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"The roots of this phenomenon can be traced back to the 'Protestant work ethic' in the 16th Century - a worldview held by white Protestants in Europe that made

"The roots of this phenomenon can be traced back to the 'Protestant work ethic' in the 16th Century - a worldview held by white Protestants in Europe that made hard work and the quest for profit seem virtuous. Sally Maitlis, professor of organisational behaviour and leadership at the University of Oxford, says that "later, the drive for efficiency that arose out of the Industrial Revolution", as well as the way we prize productivity, have "further embedded the value of consistent hard work, often at the cost of personal wellbeing". The roots of the valorization of work may well have been religious, and maybe Christian (though I very much doubt it's exclusively Christian in its origin), but it's definitely spread throughout much of the world, even among the non-religious and even atheist population. I can't count the number of times I've heard people praise others as "hard working"... in all sorts of contexts, in many different parts of the world, native or immigrant, hard work is praised to the heavens and one of the best things you can say about a person is that they're hard working. I almost never hear the value of working hard being questioned, except when the subject turns to burnout. Then everybody nods sagely and agrees that overwork is bad.. the next day they go back to praising hard workers.

crispyambulance 6y ago
The Protestant/Calvinist work-ethic is definitely a factor especially, IMHO, in technology work. It stretches over to Asian non-Christian cultures too, but I suspect that's because it's an export which they've accepted as their own because it happens to jive with the strict authoritarian hierarchies which are common in Asian countries. You can see it in Stackoverflow as well. The gamification encourages people to prove they are "worthy" of even deigning to ask a question by showing they've done "the work". Those who haven't are subject to humiliation and dismissal, regardless of need or authenticity.
- halflings 6y ago
  > You can see it in Stackoverflow as well. The gamification encourages people to prove they are "worthy" of even deigning to ask a question by showing they've done "the work". Those who haven't are subject to humiliation and dismissal, regardless of need or authenticity. I don't see how stackexchange's policy is related to the article, or "Protestant/Calvinist work-ethic". They are banning low-effort questions (e.g "File couldn't be opened" when the person just has a typo in a file path) because they devalue the platform, waste time that could have instead been spent on useful questions. > I suspect that's because it's an export which they've accepted as their own because it happens to jive with the strict authoritarian hierarchies which are common in Asian countries. Or they independently developed a glorification of hard-work from other sources. It's nothing new. All the Abrahamic religions do, and the same is true for secular ideologies such as communism.
- zepto 6y ago
  You can see the ultimate expression of Calvinism/Protestantism in Bitcoin too, where authority over what counts as money is granted to machines that can prove that they have done ‘work’. This proof is not judged by a human, but rather by the laws of mathematics and physics - I.e. the creations of God, thus Bitcoin is a money whose purity is sanctified by an offering of work done for its own sake.
  - ihsw 6y ago
    It is self-evident that BTC was invented specifically in rejection of and in opposition to being judged by humans. One could easily compare this to the importance of purity in religious contexts but it would be foolish to assume there is any connection.
    - zepto 6y ago
      > it would be foolish to assume there is any connection. Given the history of human ideas, it would be equally foolish to assume there was not. Atheists do a lot of things religious people do because they are still part of a tradition even if they don’t ‘believe’.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    That view implies and required the acceptance of a God, though - it's like saying that gravity itself is the ultimate expression of protestantism (not sure if your post is supposed to be a /s).
    - jonnyone 6y ago
      No, not necessarily. You can be psychologically influenced by a society imbued with religious moral undertones to the point where you unwittingly want to "prove yourself" to "some omnipotent other." I think it's fairly common, actually.
    - zepto 6y ago
      It only presupposes that ‘God’ is a symbol for an enforcer of laws that are above human laws. This is self-evidently a pre-requisite for Bitcoin.
- yeetman21 6y ago
  people want others to show that they at least tried to put effort into something before calling for help, this is not a bad thing
- kortilla 6y ago
  Are suggesting Japan’s salaryman was an import from Christians?
- unishark 6y ago
