Work in Progress: Why Being a Workaholic Isn’t Great

I think many of us can recall the scene from The Shining when Shelley Duvall discovers that Jack Nicholson’s “work” is only the phrase, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” typed over and over again for countless pages. While this is a shocking scene in the movie, the aphorism rings true. Horror film aside, I’ve been thinking a lot about our overwork-obsessed culture. I see the posts on social media glamorizing the hustle and the daily grind, the photo documentation of putting in the long hours on nights and weekends, and the misconception that burning the candle at both ends is standard behavior. There’s the thought that if you aren’t persistently busy (and we all love to talk about being busy) that you must not be really trying or that you must not want it enough. Vacations, sick days, free time, and hobbies are often trivialized or omitted completely. We’ve all been aiding and abetting a culture of anxious, burned out, and exhausted workers.

I was talking to a friend recently who discovered that she didn’t have any sick days at her new job. In America, there’s not a federal law requiring paid sick leave or annual leave. I questioned what employees do if they got sick and her response was, “They just have to keep working through it.” They’ve discovered that overworking (working 55-plus hours weekly) killed 745,000 people in 2016 (higher risk…