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Key points
- American work culture is notorious for requiring more work hours with less paid vacation time and minimal sick or parental leave.
- The pandemic gave us a forced pause, shifting our perspective on the push for higher work productivity.
- When our workplaces overemphasize their goals at all costs, they are actively jeopardizing our health.
From time immemorial, many societies have been drilled with the core value that hard work is a moral virtue, one that should lead to respect, praise, success, and more. Even America has a simple folk narrative that, through just hard work, one can persevere from any echelon to the top rungs of society; this value is part of the key to the American Dream.
American work culture is notorious for requiring, even encouraging, more work hours than many, with less paid vacation time and minimal to zero sick or parental leave. Only a few places like Japan and South Korea are known for even worse work hour requirements and expectations. South Korea recently proposed raising a legal cap on weekly work hours to 69 (but put the plan on hold after young people protested the initiative), and Japan has had cases of relatively young workers dying of exhaustion caused by overwork.
A Psychological Trap
In recent years, the push for higher work productivity and hours, without a concomitant increase in pay or promotions, and instead an increase in burnout and mental health issues, has led many to question the simplistic way we overemphasize hard work at all costs. The pandemic in particular gave people a forced pause that shifted our perspective; once the hamster wheel stopped for a moment, we looked around and began to question what we were doing and why. This push to work and work, with no emphasis on actually enjoying our lives, was becoming a psychological trap. What were we trying to avoid and escape sometimes by pretending nothing else mattered? The truth that we were quietly lonely, tired, and miserable?
We were also starting to see how that trap was being used against us. In the last couple of decades, corporations were enriching an increasingly slim bunch at the top with billions, at the expense of the 99 percent who were increasingly struggling to have basic survival needs met, like housing, health care, education, and more.
Unfortunately, many of us have no choice but to participate in and perpetuate these inequities to tread water and stay where we are. But sometimes we feel that our good faith is being used against us. Front-line essential workers were forced to continue working during the pandemic, despite the higher risk of COVID-19. Health care workers in New York City during the first wave used trash bags and homemade masks as protection while their hospital CEOs literally flew off in jets to safe havens in places like Florida. Even now, particularly workers in service-oriented jobs that have built-in human responsibility and risk sometimes have their inherent ethics exploited for ongoing productivity.
Some cultures seem to have a different attitude toward work–life balance that we might envy. Several European countries offer standard paid sick and parental leave (even spa vacations) to all citizens. They have leisurely breaks built into their day, and some are even mandating four-day workweeks without major falloffs in productivity.
Yet, we seem to preach a judgmental narrative that leisure and enjoyment of life are wasteful and lazy. Protein shakes are offered as a way to save time and increase task completion in lieu of a delicious, lengthy, well-cooked meal. People are expected to fill every moment of the day with something “productive”…while ignoring the reality that sleep is one of the best ways to maintain overall health (but is often neglected, leading to an epidemic of sleep deprivation).
It’s understandable that workplaces value and prize can-do workers who are industrious and good at their jobs. No one likes someone who isn’t pulling their weight or dumps their work on others. But there is a balance to be hit; when everyone feels overly stressed to the point that people are becoming mean, cutthroat, or even abusive to each other, something is seriously wrong.
Pushing Back
Workers, particularly younger ones, are starting to push back on obsessive workaholism and are vocally advocating for work–life balance. “Bare Minimum Mondays” is a recent viral term coined by Marisa Jo, who has posted TikTok videos encouraging a slow start to the workweek to avoid the more well-known Monday blues and prioritize one’s well-being. Another recently popular term is “quiet quitting,” where workers decide to do the essential tasks of their job and nothing more if no extra pay or meaningful incentives are offered.
These movements reflect a pushback against the previous traditional work culture that emphasized overwork for its own sake. During the pandemic, workers began to realize that their lives literally did not matter to the wealthier people sheltering in place. There are still concerns that the government in conjunction with corporate movements is minimizing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic to avoid heavy economic losses or expenditures associated with ensuring public health with an airborne virus. The only way to protect ourselves, we realized sadly, is to protect ourselves.
Burnout has been another popular concern but, in actuality, is a vague term that some worry pits the blame for deteriorations in workers’ mental health on their own weakness or inability to keep up, rather than the impossibility of systemic expectations and even moral injury seen in many toxic workplaces. The stigma and fear of being labeled as mentally ill/depressed also contribute to the term’s popularity; workplace coaching has become a rising business to assist people with burnout, valuing a buzzy focus on self-actualization and personal “optimization” instead over direct treatment of underlying concerns, both from the management and individual level.
In psychiatry, we often realize that mental health has multiple contributing factors requiring a biopsychosocial assessment. Aside from individual biological and psychological characteristics and propensities, our social environment can contribute greatly to our well-being. When our workplaces overemphasize their goals at all costs, they are actively jeopardizing our health. Suicide and depression continue to rise despite advances in the biological and psychological fronts because we are also not addressing the socially driven root causes of mental illness. Hopefully, all of us can step back and speak up more and more for the balance we need in our daily lives.
