Workism Lesson #2
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.
What is Workism?
Workism is the religion of work so that you find meaning in throwing your entire being into your job in an attempt to find meaning, belonging, and transcendence.
What is the fraudster?
The fraudster capitalizes on knowing that there is a large workforce hungry for Workism. While trying to slake his greed, he portrays his company as being “on a mission to change the world,” and in the process, he exploits his employees. His goal is to be compensated more and more while having less and less accountability.
What is Groupthink?
Groupthink in the workforce occurs when individuals desire to belong to the group to the point that they compromise their critical thinking skills and “go along with the program” to in effect be like sheep or “sheeple.”
Workism, fraudsters, and Groupthink Equal What?
When you combine Workism, fraudsters, and Groupthink, you get a colossal scam in the making in which many people are exploited, people lose their life savings, people are hurt, and in many cases, people’s lives are irreversibly ruined.
- We see massive fraud and exploitation in the documentary WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, about the rising and falling star Adam Neumann who managed to walk away with over a billion dollars after ruining thousands of people’s lives. He still does his grift today. His predatory existence is well chronicled in the 8-episode Apple TV show WeCrashed starring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway.
- We see criminal negligence, flagrant lies, and exploitation in The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, about the grifter Elizabeth Holmes who endangered people’s lives with a fake health invention. Holmes’ life of fraud and perfidy was also made into an excellent TV 8-episode miniseries The Dropout with Holmes masterfully played by Amanda Seyfried.
- We see fraud, exploitation, lies, and sociopathy in Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened in which Billy McFarland becomes a convicted felon.
- We see a science fiction version of Workism and Groupthink rendered in the excellent Apple TV show Severance in which workers go through a brain procedure so that their work life is severed from their personal life.
- We see a science fiction version of Workism and Groupthink in the 8-episode TV show Devs in which Nick Offerman plays a Silicon Valley cult leader with a diabolical purpose.
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.
The Purpose:
All of us are susceptible to the trappings of Groupthink. Why? Because our Hunter and Forager ancestors survived in tribes, so we have an innate hunger for group approval hard-wired into our brains.
We are programmed to conform to the tribe’s desires even if these desires sometimes conflict with our individual conscience.
Writing an essay in which we examine the ways Groupthink diminishes our critical thinking and individual conscience helps strengthen our individual resolve, sharpens our critical thinking, and hopefully repels the pitfalls of Groupthink in our lives.
What Is Groupthink?
Groupthink can be defined as a consensus that is reached without performing due diligence or critical reasoning and evaluation.
Often Groupthink deteriorates into irrational, self-destructive behavior as a result of everyone being too cowardly and too desperate to conform so there is a fear of dissent.
Groupthink is born from the tribal instinct for belonging and the desire for group unity and cohesiveness.
What class or category should we place our single-sentence definition of Groupthink?
There is no single correct answer, but here are some suggestions:
- Groupthink is a form of mindless consensus.
- Groupthink is a tribalistic instinct.
- Groupthink is the please-the-others impulse.
- Groupthink is a conformity reflex.
What are the distinguishing characteristics of Groupthink?
Irving Janis broke down Groupthink into 8 symptoms, which appropriately are the distinguishing characteristics.
Eight symptoms of Groupthink include the following:
- Overestimating the group’s power, infallibility, and morality to the point that the group is perceived as being invincible and invulnerable to the possibility of being wrong.
- The narcissistic belief that one’s group is superior to other groups without any objective evaluation. This arrogance causes people to ignore warnings and negative feedback so that they rationalize their stupid behavior.
- Close-mindedness and a reliance on tradition rather than critical analysis so that they ignore moral and ethical concerns and can enjoy their continued “in-group” status.
- The pressure for everyone in the group to conform, “to be polite,” and “get with the program” so that there is uniformity at the expense of critical analysis.
- Self-censorship results from the fear of being expelled by the tribe.
- Mindguards who repel any challenge to the status quo.
- The ability to rationalize negative outcomes.
- The ability to change the goalposts so that the group can redefine success.
Review Definition of Groupthink:
To conform to groups, we often compromise our critical thinking skills and integrity. This compromise and will to belong and get along with the group is Groupthink.
Peer Pressure
All of us are pressured to conform to group norms. If a joke is embraced as funny by the group and we don’t like it, people will say, “What’s wrong with that guy? He doesn’t even laugh. He must be sick in the head. Stay away from that guy.”