  I've always viewed the Calvinism theory as a kind of anti-American theory that violates Ockham's razor. The desire to prove one's self by overworking strikes me as an innate adolescent approach to competition. Whether it's to impress your peers at a casual sport or at your job. If some cultures achieve progress in a more healthy way, then that's the interesting and unnatural situation which needs investigating.
thomastjeffery 6y ago
Most values that exist in religious doctrine and culture end up spreading to secular culture. Issues like sexual shame, circumcision, censored language, etc. are all commonplace in America because they are actively promoted by religious conservatives and (for the most part) passively ignored by critics. It's difficult to be critical of values that religious institutions have without being generally dismissed as overly antagonistic.
analog31 6y ago
Nassim Taleb suggests that it's not an outgrowth of religion. [n] https://medium.com/incerto/religion-violence-tolerance-progress-nothing-to-do-with-theology-a31f351c729e https://medium.com/incerto/religion-violence-tolerance-progr...
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
> though I very much doubt it's exclusively Christian in its origin You should see the Japanese go at it. I hear the Chinese are every bit as bad (996). Not many Christians, there. The Japanese take a certain pride in it. I feel that their efficiency suffers, and burnout is a big problem, there.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- theshrike79 6y ago
  The Japanese working culture might be the only one worse than the American one. In Japan you need to be at the office before your boss and can't leave before they do. And this goes all the way up, meaning that the lowest employees practically live at the office. Combine this with a culture that doesn't really allow questioning your superiors makes for a really stressful work life. One anecdote I heard was that a company had a one hour meeting with the Big Boss, who told what he wanted people to do. After that they had a two-hour meeting where they figured out what the boss meant. It was not proper to ask questions directly from the big boss. Americans on the other hand glorify working two or three jobs, suffering 80-100 hour work weeks is a badge of honour. And they still just barely manage to get a living wage.
  - samatman 6y ago
    It is not. At minimum, South Korean and Mainland Chinese working culture is worse than American. Taiwanese as well. Don't know if that list is exhaustive; it might be.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    > One anecdote I heard was that a company had a one hour meeting with the Big Boss, who told what he wanted people to do. After that they had a two-hour meeting where they figured out what the boss meant. It was not proper to ask questions directly from the big boss. Totally believe that. I worked at a Japanese company for 27 years, and attended a lot of meetings. Japanese managers pretty much spend their entire career in conference rooms. The Chinese, however, have the concept of "996," which means "9AM to 9PM, six days a week." The Japanese also do that, but it's not quite as explicit.
keyle 6y ago
"An idle mind is the devil's workshop" was the exact quote.
rsj_hn 6y ago
I think the real point of the protestant work ethic is that when you have a post-Christian society that replaces church with work, you end up with people effectively going to work-monasteries. But if you look at the Middle Ages, you'll find something like 100 days off a year, tons of feast days and days off, limited working hours in the remaining days, and not at all a culture that valorized work even thought it was much more deeply Christian than modern Europe. It's all about what you worship.
- Clewza313 6y ago
  The vast majority people in the Middle Ages lived off subsistence farming, which doesn't really have "days off". Yes, farming has busier and quieter periods, but many types of work like spinning and weaving were essentially continuous (the amount of work required to clothe a family was ridiculous), and even the quietest "off day" still included things like feeding and milking the animals. Feast days were often also designed around communal events like harvesting or barn-raising, when the entire community got together and basically took turns working at tasks that needed more labor than a single household can provide.
  - rsj_hn 6y ago
