Why do we work so much?
Internalized capitalism, eating up the world
This week, I listened to an interview of Zach Bush, conducted by my friends at the Modern Elder Academy. Here’s a little excerpt:
We're currently in in the midst of our 6th extinction, in the last 150 years, we've desertified over 1/3 of the land of the earth. We're losing the function of the planet. We're going to lose another third in the next 20 years if we don't change our behavior. Longer term, we'll probably flatten out somewhere around a loss of 80-90%.
We are the consumptive, destructive, chemical force on the planet, and for that we are all depressed. Twenty five percent of American adults are on an antidepressant into anxiety. drug; fifty percent will have severe clinical major depression in their lifetime.
That's not a description of vitality as a species.
In a world where we have too much,1 why do we feel the need to keep producing more? I don’t mean that on a societal level. I mean that on a personal level. If we know we’re eating this planet up, what’s the constant urge to “be productive?”
Compelled capitalism
There is an externalized reason why we feel compelled to be productive: capitalism demands it. If you never get ahead of the work/spend cycle, you’ll work for the rest of your life. Over half of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, including 30% of Americans making over $250,000 a year.2 I write a lot about this elsewhere.
Someone in my FF1 cohort was writing this week about burnout and feeling uneasy about not accomplishing anything in a day, which they have come to understand as “part of the cultural programming around deriving self-worth via ‘productivity=value’ (i.e. internalized capitalism).” We only feel valued when we’re “productive.” Who told us that?
We’ve so internalized that work-spend cycle that we don’t realize that we’re doing it. Ideology is the thing we’ve doing without realizing we’re doing it.3 We continue to work forty hour (or more) every week, to keep producing more and more. Even our leisure time must be “productive:”
Even if you’re not working a side hustle,4 your leisure is in service to your labor too. All the lifestyle advice about meals (3 squares! Eat less fat, carbs, sugar!), exercise (ten thousand steps, 45 minutes of high intensity workout, increasing your VO2 Max!), sleep (eight hours, no tech!), extracurriculars (improve your creativity and spiritual well-being!) are really just regimented machine-like ways to optimize yourself. Stop feeling what your body actually wants. Just do these joyless things, and you’ll be, as Radiohead says, stronger, fitter, happier, more productive. In order to work more.
Externalized worthiness
As we’ve talked about already, we find our worthiness and value in work. We’re taught that we have to earn our worthiness from the outside. That’s one reason that 8 out of 10 people don’t know how much money they spend, they don't want to stop working because, without work, they wouldn't be "worth" anything. So why not keep spending?Both what I do for work and how I spend the money they give me display my status in capitalism.5
Developmental psychologists would say that learning and obeying what society demands of you is part of normal childhood ego development. But at some point, staying in that ego stage of achieving external worthiness is arrested development, what soul activist Bill Plotkin calls “pathological adolescence.”
According to Modern Elder Academy founder Chip Conley, our first half of life, our sense of worthiness in the first half of our lives comes from a four mindsets:
“I AM what I do” (achievement)
“I AM what others say about me” (image)
“I AM what I have” (status)
“I AM what I control” (power)
When we can let go of what other people think and own our story, we gain access to our worthiness—the feeling that we are enough just as we are and that we are worthy of love and belonging. When we spend a lifetime trying to distance ourselves from the parts of our lives that don’t fit with who we think we’re supposed to be, we stand outside of our story and hustle for our worthiness by constantly performing, perfecting, pleasing, and proving. - Brene Brown
All these things internalized capitalism. All of these things are inherently unstable and transitory. No amount of achievement, image, status or power ever truly satisfies. Financial freedom creates more freedom from compliance to the outside world,6 a gift of spiritual independence. Financial freedom is a way to come home to ourselves.
“We make many attempts to establish the outer world as a safe haven…instead of finding a safe haven within and bringing that to the outer world.” - Henri Nouwen
Apparently mice are a theme this week.
"Our job is to taste free air. Your so-called boss may own the clock that taunts you from the wall, but, my friends, the hour is yours.” - Severance, TV show
Making the world a better place?
There's a deeper, more subtle piece of internalized capitalism that makes us work so hard. It’s one that rarely gets mentioned:
We believe, deep down, that if we worked harder, we would be better.
That’s the soul reason we keep working more and more. Like rats on the treadmill: If we did just a little more, we could improve ourselves or the world.
One of my mentors, Vicki Robin, once wrote that capitalism is the only socially acceptable addiction in America. But it’s not only our addiction to spending that’s socially accepted, it’s also to work and to screens. Overwork, overspending, and addiction to screens are socially acceptable, and in fact drive capitalism. And even if you're doing "good work" (and incredibly, almost everyone thinks they are doing "good work" which is a whole other topic) and do a lot of it, you're creating an expectation that we all should work that much too.
Thought: working too much never truly satisfies. Isn't that addiction?
Do you feel like the more you work, the more you improve, or improve the world? If so, entertain this:
What if the opposite were true? What if the world would be better, if you did a little less?
Three toxic myths
In the end, it comes down to three toxic myths, which I credit to my hero Lynne Twist. I’ll keep talking about them ad nauseam, because it’s really the core story we’re all living under. Think about these in terms of work:
1. There's not enough (and I am not enough). Unconscious belief there is not enough to go around and someone is going to be left out. Get yours first so you don't get left out. It is at the root of otherness.
2. More is better. A mindset that comes from scarcity. It is endless.
3. That's the way it is
The first myth is why we resource hoard working. My friend and business partner Drew talks about the fact that when we work for longer than we need7, we’re actually taking away opportunities for others. There’s a moral aspect to “retiring early” and letting others work.
The second myth is why we overwork. We have an unspoken belief: "If I worked just a little bit harder... How do you end this sentence yourself?
The last myth is the most insidious. Because the only reason we’ve decided to overwork is because we’ve decided that for each other.
Each one of us has a responsibility to shape the desires of others, just as they shape ours. Each encounter we have with another person enables them, and us, to want more, to want less, or to want differently. In the final analysis, two questions are critical. What do you want? What have you helped others want? One question helps answer the other. - Luke Burgis
Here’s the thing I tell my FF students: you’ll spend every dollar you earn, either in the present or the future. We’re drawing down this planet and in the next 30 years, it’s going to be drastic. Let’s do something else. Work less. Produce less. Consume less. In doing so, you’re letting others do so as well.
Whatever we do, there will be consequences.
You spent decades doing what you thought was the right thing to become successful, and you feel hollow at the end of that journey, and the next 2 decades you have the opportunity of rebirth. We have a society that was told to march to the following metrics of success, that were all extractive, destructive at their foundation, all of them inherently disconnected from natural systems.
And with every dollar we achieved, we were crazy.
So certainly that aspect, but almost at the more personal level it's you have you have spent the last few decades building somebody else's description of an ideal world. And so you became an employee that moved up the ranks. We have been marching as cogs in a machine to build a reality that was not us. - Zach Bush
What is the reality we’re going to build for others?
Do we agree on that? Huh, I’m actually curious.
If this isn’t a pitch for Financial Freedom, I don’t know what is. It doesn’t matter how much money you make if you don’t know how to take care of your money. https://www.schooloffinancialfreedom.com/
Slavoj Zizek, Marxist philosopher
“Do what you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.” -Steve Jobs (quite a last name!)
81% of people don’t know what they spend on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis; we’re impulse and accidental spenders.
Personal finance is one. There are many paths to God, to coming home to yourself. But you have to go down a path.
Which goes to the question: How much do we need?