Workism Is Making Americans Miserable Study Guide
Study Guide for Derek Thompson’s “Workism Is Making Americans Miserable,” Part 1
Leisure Time Has Become an Obsolescent Idea
Derek Thompson begins his essay by observing that leisure time was supposed to be a significant benefit of success, that the college-educated worker could enjoy a 15-hour work week.
With the 15-hour work week, we could unchain our identities from our jobs and create a parallel world in the arts, hobbies, or other passions, which would become the new reservoir of our new identity.
The Higher the Income Tier, the More Hours You Work
While for many Americans, the work week has indeed shortened, there is one group for which the work week has actually lengthened to at least 65 hours: highly-skilled, college-educated workers who earn the top tier of income in America.
For middle-tier wage earners, the job is a necessary tool to get money to pay for basic expenses: food, gas, shelter, and medical bills.
However, the upper-tier earners work more and have embraced the cult of Workism, meaning that work is not just a source of income, but a major source of self-worth and identity. As Thompson observes:
The economists of the early 20th century did not foresee that work might evolve from a means of material production to a means of identity production. They failed to anticipate that, 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.
Work Fills the Spiritual or Existential Vaccum
Thompson posits that we all worship something: our god, our family, ambition, money, self-aggrandizement, love, social media status, fast cars, and even donuts. We may say we’ve “lost our religion,” but in reality, some kind of religion always replaces another, including “The Gospel of Work.” In the words of Thompson:
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.
What is workism? It is the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.
Without Work, We Languish in Emptiness and Despair and Feel Like Pariahs
Thompson is arguing that for the college-educated Workism is essential to their self-worth, sense of belonging, identity, and anchoring: not family, not religion, not friendship, but Workism.
The frenzied charge to enhance our self-worth through our work is uniquely American and reflects longer work hours than in other countries. As Thompson writes:
No large country in the world as productive as the United States averages more hours of work a year. And the gap between the U.S. and other countries is growing. Between 1950 and 2012, annual hours worked per employee fell by about 40 percent in Germany and the Netherlands—but by only 10 percent in the United States. Americans “work longer hours, have shorter vacations, get less in unemployment, disability, and retirement benefits, and retire later, than people in comparably rich societies,” wrote Samuel P. Huntington in his 2005 book Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity.
One group has led the widening of the workist gap: rich men.
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. In that same time, college-educated men reduced their leisure time more than any other group. Today, it is fair to say that elite American men have transformed themselves into the world’s premier workaholics, toiling longer hours than both poorer men in the U.S. and rich men in similarly rich countries.
More Work Hours Is a Pathological Power Grab
It seems that America’s high earners have punked themselves: They compete to be the hardest worker and put in the longest hours because to be a workaholic is to be superior to other workers. As we read in Thompson’s essay:
This shift defies economic logic—and economic history. The rich have always worked less than the poor, because they could afford to. The landed gentry of preindustrial Europe dined, danced, and gossiped, while serfs toiled without end. In the early 20th century, rich Americans used their ample downtime to buy weekly movie tickets and dabble in sports. Today’s rich American men can afford vastly more downtime. But they have used their wealth to buy the strangest of prizes: more work!
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. “For many of today’s rich there is no such thing as ‘leisure’; in the classic sense—work is their play,” the economist Robert Frank wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “Building wealth to them is a creative process, and the closest thing they have to fun.”
Workism Is Part of America’s Dystopian Public Policy
Americans fetishize long work hours so much that we have no political will to give workers time off, lengthy vacations, and paternity leave. We offer the most abysmal time-off in the industrial world. We also punish Americans for being unemployed by cutting them off of medical benefits. We seem to have created this dystopian hell for the working poor but rationalize that if only “they would get with the program” and join the Workism Cult they could reap the awards of the American Dream. In the words of Derek Thompson:
Even as Americans worship workism, its leaders consecrate it from the marble daises of Congress and enshrine it in law. Most advanced countries give new parents paid leave; but the United States guarantees no such thing. Many advanced countries ease the burden of parenthood with national policies; but U.S. public spending on child care and early education is near the bottom of international rankings. In most advanced countries, citizens are guaranteed access to health care by their government; but the majority of insured Americans get health care through—where else?—their workplace. Automation and AI may soon threaten the labor force, but America’s welfare system has become more work-based in the past 20 years. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which replaced much of the existing welfare system with programs that made benefits contingent on the recipient’s employment.
Study Guide for Derek Thompson’s “Workism Is Making Americans Miserable,” Part 2
Work Is Essential to the Soul But Is There a Point of Diminishing Returns
Thompson is not arguing against work per se; he actually argues that long-term unemployment may be more egregious to the spirit than the loss of a loved one. A certain amount of work is important for structure, focus, self-worth, belonging, and pride.
But what Thompson is questioning is the elevation of a job to something more than a way to make money to pay the bills. It may not be, as Work Cultists would have us believe, be a calling or a platform for self-actualization. In the words of Thompson:
There is nothing wrong with work, when work must be done. And 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.
In the past century, the American conception of work has shifted from jobs to careers to callings—from necessity to status to meaning. In an agrarian or early-manufacturing economy, where tens of millions of people perform similar routinized tasks, there are no delusions about the higher purpose of, say, planting corn or screwing bolts: It’s just a job.