Our rejection from the group snowballs when it is perceived that we are “bad news” because we are weird or problematic.
As born tribalists, we all want approval from the tribe. Since the beginning of history, our survival has depended on it. Therefore, we are hard-wired to conform to the tribe’s norms and ways.
Informative Influence: We assume the group knows best.
Sometimes we adopt a group practice because we are ignorant about something, and we assume the group’s practice is based on knowledge even though it may or may not be. It is just simpler and safer, we assume, to go along with the group. In the video, the instructor gives the example of a dog’s shock collar, which is supposed to be the best way to train a dog. Such a method may in fact be cruel and there may be better methods, but if we act under Informative Influence, we don’t explore those other options.
Normative Influence: We fear expulsion from the group
Sometimes we adopt group behavior because we fear social rejection. How many times, for example, have you liked a post on Twitter or some other social media platform less because you understood the post and more because the person who posted it was popular and you “wanted to ride the gravy train” with everyone else?
Sadly, there is a large degree of moral cowardice that informs Normative Influence. People with privilege should speak out against social injustice, but too often they do not because they don’t want to “rock the boat” and create animosity between family and community members. As a result, a myriad of social injustices persist.
Private Vs. Public Conformity
When we are persuaded by the group privately, we are internalizing their ways and customs in what is often a permanent manner. Let’s say I’m adopted by a vegan family who persuades me that the vegan diet is the only morally acceptable way to eat. I embrace their eating practice for the long haul.
However, if I eat a vegan diet just to be respectful but in truth, I crave rib-eye steak for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, then most likely when I move out of the family’s house, I will be frequenting Ruth’s Chris Steak House.
Group Polarization & Confirmation Bias
Majority opinions gain strength as more and more people seek safety and refuge in the acceptance of the majority opinion. As these opinions “amplify” over time, they create group polarization. Wanting acceptance, we rationalize the majority opinions by cherry-picking evidence that confirms their truth. This cherry-picking of evidence is called confirmation bias.
Groupthink
Confirmation bias is done in the service of achieving harmony in the group rather than breaking ranks through dissenting opinion, and in a nutshell, this is the very essence of Groupthink.
Review of the 8 Groupthink Symptoms:
One. Overestimating the group’s power, infallibility, and morality to the point that the group is perceived as being invincible and invulnerable to the possibility of being wrong.
Two. The narcissistic belief that one’s group is superior to other groups without any objective evaluation. This arrogance causes people to ignore warnings and negative feedback so that they rationalize their stupid behavior.
Three. Close-mindedness and a reliance on tradition rather than critical analysis so that they ignore moral and ethical concerns and can enjoy their continued “in-group” status.
Four. The pressure for everyone in the group to conform, “to be polite,” and “get with the program” so that there is uniformity at the expense of critical analysis. This desire for harmony over critical thinking results in Groupthink.
Five. Self-censorship results from the fear of being expelled by the tribe.
Six. Mindguards who repel any challenge to the status quo.
Seven. The ability to rationalize negative outcomes.
Eight. The ability to change the goalposts so that the group can redefine success.
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.
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 Vacuum
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.
Anne Helen Petersen, “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation”
Study Guide for Anne Helen Petersen’s “How the Millennials Became the Burnout Generation,” Part 1
The Contradiction: Lazy and Maladapted Or Overworked?
There is much talk about the newer generations, Millennials and subsequent ones of being spoiled, coddled snowflakes who lack basic development.
According to the stereotype, they have been suffocated by their helicopter parents and they lack the work ethic to succeed in adult life.
Two notable works are the best-selling book The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff and the viral Atlantic essay “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” by Jean M. Twenge.
In these works, young people are emotionally fragile, lazy, narcissistic, inward, and incapable of acting like adults.
The spoiled snowflake started to become prominent in 2012, according to Jean Twenge’s essay. This is when the Apple iPhone began to scale and nearly everyone “needed” a smartphone of some type.
Generation Z (born 1997-2012 after which we have Generation Alpha) spent most of their time on tablets or screens of some kind, not living in the real or analog world.
According to Jean Twenge, Generation Z lives in a world where social media dominates their social ranking and sense of self-worth. They do little homework and are suffocated by their helicopter parents.
As a result, Generation Z has trouble transitioning into dating, driving cars, going to college, and entering the work world.
