We've all known the person who grinds away at the millstone before and after regular working hours, sure that rising earlier than the rest and grinding harder than anyone will, in the end, pay off with money and fancy things and happiness.
Maybe we are that person.
That's in the unsigned, unwritten social contract, right? Work hardest and reap the benefits. Ye who grinds shall see rewards aplenty, yes? Well, the thing about that social contract is that it is, in fact, unwritten and unsigned. It also happens to be unobserved by many who control the resources. Does hard work pay off? In self-help books and profiles of professional athletes, sure. Does it guarantee anything? My sources say it does not. My other sources can confirm.
"Rise with the understanding that honest, hard work pays off," I wrote in 96 Ways To Rise and Grind, "know with soul-crushing certainty that this is not true, and grind."
This isn't a call to stop trying, to stop pursuing goals and passions that serve as the reason you pry yourself out of bed every morning, drag a comb across your head, gulp coffee until you feel alive, and shuffle off to work. I may be a shill for Big Cynicism, but I'd never deny that determination leads to results. I decided over dinner one night in September 2012 that I would write a piece for The New York Times about my unhealthy relationship with fantasy football. This article appeared in the paper of record two and a half months later. I had a goal. I chased it. Good stuff followed. I get it. It happens.
Pouring inhuman hours into a job is often a fruitless (and harmful) game. Working all day, every day has become a perverse status symbol in our work-obsessed culture -- a badge to wear in the company of slackers who do the rise-and-grind for a mere 40 hours every week. Endlessly working has been pitched to us as a path to happiness, an amazingly convenient path for folks at the top of that big, nasty economic food chain. Work and be happy. Work and be free. Somewhere, George Orwell smirks. So do these people.
We're programmed to be so sure of this work-happiness tradeoff while research has shown for decades that we've put our unquestioned faith into an approach with no evidence supporting it. The work-happiness paradigm is a castle with no foundation. A gentle wind (in the form of evidence and research) knocks it over.
Research shows, as I mentioned in the foreword to the 96 Ways book, that happiness levels spike during the weekends. But of course they do, you say. Weekends are good and fun. I suppose they can be if you don't play fantasy football. But here's the thing: key happiness indicators peaked on the weekends even for people who don't work. Stress and anxiety levels for both those who work and those who don't jumped during the workweek, only to plummet on Saturday and Sunday.
Why, you might ask, bleary eyed and strapping a coffee IV to your forearm, would there be a universal happiness spike on non-work days? Because, as people in a Stanford University research project reported, spending time with friends and family made them happy. Socializing, laughing, engaging in various time-sucking hobbies, shooting the shit -- it all led to self-reported positive feelings.
There's reason to believe the workweek can and should be cut in half. A United Kingdom study published by the New Economics Foundation found that the 40-hour workweek -- a relic established in large part by the Ford Motor Company -- is "out of step" with what it means to be a 21st century worker. You don't have to read a 300-page research paper to know that worker productivity has skyrocketed in this dystopian technological age.
Slashing the typical workweek in half would solve myriad issues, including “overwork, unemployment, over-consumption, high carbon emissions, low well-being, entrenched inequalities, and the lack of time to live sustainably, to care for each other, and simply to enjoy life," according to the New Economics Foundation. A new workweek standard would lead to better health outcomes too, as workers would (presumably) deal with less stress, the destroyer of health. Reforming the workweek, cutting it to a cool 21 hours, would flip the script on what we think of as "the economy." People and the environment would no longer be subjugated to the whims of business interests; the economy would serve the public interest. Well-rounded lives would be possible without going broke. Gender relations would be vastly improved, as would everyday family life. Neighbors would get to know each other. People would be less miserable. Reforming the workweek wouldn't be a panacea, but it'd be a hell of an improvement over the abject horrors of today's work life.
And a workweek whittled down to a skeletal four hours might be possible for some.
Probably you can rattle off a dozen anecdotes about hard work paying off. I'd believe every one. But happiness -- if that's your goal -- won't be found at the end of an arduous workweek (or work life). This is for the work-long-hours truthers among us: your quasi-religious faith in hard work paying dividends is a lie fed to you from above. Work hard when you must, but remember that evidence matters, and the evidence is against you.