"Why do we work so hard?", by Ryan Avent

I really like this recent long-form piece by The Economist’s Ryan Avent. It’s a reflection on why high-achieving people nowadays choose to work long hours.

I get up at 5.30am and spend an hour or two at my desk at home. Once the children are up I join them for breakfast, then go to work as they head off to school. I can usually leave the office in time to join the family for dinner and put the children to bed. Then I can get a bit more done at home: writing, if there is a deadline looming, or reading, which is also part of the job. I work hard, doggedly, almost relentlessly. The joke, which I only now get, is that work is fun.

[…]

But my work – the work we lucky few well-paid professionals do every day, as we co-operate with talented people while solving complex, interesting problems – is fun. And I find that I can devote surprising quantities of time to it.

What is less clear to me, and to so many of my peers, is whether we should do so much of it.

And he says it’s not that there’s increased competition through – say – globalization, but instead people choose to work a lot:

The problem is not that overworked professionals are all miserable. The problem is that they are not.

And when he talks about his father’s attitude to work, it reminds me of how my grandparents view work and private life:

Work was a means to an end; it was something you did to earn the money to pay for the important things in life.

It’s a luxury that only well educated people in richer countries can afford. I’m sometimes surprised to see young people in countries like Brazil who are so much more focused on a straight career with high incomes than me and my peers in Germany. I think that’s because work there isn’t so much fun as you work for your father’s textile company, or a financial company or as a lawyer in São Paulo, but the things it allows you to do, are. But he wants more:

The pleasure lies partly in flow, in the process of losing oneself in a puzzle with a solution on which other people depend.

It boils down to choosing a lifestyle which comes with both long work hours and all the perks like intellectual stimulation and nice coworkers. He calls this the “package deal” that you get. And you cannot pick the best of both. He ends with:

[…] As I explain this, a circularity threatens to overtake my point: to build my career is to make myself indispensable, demonstrating indispensability means burying myself in the work, and the upshot of successfully demonstrating my indispensability is the need to continue working tirelessly. Not only can I not do all that elsewhere; outside London, the obvious brilliance of a commitment to this course of action is underappreciated. It looks pointless – daft, even.

And I begin to understand the nature of the trouble I’m having communicating to my parents precisely why what I’m doing appeals to me. They are asking about a job. I am thinking about identity, community, purpose – the things that provide meaning and motivation. I am talking about my life.