As Jean Twenge would want you to believe, Generation Z is content living in their parents’ homes for perpetuity while reclined in bed scrolling a screen and checking their social media status.
Twenge’s term for this group of sedated screen-addicted children is iGen.
According to Twenge’s research, when iGen spends time on their screens, they are less happy; when they spend time off their screens, they are happier. However, they are addicted to their screens, so in a way, they are addicted to misery.
Nothing in Twenge’s portrayal of iGen suggests a generation beholden to Workism.
Indeed, Anne Helen Petersen addresses this stereotype of Lazy iGen in her essay. As she writes, basic tasks cannot be completed by today’s generation like mailing a letter.
Adulting and Errand Paralysis
Petersen argues that many young people are the opposite of spoiled. They live in fear and enormous stress due to the failure of the American Dream. Their college costs are up 2,000 percent from thirty years ago and the cost of housing makes home ownership nearly impossible.
To get a headstart in life, young kids are adulting. Petersen defines adulting as doing tedious tasks that are required to live in the adult world such as basic chores: grocery shopping, house cleaning, etc.
Errand paralysis is when the To-Do list is so long people just go to bed and say “Screw it.”
Petersen includes herself in the narrative. As she writes:
None of these tasks were that hard: getting knives sharpened, taking boots to the cobbler, registering my dog for a new license, sending someone a signed copy of my book, scheduling an appointment with the dermatologist, donating books to the library, vacuuming my car. A handful of emails — one from a dear friend, one from a former student asking how my life was going — festered in my personal inbox, which I use as a sort of alternative to-do list, to the point that I started calling it the “inbox of shame.”
It’s not as if I were slacking in the rest of my life. I was publishing stories, writing two books, making meals, executing a move across the country, planning trips, paying my student loans, exercising on a regular basis. But when it came to the mundane, the medium priority, the stuff that wouldn’t make my job easier or my work better, I avoided it.
Adulting, To-Do Lists, and the Meaning of Life
When young people are overwhelmed by all these things they have to do to become an adult, to become successful, and to achieve charisma in the dating world, they see life as following a script that leads to emptiness and vanity.
Some will seek YouTube motivational bros who will teach you how to be good-looking, fit, smart, and intellectual.
Others will see this whole makeover quest as a joke.
So what we have are two contradictory images of iGen:
We have the Smartphone Zombie:
- Addicted to smartphone
- Depressed from being mired in social media addiction
- Narcissistic
- Snowflake
- Coddled by parents
- Lacks independence
- Stunted emotional growth
- Self-image dysmorphia (low self-esteem)
- Overly sensitive to social media ranking and status
- Doesn’t drive
- Doesn’t date
- Doesn’t work
- Doesn’t want to grow up
- Easily offended and triggered
But we also have the tireless Social Influencer or Ubermensch (Superman or Superwoman)
You’ve excelled in STEM and have been adept at computer coding since the first grade
Since the age of ten, you have been an expert at writing college personal statements in which you’ve created a powerful personal narrative that captures your Brand.
By high school, you are well-versed in The Classics and at the drop of a hat you can quote lengthy passages from Nietzsche, Aristotle, Plato, Spinoza, Hobbes, Aristophanes, Darwin, Freud, Jung, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Lao Tzu, Aldous Huxley, Bushido Samarai, Karl Marx, Shakespeare, Dante, Frederick Douglass, Virginia Wolf, Joan Didion, Doestoveski, and Theodor Adorno.
You have a strong social media presence like a YouTube channel with hundreds of thousands of followers and you give advice on business, diet, exercise, philosophy, future trends, and cryptocurrency.
You give Ted Talks about how even though you have never gone to college, you are an autodidactic and have taught yourself to have the equivalent of ten PhDs, and you teach young people how to become successful without a college degree by starting their own tech start-up, investing in Bitcoin, and finding their niche in day trading.
You drive an electric car that looks and moves like a flying saucer.
You have almost no body fat, wear dark jeans, black T-shirts, and Vibram Five-Finger Toe Shoes, and replace all your meals with tall glasses of water mixed with whey-isolate protein powder, spirulina, and wheat grass.
You are a philanthropist and you visit third-world countries where you establish schools named after you. These schools are state-of-the-art with lightning-fast computers, organic vegetable gardens, and a spectacular Planetarium where kids can watch the cosmos while listening to the music of Lana Del Ray and Pink Floyd.
