cycle.
So Workism is really not a meaning quest. It’s a canard or a smokescreen for blind ambition dressed up with the perfume of fake meaning.
There are consequences to turning work into a religious place of sacred worship.
Some argue that The Great Resignation is a sign that workers are abandoning Work-As-Religion, but Carolyn Chen in her book that the hunger for finding meaning and community at work has never been stronger, based on her interviews with people who work in Silicon Valley.
The Whipped Cream of Fake Spirituality
Many of these employees and employers hire Buddhist mindful counselors and spiritual advisers as if having such spiritual leaders is a requirement for both substance and image in such workplaces.
Even Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and Walmart hire chaplains to address the employees’ spiritual needs.
An argument can be made that this veneer of work spirituality is evil because it encourages workers to kiss the butt of blind ambition while consoling themselves with pretentious notions of spirituality through cheap and hollow adages, aphorisms, and quotes from holy texts.
In other words, these employees are gaslighting themselves with cheap religious bromides.
Why Is There Religion or Pseudo Religion at the Workplace?
In 1990, 8% of Americans said they have no religious affiliation. Today that number has jumped to 25%. As a result, Chen observes that Americans don’t go to work to sell their souls but to find their souls.
People cannot bear living in a spiritual vacuum, so if they abandon their traditional religion, they will feel compelled to replace it with a new spirituality, even if it means finding “religion” in the workplace.
As a result, there is no work-life balance. Now a 65-hour work week is “typical.”
Work becomes the god. This false god is just a smokescreen for blind ambition.
In Before Times, Work Was Soul-Crushing
In contrast, white-collar work in the 50s was soul-crushing and Americans found peace and connection in their religious community.
There was a strong demarcation line: work in one part of your life and the spiritual existence of the church, community, and family life on the other.
Community Erodes
Now that the religious community is eroding, work is taking the place of such a community.
Those in the upper-income brackets are more likely to like their jobs and see their workplace as a spiritual haven.
Branding Yourself and Giving Yourself an Origin Story
The job sites have a mission, a higher purpose, and even like Marvel superheroes, an “origin story.” In the new global economy, if you don’t have an origin story to strengthen your brand, you are irrelevant.
These origin stories are based on mythologies.
You hit rock bottom, you lose everything, you fall into a pit of despair, you’ve gone down some rabbit hole of confusion; and just then when all seems lost, you see in some crag or nook or cranny this beam of the True Light that leads you to the True Path. Once embarked upon the True Path, you can save the world, find personal redemption, and adopt a three-legged rescue dog named Patsy.
All origin stories are a variation of the above.
Writing for The Verge in her essay “Therano’s Greatest Invention Was Elizabeth Holmes,” Elizabeth Lopatto writes:
The Holmes persona checked off boxes that Silicon Valley’s startup world loves to fawn over. Dropout from a prestigious school? Check. Obsessed with work, to the point of having no personal life? Check. Under the age of 32? Check. (Paul Graham in 2013, describing what Silicon Valley VCs look for: “The cutoff in investors’ heads is 32.” Also: “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg.”) Only hobby is exercise? Check. Steve Jobs worship? Check. Unnecessary secrecy around your innovation? In tech, secrecy around new inventions is the norm.
What’s interesting about the Elizabeth Holmes character is how she fit in with this founder myth, since she was, you know, female. But a specific kind of woman: low voice, only wears pants, high-neck shirt, clumsy makeup. Not like those other girls. She began to grace magazine covers during a period shortly after Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In, a misguided book about how the solution to misogyny is simply working harder, and around the time Sophia Amoruso published Girlboss, a 2014 book about founding an online discount clothing store.
The Lean In / girlboss period was a kind of response to tech’s image as a bunch of smelly bros in hoodies. Conditions on the ground for lower-level engineers were often full of sexual harassment. What’s more, women rarely got money: in 2019, 2.8 percent of VC funds went to female founders, an all-time high. These are large, systemic issues! And rather than talk about them, the corporate world elected to bring us inspiration, as though the only thing stopping women from building their own CEO destinies was a lack of role models.