    > The vast majority people in the Middle Ages lived off subsistence farming, which doesn't really have "days off". I think you have an incorrect view of subsistence farming. It does not require constant work, and you do not see constant work in traditional societies. You do see many days off. Now during harvest time there is lots of work, but that is a small period of the year, say 7 weeks out of the year. Other times the farmer has the option of when to plant and how much, when to weed and how much, when to work on processing food and how much. And these fall into familiar patterns from which things like feast days emerge as the interstitial times when the above does not need to happen. The idea of constant backbreaking labor all year long may be appropriate for something like a large Jamaican plantation, but not a small farm in Europe. Of course if it was an American farmer, they would enlarge their farm, bring in more livestock or auxiliary sources of income to fill up whatever daylight was available, and keep adding work until they and all their hired hands were busy all the time. Then they would take the earnings and use it to buy more land and hire more people and expand the work even further. But traditional societies did not organize themselves this way, nor is this something required of farmers. Here is some data: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w... "The contrast between capitalist and precapitalist work patterns is most striking in respect to the working year. The medieval calendar was filled with holidays. Official -- that is, church -- holidays included not only long "vacations" at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer but also numerous saints' andrest days. These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking. In addition to official celebrations, there were often weeks' worth of ales -- to mark important life events (bride ales or wake ales) as well as less momentous occasions (scot ale, lamb ale, and hock ale). All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancien règime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year.[5] The peasant's free time extended beyond officially sanctioned holidays. There is considerable evidence of what economists call the backward-bending supply curve of labor -- the idea that when wages rise, workers supply less labor. During one period of unusually high wages (the late fourteenth century), many laborers refused to work "by the year or the half year or by any of the usual terms but only by the day." And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income -- which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall). A thirteenth-century estime finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year -- 175 days -- for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year."
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rStar 6y ago
>I can't count the number of times I've heard people praise others as "hard working"... in all sorts of contexts, in many different parts of the world, native or immigrant, hard work is praised to the heavens and one of the best things you can say about a person is that they're hard working. this reminds me of how, in the US at least, society has settled into the pattern of saying "thank you" to the "heroes" who fight our wars, protect us from fire and keep our for-profit prisons full. it's because the rest of us have no interest in doing any of those things, so we blow smoke up their proverbial *. fuck the protestant work ethic, and fuck being guilted into wage slavery, for at least, you know, the period of your life that lasts from the time your young and healthy until you die.
acituan 6y ago
The problem is not about being hard working or not hard working. It is about the constraints around that hard work; or lack thereof. In late modern labor society the normativity is to achieve in itself, without any philosophical or ethical constraints that grounds achievement in real meaning. It is a pick-and-choose buffet of values and priorities, that is individually curated - rather than also being synchronized with others, the past and the future - and there is only one rule, that you have to achieve. The grammar of achievement is performance and excess. Everything is possible, and you must exploit yourself while trying to exhaust the possibilities. Except you can't and therefore it is a slow burn spiritual suicide, until you burnout, get into depression, have autoimmune problems etc and hopefully get a wakeup call. Except your therapist is not going to tell you to take it easy either, because they can't come up with any answer to lack of meaning other than work (and maybe to get a family) either. Not that there is any evil conspiring forces that have set this up, but it also happens having people exploit themselves in the name of achievement yields more than being exploited by someone else directly; to be told what and what not to do all the time is unnecessary when people are equally capable of auto-exploitation. Everyone carries little walking labor camps in themselves.
- dqh 6y ago
  Interesting that you mention autoimmune problems alongside burnout and depression, I hadn’t heard of that possible link before. Do you have any anecdotes on this that you would share?
  - andrewjl 6y ago
    Not the OP but look into links between stress and inflammation.[1] [1] https://www.healthline.com/health/inflammation https://www.healthline.com/health/inflammation
- insert_coin 6y ago