You have mastered several languages including Russian, Mandarin, Cantonese, German, French, Spanish, Farsi, Urdu, and Ki-Swahili.
You are well-versed in the breathing techniques of Breathing Master Wim Hof. As a result, you are an evangelist for correct breathing, and you will chastise people for breathing through their mouths, telling them that nose-breathing is the only True Path.
Three times a day you spend an hour inside your ten-thousand-dollar Ice Chamber to enjoy the health benefits of cryotherapy and engage in “mindful meditation” while listening to the haunting Icelandic band Sigur Ros, Eluvium, or Radiohead.
Being an Ubermensch is parodied in the YouTube video “How I Became an Adult.”
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Not Laziness But Burnout
Petersen is arguing that the newer generations, post-Millennial, are not lazy; they are burned out. It’s not so much a flaw of individual character but something systemic to culture at large, a society that promotes a dystopia where people are underpaid and overworked. Society has acclimated itself to this burnout but it can be felt in the background. As Petersen writes:
But the more I tried to figure out my errand paralysis, the more the actual parameters of burnout began to reveal themselves. Burnout and the behaviors and weight that accompany it aren’t, in fact, something we can cure by going on vacation. It’s not limited to workers in acutely high-stress environments. And it’s not a temporary affliction: It’s the millennial condition. It’s our base temperature. It’s our background music. It’s the way things are. It’s our lives.
That realization recast my recent struggles: Why can’t I get this mundane stuff done? Because I’m burned out. Why am I burned out? Because I’ve internalized the idea that I should be working all the time. Why have I internalized that idea? Because everything and everyone in my life has reinforced it — explicitly and implicitly — since I was young. Life has always been hard, but many millennials are unequipped to deal with the particular ways in which it’s become hard for us.
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Economic Disadvantage
Petersen argues that it is grotesque for Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers to paint younger generations as spoiled when the younger gens have several economic disadvantages: cost of education, cost of housing, and crappy or at best mediocre job prospects, which often require a side hustle.
Competing for good jobs has become a scene out of the Netflix show Squid Game, about a world that is essentially a tooth-and-claw zero-sum game with only winners and losers, no in-between.
Contrary to being lazy, many of the new generations are full-time careerists who fearfully worship at the altar of Workism, putting all their energies on career success. As Petersen writes:
It wasn’t until after college that I began to see the results of those attitudes in action. Four years postgraduation, alumni would complain that the school had filled with nerds: No one even parties on a Tuesday! I laughed at the eternal refrain — These younger kids, what dorks, we were way cooler — but not until I returned to campus years later as a professor did I realize just how fundamentally different those students’ orientation to school was. There were still obnoxious frat boys and fancy sorority girls, but they were far more studious than my peers had been. They skipped fewer classes. They religiously attended office hours. They emailed at all hours. But they were also anxious grade grubbers, paralyzed at the thought of graduating, and regularly stymied by assignments that called for creativity. They’d been guided closely all their lives, and they wanted me to guide them as well. They were, in a word, scared.
Every graduating senior is scared, to some degree, of the future, but this was on a different level. When my class left our liberal arts experience, we scattered to temporary gigs: I worked at a dude ranch; another friend nannied for the summer; one got a job on a farm in New Zealand; others became raft guides and transitioned to ski instructors. We didn’t think our first job was important; it was just a job and would eventually, meanderingly lead to The Job.
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Fear
A certain amount of fear is normal in life. I’m a Baby Boomer, and fear helped me succeed in college.
When I was seventeen during the summer before I went to college, I did construction work, and I was so sweat-soaked and tired when I got home that all I could do is shower, eat a bowl of cereal, go to bed, and wake up the next morning and start my Hell Day all over again.
It became apparent to me as a teenage kid that if I didn’t go to college, my life would be miserable and I would be so tired I wouldn’t even have time for thoughts; in other words, I would have been a Work Bot who Never Becomes Someone.
I went to college because I wanted to Become Someone.
I nearly failed my first year of college. I received a letter of probationary warning: Either stop dropping classes and improve your grades or you’re expelled.
The warning letter put a fire torch on my rear and motivated me to change my ways, stop hanging out with my high school buddies, and start being consistent with my studies.
I dumped my old friends and quickly spiked my GPA so that I was on the Dean’s List, but let there be no mistake, fear was a huge motivational factor.
