In February 2023 the Pew Research Center asked American workers how important their job is to their overall identity. Thirty-nine percent said extremely or very important. Thirty-four percent said somewhat, and 27 percent said not too or not at all.
The share rises with education. Among workers with a postgraduate degree it was 53 percent. Among those with some college or less it was 34 percent.
In 2022 Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry, published Rest Is Resistance. Her organization “examines rest as a form of resistance.” The publisher’s description speaks of “the oppressive grip of Grind Culture” and says: “Rest, in its simplest form, becomes an act of resistance and a reclaiming of power.”
On November 26, 2018, Elon Musk wrote on Twitter: “There are way easier places to work, but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” Asked how many hours he meant, he said about 80 a week was sustainable, with peaks above 100. “Pain level increases exponentially above 80.”
In 2016 the U.S. Travel Association’s Project: Time Off published a report on what it called work martyrs. These are employees who skip vacation to show complete dedication, worry they will be seen as replaceable, feel guilty for using time off, and believe no one else can do their job.
Thirty-nine percent of employees said they wanted their boss to see them as a work martyr. Among millennials it was 48 percent: “Nearly half (48%) of Millennials think it is a good thing to be seen as a work martyr by the boss.”
Gallup asks working Americans: “If you won 10 million dollars in the lottery, would you continue to work, or would you stop working?” In August 2013 two-thirds said they would keep working. Thirty-one percent said they would stop.
In April 2007, after two years of 18-hour days building The Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington collapsed. “I collapsed from sleep deprivation and hit my desk on the way down and broke my cheekbone.”
In 2016 she published The Sleep Revolution, against what she called “burnout machismo.” In an interview she said, “We hear employees being congratulated for working 24/7, which now we know is the cognitive equivalent of coming to work drunk.” She predicted that “nap rooms in corporations are going to be as prevalent as conference rooms.”
The last of the habits in Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is Habit 7, “Sharpen the Saw.” FranklinCovey, the company that teaches the habits, explains that “dull or rusty tools are much less effective than clean and sharp tools.”
Renewing body, heart, mind and spirit preserves “the greatest asset we have to deal with life and contribute—ourselves.” Through renewal, “We increase our capacity to produce results and handle the challenges around us.”
On June 12, 2005, Steve Jobs gave the commencement speech at Stanford University. “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”
The word workaholic is usually credited to Wayne Oates, an American professor of the psychology of religion and pastoral care. He used it in a 1968 article, “On Being a ‘Workaholic’,” and in his book Confessions of a Workaholic, copyright 1970.
The word is older. In 1947 the Toronto Daily Star joked about a group called Workaholics Synonymous. The Thomasville Times-Enterprise used workaholic in 1962. In 1983 a corporate financial planner and a schoolteacher in New York formed Workaholics Anonymous, a twelve-step fellowship.
On June 30, 2012, the writer Tim Kreider published an essay in The New York Times called “The ‘Busy’ Trap.” It begins: “If you live in America in the twenty-first century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are.”
He calls the complaint of being busy “a boast disguised as a complaint.” He writes, “Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness.” The essay drew more than 500 comments, and sales of his book jumped.