  > The problem is not about being hard working or not hard working. It is about the constraints around that hard work; or lack thereof. In late modern labor society the normativity is to achieve in itself, without any philosophical or ethical constraints that grounds achievement in real meaning. It is a pick-and-choose buffet of values and priorities, that is individually curated - rather than also being synchronized with others, the past and the future - and there is only one rule, that you have to achieve. That is of course not true. Individually curated means synchronized with others as no individual exists in a vacuum; it feeds on others, on the environment, on history, and others feed on the individual, and the environment is modified by the individual, and history written by it. That it is free to evaluate its own future path is not the same as not being also part of something else, much less not take into account the something else. Achievement in itself is, unparadoxically, and achievement. That you don't agree with it says more about your synchronicity with the rest of society than the opposite.
refurb 6y ago
And the reason why that culture permeates East Asia?
- jhbadger 6y ago
  Confucianism has a work ethic that while not exactly the same as the Western/Christian one, has a lot of similarities. Although Confucius was Chinese, these ideas spread into other East Asian countries that were under historical Chinese influence like Japan, Korea, and Vietnam
eat_veggies 6y ago
Yes, that's a major point in Weber's original formulation of the Protestant work ethic—the secularization of those values and practices. In other words, the puritans wanted to live this way; we have to. If the phenomenon seems like it's global now—even appearing in parts of the world that Protestantism never touched—then that's because, well, capitalism is global.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  You have to live like them? I have a strong suspicion you work nowhere near as hard or long as the Puritans did.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Datagenerator 6y ago
This, thank you for the paradoxical views most have on the 'hard workers'. Up until mental problems become undeniable these people are exploited.
WalterBright 6y ago
Colonial Americans, before the industrial revolution, worked very hard and died young. The proof is in their bones, all showing signs of overwork. Subsistence farming is no picnic.
- goodpoint 6y ago
  > Subsistence farming is no picnic. The majority of traditional cultures practicing subsistence farming often work much less than 40h/w, still today. During the middle ages it was common in many cultures to have less than 200 working days per year.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    I bet they're not making their own thread, cloth, clothes, and a lot of the other things provided by an industrialized world. Doing those things the old way is very, very labor intensive.
wildmanx 6y ago
The opposite of "hard working" is not "good work-life balance", but "slacking off". And that's one of the roots of this cult. You don't want to be perceived as slacking off, so you sacrifice work-life balance and work overtime. That's such an enormous misconception. You can be very focused 9-to-5, and then you go home and don't look back until next morning at 9 am when you again are as hard-working as the day before. Somebody who is 12 hours a day at the office but spends half the time chit-chatting at the water cooler and browsing facebook is not "hard working". Hard-working and work-life balance are not opposites. That's something people really need to understand.
- chasd00 6y ago
  I’ll add that working hard doesn’t mean being effective or productive. I can go dig holes in my backyard 24x7 which is very hard work but does nothing. Some people can be very effective 9 to 5 and push progress much further than many others working 14 hr days doing the digital equivalent of digging holes.
routerl 6y ago
> The roots of the valorization of work may well have been religious, and maybe Christian (though I very much doubt it's exclusively Christian in its origin), but it's definitely spread throughout much of the world, even among the non-religious and even atheist population. The article is referencing "The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism", which is a seminal work on the history and structure of labour. It does not, in any way, imply that this is a religious phenomenon any more than capitalism itself.
bambax 6y ago
> even among the non-religious and even atheist population Just because one proclaims to not believe in God doesn't free them from the values that were drilled in their head during childhood. So many people proclaim to be "atheists" but otherwise strongly believe in and defend Christian values (Bill Gates is a prominent example). It's not just childhood, it's social pressure. It's extremely hard to publicly hold values that go contrary to the group, even more so when those contrarian values don't bring success and therefore don't have much to show for themselves. Diogenes was a true hero.
zarkov99 6y ago
Hard workers should be praised. It is hard and it works. It is the only lever we actually have some control over to move forward in life. On the other hand there is nothing admirable about taking it easy. Anyone can do it and it does not lead to any achievement. Of course some people care about achievement and some do not, that is fine, but lets not pretend hard work is not necessary for it.