Easier for Me
But let’s be clear. My college life as a Baby Boomer was easier than today’s generation. I paid $75 a quarter to go to Cal State and I could major in anything I wanted and be confident I’d find a high-paying job with good medical benefits and afford a house. That scenario doesn’t exist for my students today.
For example, I had no student debt to worry about. But today the average student loan debt is $36K overall and $55K for private colleges.
Today’s Fear of Failure and Disappointing One’s Parents
Petersen observes that today’s generation in college feels the stakes are so high that they immediately must get a high-status job to define their success and “intrinsic value”; otherwise, they will disappoint themselves and their parents. As we read:
But these students were convinced that their first job out of college would not only determine their career trajectory, but also their intrinsic value for the rest of their lives. I told one student, whose dozens of internship and fellowship applications yielded no results, that she should move somewhere fun, get any job, and figure out what interests her and what kind of work she doesn’t want to do — a suggestion that prompted wailing. “But what’ll I tell my parents?” she said. “I want a cool job I’m passionate about!”
Those expectations encapsulate the millennial rearing project, in which students internalize the need to find employment that reflects well on their parents (steady, decently paying, recognizable as a “good job”) that’s also impressive to their peers (at a “cool” company) and fulfills what they’ve been told has been the end goal of all of this childhood optimization: doing work that you’re passionate about. Whether that job is as a professional sports player, a Patagonia social media manager, a programmer at a startup, or a partner at a law firm seems to matter less than checking all of those boxes.
Or at least that’s the theory. So what happens when millennials start the actual search for that holy grail career — and start “adulting” — but it doesn’t feel at all like the dream that had been promised?
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Study Guide for Anne Helen Petersen’s “How the Millennials Became the Burnout Generation,” Part 2
Curating Our Life to be Self-Actualized and Successful
Social media has become the prominent mode for curating our lives as being successful and self-actualized.
We have become inculcated with the idea that we must curate a narrative on social media: We are on a self-actualization journey; we have a hard-work ethic, and we enjoy the fruits of our hard work.
We like to show the world our expensive vacations, our pet dogs, our euphoric romances, our mouth-water meals. We fail to realize that this facade is pure BS, the effluvium of the insecure, the impoverished, and the psychologically damaged.
No matter how much attention and validation is lavished upon us for our social media curations, we feel constantly impoverished, hungry, and “thirsty” for more attention. We can never get enough. We remain sad, anxious, and depressed.
To make our connection to social media even worse, not only are we emotionally addicted to self-curation, we are told that having a “social media presence” is essential to promoting our career and establishing “our brand.” As Petersen writes:
The social media feed — and Instagram in particular — is thus evidence of the fruits of hard, rewarding labor and the labor itself. The photos and videos that induce the most jealousy are those that suggest a perfect equilibrium (work hard, play hard!) has been reached. But of course, for most of us, it hasn’t. Posting on social media, after all, is a means of narrativizing our own lives: What we’re telling ourselves our lives are like. And when we don’t feel the satisfaction that we’ve been told we should receive from a good job that’s “fulfilling,” balanced with a personal life that’s equally so, the best way to convince yourself you’re feeling it is to illustrate it for others.
For many millennials, a social media presence — on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter — has also become an integral part of obtaining and maintaining a job. The “purest” example is the social media influencer, whose entire income source is performing and mediating the self online. But social media is also the means through which many “knowledge workers” — that is, workers who handle, process, or make meaning of information — market and brand themselves. Journalists use Twitter to learn about other stories, but they also use it to develop a personal brand and following that can be leveraged; people use LinkedIn not just for résumés and networking, but to post articles that attest to their personality (their brand!) as a manager or entrepreneur. Millennials aren’t the only ones who do this, but we’re the ones who perfected and thus set the standards for those who do.
“Branding” is a fitting word for this work, as it underlines what the millennial self becomes: a product. And as in childhood, the work of optimizing that brand blurs whatever boundaries remained between work and play. There is no “off the clock” when at all hours you could be documenting your on-brand experiences or tweeting your on-brand observations. The rise of smartphones makes these behaviors frictionless and thus more pervasive, more standardized. In the early days of Facebook, you had to take pictures with your digital camera, upload them to your computer, and post them in albums. Now, your phone is a sophisticated camera, always ready to document every component of your life — in easily manipulated photos, in short video bursts, in constant updates to Instagram Stories — and to facilitate the labor of performing the self for public consumption.