And then there was Holmes. She was, conveniently, a woman succeeding in Silicon Valley, a place some people had suggested was possibly sexist due to things such as Paul Graham’s aforementioned Zuckerberg comment, Ellen Pao’s lawsuit against VC firm Kleiner Perkins, and Travis Kalanick’s “boober” incident.
Holmes’ fall from grace was the first crack in the founder myth. It was followed by Travis Kalanick being booted from Uber over the culture of sexual harassment, bullying, and general lawlessness he’d built. More flamboyantly, Adam Neumann of WeWork was forced out after the company filed frankly deranged paperwork for its IPO, which was then called off. Those three founders had borrowed the notes of tech hype for products that were, well, not tech: Theranos was (at least in theory) medicine, Uber is a car service with a nice app, and WeWork is a real estate company. During this heady period, though, investors tended to overlook tech-hyped things that weren’t actually tech.
Even College Students Need Origin Stories to Create a Brand
Even college students writing personal statements to get into high-tier universities fabricate an elaborate origin story to strengthen their brand.
We live in a world where we are on social media and creating a brand for ourselves. This brand may be BS, but over time we will come to believe in it.
Work As Friendship and Emotional Support System
Chen quotes sociologist Arlie Hochschild who reports that today more Americans are meeting their social needs more at work than they are in their families.
If this is true, then what is the motivation to stay in a family, if not literally then at least in terms of time given to that family? Would not someone who finds love and friendship at work be prone to spend as little time with family as possible?
Chen is making the case that the rise of business as a place to meet love, spiritual, friendship, and emotional needs is taking the place of religion and even the family.
Who’s the Team Player in This Scenario?
Do I look to my job for emotional fulfillment?
I love my job and the people I work with and my students, but the fact that I’d rather be home with my family is such that some co-workers might grumble, “He’s not a team player. For McMahon, the apotheosis of love and meaning must come from work. Family is second.”
This sounds insane.
The More Educated and High-Income You Are, The More You Embrace the Workplace as Your Spiritual Haven
Chen traces a direct line between high income and the job site as a place of spiritual meaning, identity, and connection.
Richard Florida calls these job sites “human capital clusters.” They are mostly in big cities like Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Chicago. The workplace has gourmet buffet, yoga centers, wellness centers, gyms, tracks, meditation retreats, self-esteem therapists, sleeping quarters, busses that come to your house, barista cafes, organic gardens, vegan and homemade pasta cooking lessons, media entertainment centers, deep-tissue massage, hand-crafted IPA and wine bars, and spiritual counseling repurposed to make you more productive. These are One-Size-Fits-All Nanny Centers. They suffocate you, yet you love it.
Chen observes that the higher up the ladder the employee climbs the more likely they are to abandon religion, but their religious needs have not disappeared; “they have been displaced.”
Techtopia
Chen coins the term Techtopia: an engineered society that gives people the highest fulfillment at work by colonizing the functions of other social institutions.
In other words, the spiritual nourishment of the holy temples and family has been spiritually appropriated by work.
Tech Migrants Are Not Just Paying the Bills
Most of the workers Chen interviewed are tech migrants, those who traveled great distances to work in the tech industry. They left friends and family behind. Therefore, they are hungry for connection, and they find it at work.
In the tech industry, a job is more than paying your bills: It’s your identity and your brand. You can never work hard enough to cultivate your identity and your brand. The employer has you right where they want you.
Why You Need Faith
You have to believe in yourself in the tech industry. Either you will become a billionaire and win a big IPO or get bought by Facebook or Microsoft or something equally big, but all the while you know that over 90% of start-ups fail. Therefore, you need lots of faith. You have to believe in the Purpose and the Mission. You have to drink your own Kool-Aid.
All the missions are the same: “My product will bring people together and change the world.”
Any worker who doesn’t drink the Kool-Aid of the above mantra is a nonbeliever, a malcontent who must be expelled from the premises.
Corporate Maternalism
The corporation suffocates you with “love” and all-day care and expects a return on their investment. “The personal is the profession” is the mantra.