McMahon’s Take: College Applications and Origin Stories
It seems that applying to colleges is rooted in the Job-As-Self-Actualization Myth. When you apply to a college, you have to write a Personal Statement letter, which is nothing less than a Superhero Origin Story about how you found your Life Calling. If you don’t have such a dramatic story that brands you as a Special Person with a Calling, you will find your application gets thrown away and you will be replaced by a student who plays the game and writes a phony origin story.
In other words, colleges are contributing to Workism. Thompson omits this important fact. Colleges are invested in selling meaning and transcendence to prospective students just like the purveyors of business.
What Thompson analyzes in the workplace could be equally applied to the university:
“We’ve created this idea that the meaning of life should be found in work,” says Oren Cass, the author of the book The Once and Future Worker. “We tell young people that their work should be their passion. ‘Don’t give up until you find a job that you love!’ we say. ‘You should be changing the world!’ we tell them. That is the message in commencement addresses, in pop culture, and frankly, in media, including The Atlantic.”
But our desks were never meant to be our altars. The modern labor force evolved to serve the needs of consumers and capitalists, not to satisfy tens of millions of people seeking transcendence at the office. It’s hard to self-actualize on the job if you’re a cashier—one of the most common occupations in the U.S.—and 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.
The Two Traumus of Millennials and Subsequent Generations
Thompson writes that Millennials have amassed huge student debt to make sure they are armed with sufficient degrees and credentials in the competitive workforce. When you are in debt for over two decades, if not a lifetime, for your student loans, you want your job to be larger than life, to possess secret sauce, and unlock the secrets of the universe. Your job has to be far more than money to be to afford food and shelter.
Additionally, Millennials and subsequent generations have social media, which puts pressure on us to curate a successful life, one rich with fulfillment, meaning, and self-actualization. In the words of Thompson:
While it’s inadvisable to paint 85 million people with the same brush, it’s fair to say that American Millennials have been collectively defined by two external traumas. The first is student debt. Millennials are the most educated generation ever, a distinction that should have made them rich and secure. But rising educational attainment has come at a steep price. Since 2007, outstanding student debt has grown by almost $1 trillion, roughly tripling in just 12 years. And since the economy cratered in 2008, average wages for young graduates have stagnated—making it even harder to pay off loans.
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—for oneself, for one’s friends and colleagues, and even for one’s parents. But literally visualizing career success can be difficult in a services and information economy. Blue-collar jobs produce tangible products, like coal, steel rods, and houses. The output of white-collar work—algorithms, consulting projects, programmatic advertising campaigns—is more shapeless and often quite invisible. It’s not glib to say that the whiter the collar, the more invisible the product.
Since the physical world leaves few traces of achievement, today’s workers turn to social media to make manifest their accomplishments. Many of them spend hours crafting a separate reality of stress-free smiles, postcard vistas, and Edison-lightbulbed working spaces. “The social media feed [is] evidence of the fruits of hard, rewarding labor and the labor itself,” Petersen writes.
“Do What You Love” Is a Lie That Targets the “Meaning Junkies”
Thompson refers to Erin Griffith’s New York Times essay “Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work?” in which she shows a generation of young people working at WeWork with “Do What You Love” pillows and they’re all miserable and burned out.
Millennials are “meaning junkies” who need to find a higher purpose at work, a job that justifies all the student debt they’ve accrued. And this meaning must be curated on social media so the whole world can see how fulfilled and spiritually together they are. This makes them ripe for exploitation. We see this exploitation at WeWork, Theranos, and the Fyre Festival fiasco.
This exploitation is justified by Workism, which lines the pockets of the elite rich. As we read:
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. But the overwork myths survive “because they justify the extreme wealth created for a small group of elite techies,” Griffith writes.
Derek Thompson and Ethos
To give himself some humility and credibility in his essay, Thompson makes a confession: He himself is a practitioner of the Cult of Workism. He writes:
This is the right time for a confession. I am the very thing that I am criticizing.
I am devoted to my job. I feel most myself when I am fulfilled by my work—including the work of writing an essay about work. My sense of identity is so bound up in my job, my sense of accomplishment, and my feeling of productivity that bouts of writer’s block can send me into an existential funk that can spill over into every part of my life. And I know enough writers, tech workers, marketers, artists, and entrepreneurs to know that my affliction is common, especially within a certain tranche of the white-collar workforce.
The Reality of Workism
Thompson concedes it’s true that a culture that produces Workism produces some of the best innovations in the world, but it’s also true that 87% of American workers are not engaged at work. Think about that: Eighty-seven % of the workers are disaffected, afflicted with job boredom, burnout, and ennui.
Conclusion: America Needs More Paid Leave and More Work Balance
Thompson argues in his conclusion that as a country America must change its public policy: More paid leave, more paternity leave, better medical coverage for the employed and unemployed alike, and better work balance, which means you work to “buy free time.”
In the end, while some of us are work superstars like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and others, about 90% of us will work to pay the bills, not as a higher calling. We need to live in reality, not fantasy.
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