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Turning ourselves into “a brand” is a form of self-commodification that contributes to Workism. As we drink our own Kool-Aid and believe the BS narrative we spin on social media, we become lost narcissists worshipping at the altar of Workism and not realizing that eventually we will crash and burn.
Business is both complicit and happy with our demise. They are looking at us as wet rags and every last drop will be squeezed from us.
The Phone Tethers Us to Work 24/7 While We Suffer Wage Stagnation
In the Smartphone Age, the idea of a 40-hour work week is a joke. The smartphone makes us beholden to our job responsibilities 24/7, either by explicit decree by our boss or our own internalized pressures to keep up and remain competitive.
We would like to believe our increased hours and productivity would result in commensurate pay, but on the contrary, we get paid less, suffer less job security, and endure fewer benefits. As Petersen writes:
But as sociologist Arne L. Kalleberg points out, that efficiency was supposed to give us more job security, more pay, perhaps even more leisure. In short, better jobs.
Yet the more work we do, the more efficient we’ve proven ourselves to be, the worse our jobs become: lower pay, worse benefits, less job security. Our efficiency hasn’t bucked wage stagnation; our steadfastness hasn’t made us more valuable. If anything, our commitment to work, no matter how exploitative, has simply encouraged and facilitated our exploitation. We put up with companies treating us poorly because we don’t see another option. We don’t quit. We internalize that we’re not striving hard enough. And we get a second gig.
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Optimization Is a Pretty Word for Burnout
As we optimize and maximize our efficiency to champion our success, we actually fall precipitously into a rabbit hole of mental and physical weariness and collapse.
Worse than exhaustion which has an endpoint, burnout is a form of an ongoing collapse in which we are in a state of depression and sadness yet keep pushing ourselves to maintain our agenda. Somehow with no rewards, we keep telling ourselves to exploit ourselves more and more as if there is a rainbow waiting for us when in fact no such rainbow exists.
Exhaustion has an endgame. You collapse, hit rock bottom, and abandon the thing that caused the exhaustion.
In contrast, burnout has no endgame. You slog forward in a state of frayed and tattered emotions with no will to stop yourself.
Our intellect tells us to stop and get off the Workism Treadmill, but we have internalized a compulsive addiction to self-punishment that defines what our powers of reason tell us.
As a result, this pathological condition called Burnout becomes the new normal for newer generations. As Petersen writes:
All of this optimization — as children, in college, online — culminates in the dominant millennial condition, regardless of class or race or location: burnout. “Burnout” was first recognized as a psychological diagnosis in 1974, applied by psychologist Herbert Freudenberger to cases of “physical or mental collapse caused by overwork or stress.” Burnout is of a substantively different category than “exhaustion,” although it’s related. Exhaustion means going to the point where you can’t go any further; burnout means reaching that point and pushing yourself to keep going, whether for days or weeks or years.
What’s worse, the feeling of accomplishment that follows an exhausting task — passing the final! Finishing the massive work project! — never comes. “The exhaustion experienced in burnout combines an intense yearning for this state of completion with the tormenting sense that it cannot be attained, that there is always some demand or anxiety or distraction which can’t be silenced,” Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst specializing in burnout, writes. “You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless.”
In his writing about burnout, Cohen is careful to note that it has antecedents; “melancholic world-weariness,” as he puts it, is noted in the book of Ecclesiastes, diagnosed by Hippocrates, and endemic to the Renaissance, a symptom of bewilderment with the feeling of “relentless change.” In the late 1800s, “neurasthenia,” or nervous exhaustion, afflicted patients run down by the “pace and strain of modern industrial life.” Burnout differs in its intensity and its prevalence: It isn’t an affliction experienced by relatively few that evidences the darker qualities of change but, increasingly, and particularly among millennials, the contemporary condition.
People patching together a retail job with unpredictable scheduling while driving Uber and arranging child care have burnout. Startup workers with fancy catered lunches, free laundry service, and 70-minute commutes have burnout. Academics teaching four adjunct classes and surviving on food stamps while trying to publish research in one last attempt at snagging a tenure-track job have burnout. Freelance graphic artists operating on their own schedule without health care or paid time off have burnout.
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Propaganda Against Millennials Reframes Necessity as “Killing” and “Laziness.”