The goals of corporate maternalism are threefold: strengthen emotional bonds to the company, help employees avoid job burnout, and obscure the line between the boss and the underlying in order to create a family atmosphere.
Corporate maternalism become a form of authoritarianism and in its extreme, it is the influence of the hit Apple TV show Severance.
In Carolyn Chen’s readable book Work Pray Code, she chronicles the workplace as a “Techtopia” where all of one’s emotional, spiritual, and physical needs are met by “corporate maternalism.” One of the key features of corporate maternalism is feeding your employees. As an employee at a hot tech company, you can eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks from a celebrity gourmet chef and be so satisfied that you don’t even have to waste time and money on grocery shopping. You don’t even have to go home to face meal preparation or kitchen cleanup. The perk attracts talent and keeps it there.
If that’s not a perk to stay on the job, I don’t know what is.
However, Chen observes that corporate maternalism is often phony. She asks the question: What use is a yoga studio when your boss wants you to work 16 hours a day?
Toxic Positivity
Another symptom of corporate maternalism is toxic positivity in which the employees are pressured, often through implicit means, to force a smile and curate a persona of glee and happiness in order to persuade everyone that the company is legit.
Be Your Best Self equals Work Your Butt Off Without Complaining.
“We want you to be your best self, go deep into your soul, and find out who you are.” What this really means is we want you to give us your blood, sweat, and tears, and smile while you’re doing it.
Book Review of Toxic Positivity
Some Helpful Videos:
“Toxic Positivity: The Reality of Suppressing Emotions”
“The Shadow of Toxic Positivity”
Review Outline
Suggested Essay Outline
Paragraph 1: Summarize Derek Thompson’s essay about Workism.
Paragraph 2: Your thesis: Develop a claim that the causes of Workism are the following:
- The rise of the fraudster who relies on a mythical origin story about creating disruptive change that makes for a better world.
- The prevalence of Groupthink in the workplace makes workers malleable.
- The prevalence of toxic positivity in the workplace is used to manipulate workers.
- The prevalence of pseudo-spirituality in the workplace tethers employees to work while they disconnect from family and community and this creates a vicious cycle.
- The prevalence of the Ubermensch ethic as described by Anne Helen Petersen chains employees to a burnout work cycle.
Paragraphs 3-7 address the above bullet points.
Paragraphs 8 and 9: Counterargument and Rebuttal
Some will argue that economic necessity in a hyper-competitive field that makes success a zero-sum game to be the real reason of Workism, not the above. Do you concede that point? Do you reject it? Why? Why not?
Paragraph 10: Conclusion, a reiteration of your thesis.
Works Cited with 4 sources in MLA format.
If you disagree with what’s written below, then it will be a counterargument in your essay.
However, if you agree with the following points, then your thesis will very similar to them.
Sample Thesis Statements, Part 2
Some arguments that serve to disagree with the causes of Workism that we have studied in this class:
Sample #1:
While it’s true that there is toxic positivity, pseudo-spirituality, and fraudsters at many worksites, these sideshows distract us from the real cause of job burnout, which is the zero-sum game of hyper-competitive capitalism.
Sample #2
I will concede with Derek Thompson, Carolyn Chen, and others that the workplace has become a false path for finding meaning, but most hard-working Americans are not getting suckered by CEO fraudsters and their ilk; rather, we are working our butts off because of economic necessity.
Sample #3
Finding your niche at work and getting meaning from that is not some kind of bad thing as McMahon has framed it in this class. Come on, McMahon, stop discouraging us from finding a meaningful, fulfilling job, and instead help us use our critical thinking skills for something valuable. I’m dropping your class.
Sample #4
McMahon has done us a service by making us question putting too much emotional investment at work as a place for meaning. He’s really got me thinking about the life-work balance, and how I don’t want to lose that balance by becoming some sort of slavish devotee to my job. However, as much as I love McMahon’s amazing teaching skills and his captivating and engrossing class discussions, I take issue with his notion that Workism is some sort of phony Meaning Quest. Workism is a symptom of America’s economic failures, which pressure most Americans like myself to run on the work treadmill just so we don’t get behind.
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