crispyambulance 6y ago

The Protestant/Calvinist work-ethic is definitely a factor especially, IMHO, in technology work. It stretches over to Asian non-Christian cultures too, but I suspect that's because it's an export which they've accepted as their own because it happens to jive with the strict authoritarian hierarchies which are common in Asian countries. You can see it in Stackoverflow as well. The gamification encourages people to prove they are "worthy" of even deigning to ask a question by showing they've done "the work". Those who haven't are subject to humiliation and dismissal, regardless of need or authenticity.

halflings 6y ago
> You can see it in Stackoverflow as well. The gamification encourages people to prove they are "worthy" of even deigning to ask a question by showing they've done "the work". Those who haven't are subject to humiliation and dismissal, regardless of need or authenticity. I don't see how stackexchange's policy is related to the article, or "Protestant/Calvinist work-ethic". They are banning low-effort questions (e.g "File couldn't be opened" when the person just has a typo in a file path) because they devalue the platform, waste time that could have instead been spent on useful questions. > I suspect that's because it's an export which they've accepted as their own because it happens to jive with the strict authoritarian hierarchies which are common in Asian countries. Or they independently developed a glorification of hard-work from other sources. It's nothing new. All the Abrahamic religions do, and the same is true for secular ideologies such as communism.
zepto 6y ago
You can see the ultimate expression of Calvinism/Protestantism in Bitcoin too, where authority over what counts as money is granted to machines that can prove that they have done ‘work’. This proof is not judged by a human, but rather by the laws of mathematics and physics - I.e. the creations of God, thus Bitcoin is a money whose purity is sanctified by an offering of work done for its own sake.
- ihsw 6y ago
  It is self-evident that BTC was invented specifically in rejection of and in opposition to being judged by humans. One could easily compare this to the importance of purity in religious contexts but it would be foolish to assume there is any connection.
  - zepto 6y ago
    > it would be foolish to assume there is any connection. Given the history of human ideas, it would be equally foolish to assume there was not. Atheists do a lot of things religious people do because they are still part of a tradition even if they don’t ‘believe’.
- judge2020 6y ago
  That view implies and required the acceptance of a God, though - it's like saying that gravity itself is the ultimate expression of protestantism (not sure if your post is supposed to be a /s).
  - jonnyone 6y ago
    No, not necessarily. You can be psychologically influenced by a society imbued with religious moral undertones to the point where you unwittingly want to "prove yourself" to "some omnipotent other." I think it's fairly common, actually.
  - zepto 6y ago
    It only presupposes that ‘God’ is a symbol for an enforcer of laws that are above human laws. This is self-evidently a pre-requisite for Bitcoin.
yeetman21 6y ago
people want others to show that they at least tried to put effort into something before calling for help, this is not a bad thing
kortilla 6y ago
Are suggesting Japan’s salaryman was an import from Christians?
unishark 6y ago
I've always viewed the Calvinism theory as a kind of anti-American theory that violates Ockham's razor. The desire to prove one's self by overworking strikes me as an innate adolescent approach to competition. Whether it's to impress your peers at a casual sport or at your job. If some cultures achieve progress in a more healthy way, then that's the interesting and unnatural situation which needs investigating.

thomastjeffery 6y ago

Most values that exist in religious doctrine and culture end up spreading to secular culture. Issues like sexual shame, circumcision, censored language, etc. are all commonplace in America because they are actively promoted by religious conservatives and (for the most part) passively ignored by critics. It's difficult to be critical of values that religious institutions have without being generally dismissed as overly antagonistic.

analog31 6y ago

Nassim Taleb suggests that it's not an outgrowth of religion. [n] https://medium.com/incerto/religion-violence-tolerance-progress-nothing-to-do-with-theology-a31f351c729e https://medium.com/incerto/religion-violence-tolerance-progr...

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

> though I very much doubt it's exclusively Christian in its origin You should see the Japanese go at it. I hear the Chinese are every bit as bad (996). Not many Christians, there. The Japanese take a certain pride in it. I feel that their efficiency suffers, and burnout is a big problem, there.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
theshrike79 6y ago
The Japanese working culture might be the only one worse than the American one. In Japan you need to be at the office before your boss and can't leave before they do. And this goes all the way up, meaning that the lowest employees practically live at the office. Combine this with a culture that doesn't really allow questioning your superiors makes for a really stressful work life. One anecdote I heard was that a company had a one hour meeting with the Big Boss, who told what he wanted people to do. After that they had a two-hour meeting where they figured out what the boss meant. It was not proper to ask questions directly from the big boss. Americans on the other hand glorify working two or three jobs, suffering 80-100 hour work weeks is a badge of honour. And they still just barely manage to get a living wage.
- samatman 6y ago
  It is not. At minimum, South Korean and Mainland Chinese working culture is worse than American. Taiwanese as well. Don't know if that list is exhaustive; it might be.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  > One anecdote I heard was that a company had a one hour meeting with the Big Boss, who told what he wanted people to do. After that they had a two-hour meeting where they figured out what the boss meant. It was not proper to ask questions directly from the big boss. Totally believe that. I worked at a Japanese company for 27 years, and attended a lot of meetings. Japanese managers pretty much spend their entire career in conference rooms. The Chinese, however, have the concept of "996," which means "9AM to 9PM, six days a week." The Japanese also do that, but it's not quite as explicit.

keyle 6y ago

"An idle mind is the devil's workshop" was the exact quote.

rsj_hn 6y ago

I think the real point of the protestant work ethic is that when you have a post-Christian society that replaces church with work, you end up with people effectively going to work-monasteries. But if you look at the Middle Ages, you'll find something like 100 days off a year, tons of feast days and days off, limited working hours in the remaining days, and not at all a culture that valorized work even thought it was much more deeply Christian than modern Europe. It's all about what you worship.