What critics call “killing” high-quality cultural artifacts like nice furniture, diamond wedding rings, and sit-down restaurants as a sign of bad taste and laziness is actually the necessity of optimization. As Petersen writes:
One of the ways to think through the mechanics of millennial burnout is by looking closely at the various objects and industries our generation has supposedly “killed.” We’ve “killed” diamonds because we’re getting married later (or not at all), and if or when we do, it’s rare for one partner to have the financial stability to set aside the traditional two months’ salary for a diamond engagement ring. We’re killing antiques, opting instead for “fast furniture” — not because we hate our grandparents’ old items, but because we’re chasing stable employment across the country, and lugging old furniture and fragile china costs money that we don’t have. We’ve exchanged sit-down casual dining (Applebee’s, TGI Fridays) for fast casual (Chipotle et al.) because if we’re gonna pay for something, it should either be an experience worth waiting in line for (Cronuts! World-famous BBQ! Momofuku!) or efficient as hell.
Even the trends millennials have popularized — like athleisure — speak to our self-optimization. Yoga pants might look sloppy to your mom, but they’re efficient: You can transition seamlessly from an exercise class to a Skype meeting to child pickup. We use Fresh Direct and Amazon because the time they save allows us to do more work.
This is why the fundamental criticism of millennials — that we’re lazy and entitled — is so frustrating: We hustle so hard that we’ve figured out how to avoid wasting time eating meals and are called entitled for asking for fair compensation and benefits like working remotely (so we can live in affordable cities), adequate health care, or 401(k)s (so we can theoretically stop working at some point before the day we die). We’re called whiny for talking frankly about just how much we do work, or how exhausted we are by it. But because overworking for less money isn’t always visible — because job hunting now means trawling LinkedIn, because “overtime” now means replying to emails in bed — the extent of our labor is often ignored, or degraded.
Raising a Family Is the Second Shift
Peterson observes another factor to burnout: Having a family. Raising a family is hard by itself but coming home from a job to cook and clean for a family is the Second Shift. This life has become the new normal and burnout is inevitable. More and more of the young generation are opting out of marriage and having kids altogether to be spared the Second Shift and the financial burdens of raising a family.
Add to the Second Shift the “massive cognitive load” from worrying about money all the time and you’ve got Burnout.
Post-Petersen Essay, American Burnout Has Gotten Worse
America has gotten worse since Petersen’s essay came out in 2019. When we look at the economy, climate change, global conflicts, the Covid Pandemic and all its variants, America’s political polarization, the erosion of American democracy, and masses of Americans with no decent and critical thinking skills living in a conspiracy-addled Fever Swamp of weaponized misinformation, we find ourselves living in a constant state of Hair on Fire.
When our Hair is on Fire 24/7, the burnout Petersen describes is multiplied by a thousand.
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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.
What is Workism?
Workism is the religion of work so that you find meaning in throwing your entire being into your job in an attempt to find meaning, belonging, and transcendence.
What is the fraudster?
The fraudster capitalizes on knowing that there is a large workforce hungry for Workism. While trying to slake his greed, he portrays his company as being “on a mission to change the world,” and in the process, he exploits his employees.
What is Groupthink?
Groupthink in the workforce occurs when individuals desire to belong to the group to the point that they compromise their critical thinking skills and “go along with the program” to in effect be like sheep or “sheeple.”
Workism, fraudsters, and Groupthink Equal What?
When you combine Workism, fraudsters, and Groupthink, you get a colossal scam in the making in which many people are exploited, people lose their life savings, people are hurt, and in many cases, people’s lives are irreversibly ruined.
- We see massive fraud and exploitation in the documentary WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, about the rising and falling star Adam Neumann who managed to walk away with over a billion dollars after ruining thousands of people’s lives. He still does his grift today. His predatory existence is well chronicled in the 8-episode Apple TV show WeCrashed starring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway.
- We see criminal negligence, flagrant lies, and exploitation in The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, about the grifter Elizabeth Holmes who endangered people’s lives with a fake health invention. Holmes’ life of fraud and perfidy was also made into an excellent TV 8-episode miniseries The Dropout with Holmes masterfully played by Amanda Seyfried.
- We see fraud, exploitation, lies, and sociopathy in Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened in which Billy McFarland becomes a convicted felon.
- We see a science fiction version of Workism and Groupthink rendered in the excellent Apple TV show Severance in which workers go through a brain procedure so that their work life is severed from their personal life.
- We see a science fiction version of Workism and Groupthink in the 8-episode TV show Devs in which Nick Offerman plays a Silicon Valley cult leader with a diabolical purpose.
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.
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