Clewza313 6y ago
The vast majority people in the Middle Ages lived off subsistence farming, which doesn't really have "days off". Yes, farming has busier and quieter periods, but many types of work like spinning and weaving were essentially continuous (the amount of work required to clothe a family was ridiculous), and even the quietest "off day" still included things like feeding and milking the animals. Feast days were often also designed around communal events like harvesting or barn-raising, when the entire community got together and basically took turns working at tasks that needed more labor than a single household can provide.
- rsj_hn 6y ago
  > The vast majority people in the Middle Ages lived off subsistence farming, which doesn't really have "days off". I think you have an incorrect view of subsistence farming. It does not require constant work, and you do not see constant work in traditional societies. You do see many days off. Now during harvest time there is lots of work, but that is a small period of the year, say 7 weeks out of the year. Other times the farmer has the option of when to plant and how much, when to weed and how much, when to work on processing food and how much. And these fall into familiar patterns from which things like feast days emerge as the interstitial times when the above does not need to happen. The idea of constant backbreaking labor all year long may be appropriate for something like a large Jamaican plantation, but not a small farm in Europe. Of course if it was an American farmer, they would enlarge their farm, bring in more livestock or auxiliary sources of income to fill up whatever daylight was available, and keep adding work until they and all their hired hands were busy all the time. Then they would take the earnings and use it to buy more land and hire more people and expand the work even further. But traditional societies did not organize themselves this way, nor is this something required of farmers. Here is some data: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w... "The contrast between capitalist and precapitalist work patterns is most striking in respect to the working year. The medieval calendar was filled with holidays. Official -- that is, church -- holidays included not only long "vacations" at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer but also numerous saints' andrest days. These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking. In addition to official celebrations, there were often weeks' worth of ales -- to mark important life events (bride ales or wake ales) as well as less momentous occasions (scot ale, lamb ale, and hock ale). All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancien règime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year.[5] The peasant's free time extended beyond officially sanctioned holidays. There is considerable evidence of what economists call the backward-bending supply curve of labor -- the idea that when wages rise, workers supply less labor. During one period of unusually high wages (the late fourteenth century), many laborers refused to work "by the year or the half year or by any of the usual terms but only by the day." And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income -- which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall). A thirteenth-century estime finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year -- 175 days -- for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year."

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

rStar 6y ago

>I can't count the number of times I've heard people praise others as "hard working"... in all sorts of contexts, in many different parts of the world, native or immigrant, hard work is praised to the heavens and one of the best things you can say about a person is that they're hard working. this reminds me of how, in the US at least, society has settled into the pattern of saying "thank you" to the "heroes" who fight our wars, protect us from fire and keep our for-profit prisons full. it's because the rest of us have no interest in doing any of those things, so we blow smoke up their proverbial *. fuck the protestant work ethic, and fuck being guilted into wage slavery, for at least, you know, the period of your life that lasts from the time your young and healthy until you die.

acituan 6y ago

The problem is not about being hard working or not hard working. It is about the constraints around that hard work; or lack thereof. In late modern labor society the normativity is to achieve in itself, without any philosophical or ethical constraints that grounds achievement in real meaning. It is a pick-and-choose buffet of values and priorities, that is individually curated - rather than also being synchronized with others, the past and the future - and there is only one rule, that you have to achieve. The grammar of achievement is performance and excess. Everything is possible, and you must exploit yourself while trying to exhaust the possibilities. Except you can't and therefore it is a slow burn spiritual suicide, until you burnout, get into depression, have autoimmune problems etc and hopefully get a wakeup call. Except your therapist is not going to tell you to take it easy either, because they can't come up with any answer to lack of meaning other than work (and maybe to get a family) either. Not that there is any evil conspiring forces that have set this up, but it also happens having people exploit themselves in the name of achievement yields more than being exploited by someone else directly; to be told what and what not to do all the time is unnecessary when people are equally capable of auto-exploitation. Everyone carries little walking labor camps in themselves.

dqh 6y ago
Interesting that you mention autoimmune problems alongside burnout and depression, I hadn’t heard of that possible link before. Do you have any anecdotes on this that you would share?
- andrewjl 6y ago
  Not the OP but look into links between stress and inflammation.[1] [1] https://www.healthline.com/health/inflammation https://www.healthline.com/health/inflammation
insert_coin 6y ago
> The problem is not about being hard working or not hard working. It is about the constraints around that hard work; or lack thereof. In late modern labor society the normativity is to achieve in itself, without any philosophical or ethical constraints that grounds achievement in real meaning. It is a pick-and-choose buffet of values and priorities, that is individually curated - rather than also being synchronized with others, the past and the future - and there is only one rule, that you have to achieve. That is of course not true. Individually curated means synchronized with others as no individual exists in a vacuum; it feeds on others, on the environment, on history, and others feed on the individual, and the environment is modified by the individual, and history written by it. That it is free to evaluate its own future path is not the same as not being also part of something else, much less not take into account the something else. Achievement in itself is, unparadoxically, and achievement. That you don't agree with it says more about your synchronicity with the rest of society than the opposite.

refurb 6y ago

And the reason why that culture permeates East Asia?

jhbadger 6y ago
Confucianism has a work ethic that while not exactly the same as the Western/Christian one, has a lot of similarities. Although Confucius was Chinese, these ideas spread into other East Asian countries that were under historical Chinese influence like Japan, Korea, and Vietnam

eat_veggies 6y ago

Yes, that's a major point in Weber's original formulation of the Protestant work ethic—the secularization of those values and practices. In other words, the puritans wanted to live this way; we have to. If the phenomenon seems like it's global now—even appearing in parts of the world that Protestantism never touched—then that's because, well, capitalism is global.

missedthecue 6y ago
You have to live like them? I have a strong suspicion you work nowhere near as hard or long as the Puritans did.

deleted 6y ago

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Datagenerator 6y ago

This, thank you for the paradoxical views most have on the 'hard workers'. Up until mental problems become undeniable these people are exploited.

WalterBright 6y ago

Colonial Americans, before the industrial revolution, worked very hard and died young. The proof is in their bones, all showing signs of overwork. Subsistence farming is no picnic.

goodpoint 6y ago
> Subsistence farming is no picnic. The majority of traditional cultures practicing subsistence farming often work much less than 40h/w, still today. During the middle ages it was common in many cultures to have less than 200 working days per year.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  I bet they're not making their own thread, cloth, clothes, and a lot of the other things provided by an industrialized world. Doing those things the old way is very, very labor intensive.

wildmanx 6y ago

The opposite of "hard working" is not "good work-life balance", but "slacking off". And that's one of the roots of this cult. You don't want to be perceived as slacking off, so you sacrifice work-life balance and work overtime. That's such an enormous misconception. You can be very focused 9-to-5, and then you go home and don't look back until next morning at 9 am when you again are as hard-working as the day before. Somebody who is 12 hours a day at the office but spends half the time chit-chatting at the water cooler and browsing facebook is not "hard working". Hard-working and work-life balance are not opposites. That's something people really need to understand.

chasd00 6y ago
I’ll add that working hard doesn’t mean being effective or productive. I can go dig holes in my backyard 24x7 which is very hard work but does nothing. Some people can be very effective 9 to 5 and push progress much further than many others working 14 hr days doing the digital equivalent of digging holes.

routerl 6y ago

> The roots of the valorization of work may well have been religious, and maybe Christian (though I very much doubt it's exclusively Christian in its origin), but it's definitely spread throughout much of the world, even among the non-religious and even atheist population. The article is referencing "The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism", which is a seminal work on the history and structure of labour. It does not, in any way, imply that this is a religious phenomenon any more than capitalism itself.

bambax 6y ago

> even among the non-religious and even atheist population Just because one proclaims to not believe in God doesn't free them from the values that were drilled in their head during childhood. So many people proclaim to be "atheists" but otherwise strongly believe in and defend Christian values (Bill Gates is a prominent example). It's not just childhood, it's social pressure. It's extremely hard to publicly hold values that go contrary to the group, even more so when those contrarian values don't bring success and therefore don't have much to show for themselves. Diogenes was a true hero.

zarkov99 6y ago

Hard workers should be praised. It is hard and it works. It is the only lever we actually have some control over to move forward in life. On the other hand there is nothing admirable about taking it easy. Anyone can do it and it does not lead to any achievement. Of course some people care about achievement and some do not, that is fine, but lets not pretend hard work is not necessary for it.