Why do American youth pretend to love working

I watched the greatest minds of my generation work 18 hours a day, and boasted about it on Instagram with the #hustle tag. When did performative workaholism become a way of life?

Not once at the beginning of his working week - not in line for morning coffee; not in a crowd of people going to work in the subway; nor at the beginning of sorting the bottomless inbox - I did not stop then to look up at the sky and whisper: # Glory to God Monday (SBP).

Apparently, by this I betray my generation. I found out about this during a series of my recent visits to WeWork’s coworking network in New York, where sofa cushions urge busy visitors: “Do what you love.” Neon signs require “Hurry Up Faster,” and wall inscriptions glorify the doctrine of SBP. Even cucumbers in WeWork coolers have their own program. “Do not stop when you are tired,” he recently cut out.someone in the flesh of floating vegetables. "Stop when you're done." Metaphors related to the use of Kool-Aid are rarely so literal [ in American culture, the phrase “drinking Kool-Aid” means believing in a dangerous idea that promises a great reward and is associated with mass suicide in Johnstown / approx. perev. ].

Welcome to the culture of fuss. She is obsessed with aspiration, tirelessly positive, devoid of humor, and - when you notice this - it is impossible to get out of it. "Rise and Grind" [Rise and Grind] - at the same time the theme of the Nike advertising campaign and the title of the book of one of the sharks on the TV show " Aquarium with Sharks". New media like Hustle, which is responsible for popular business news and conferences, and One37pm, a company created by the patron saint of all the fussy, Gary Vainerchuk , glorify ambition not as a means to an end, but as a lifestyle.

" Today's state of entrepreneurship is more than a career, - write on the page “ About us“At One37pm. “This is ambition, strength of character and vanity. This is a live performance that feeds your creativity. Physical activity that triggers an endorphin reaction. A dreamer that broadens your mind. ” From this point of view, a person not only does not stop fussing - he never leaves the state of admiration for work, in which the main goal of doing exercises or attending a concert remains the search for inspiration leading you back to your desktop.

Ryan Harwood, CEO of One37pm's parent company, told me that the site’s content is for a younger generation of people seeking permission to follow their dreams. “They want to know how to take control of their moment at any given time,” he said.

“Take hold of your moment” is a cunning alteration of the concept of “survive in the rat race .” In a new working culture, it’s not enough just to be enduring or to like a person. Workers must adore their work and spread this adoration on social networks, thus soldering their personalities with personalities . employers LinkedIn Why else would do their version of Snapchat Stories?

it's the glamor of hard work, and he comes out to the masses is most evident that WeWork -. investors which were recently valued at $ 47 billion - is becoming a Starbucks office ultury. The company has already exported its brand of performative workaholism in 27 countries, has 400 000 visitors, including workers from the 30% of companies from Global Fortune 500 list.

In January, WeWork founder Adam Newman announced that his startup was changing the brand to We Company to reflect the expansion of the real estate and education business. Describing this process, Fast Company noted: “Instead of just renting tables, the company wants to embrace all aspects of people's lives, both in the physical and digital worlds.” You can imagine their ideal client as a person so enchanted by WeWork's office aesthetics - cucumbers with lashes and everything else - that he sleeps in WeLive apartments, practices at the Rise by We gym and sends the children to WeGrow school.

From this bell tower, the Office Space series, an ode to laziness for the X generation, which will turn 20 next month, seems like science fiction from a faraway country. It is almost impossible to imagine a working bee from today's startup, which, in the manner of the protagonist Peter Gibbons, would admit : "I'm not that lazy, I just don't care." Indifference in the workplace does not have a socially acceptable hashtag.

“It's cruel and exploitative.”

It is quite simple to consider the culture of fuss as a hoax. In the end, persuading an entire generation of workers to plow is very convenient for those upstairs.

“Most of the people who sing the vanity mania do not belong to the group that really works. These are managers, financiers, and company owners, ”said David Heinmeier Hansson, one of the founders of Basecamp, a software company. We talked in October when he advertised his book “ It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work ], where it talks about creating a healthy corporate culture.

Heinmeier Hansson said that despite the evidence that long daily work does not improve either efficiency or creativity, recycling myths persist as they justify the excessive wealth created for a small group of elite techies. “It's cruel and exploitative,” he said.



Elon Musk, who gets a bonus of up to $ 50 billion, if his Tesla achieves certain indicators, serves as a vivid example of a man who praises labor that will bring profit mainly to him alone. In November, he tweeted that there are places where it’s easier to work than Tesla, “but no one ever changed the world by working 40 hours a week.” The exact number of hours "depends on the person," he continued, "but usually it’s 80 hours, and at peak times - 100. The pain threshold exponentially grows over 80 hours a week."

Further Musk, who has 24 million followers on Twitter, noted that if you love your work, "then it (practically) does not feel like work." Even he had to soften the lie about SBP with brackets.

The technology industry probably spawned this culture of hard work around the turn of the millennium, when Google and others like it began to feed their employees, massage them and play doctor. All these buns were supposed to attract the most talented to the company - and to keep employees at the desktop longer. All this seemed worthy of envy: who will not like the employer who literally does the laundry for you?



But today, when technoculture penetrates all corners of the business world, its hymns to the virtues of unceasing work most remind me of the propaganda of the Soviet era , promoting the feats of labor productivity that seemed impossible to motivate the workforce. One obvious difference was that these Stakhanov’sthe posters had an anti-capitalist message, and criticized the fat cats that flourished in the field of free enterprise. Today's messages glorify personal prosperity, even if most of the profits come not from employees, but from bosses and investors. Salary, in fact, does not grow for years.

Perhaps we all missed the meaningfulness. Interest in organized religion falls, it is especially low among the American millennials. In San Francisco, where I live, I noticed that the concept of productivity is extolled almost to a spiritual level. The techies have made international the idea - sprouting from a Protestant work ethic - that work is not an act performed in an attempt to get what one wants; work is all that you have. Therefore, all sorts of tricks or buns from the company, optimizing the day of such people and allowing them to work a little more, are not only desirable, but also essentially virtuous.

Aidan Harper Launches Campaign Shortening 4 Week Week, claims that this approach is toxic, and coarsens the person. “He assumes that the only value of us as people is our production capabilities - our ability to work, and not our humanity,” he told me.

This is a cult policy, Harper added, to force workers to exploit them with slogans of "changing the world for the better." “It seems that Elon Musk is your high priest,” he said. “You go to your church daily and worship the working altar.”

Parishioners of the Cathedral of eternal fuss feel guilty when they spend time on something that is not related to work. Jonathan Crawford, a San Francisco-based entrepreneur, told me that while working on his commercial startup Storenvy, he gained 20 kg and ruined his relationship. Any socialization was associated with his work. If he read a book, it was a business book. He rarely did something that did not give him a direct “return on investment” for his company.

Crawford changed his lifestyle, realizing that he made him unhappy. Now, as a full-time entrepreneur of the investment company 500 Start-ups, he recommends that his founding colleagues engage in activities not related to work, for example, reading fiction, watching a movie or playing games. And for some reason this sounds radical to them. “This, strangely enough, opens their eyes to them, because they don’t realize that they regard themselves as a resource that needs to be spent,” Crawford said.

It's easy to get addicted to work speed and stress in 2019. Bernie Clinder, a consultant at a large technology company, said he was trying to limit his work to five days for 11 hours each, which gives one extra productive day. “If your colleagues are very competitive, then working on a“ normal schedule ”, you will look like a bummer,” he wrote by e-mail.

However, he realistically refers to his position in the "rat race". “I’m trying not to forget that if I suddenly fall dead at work, all my acrylic awards for work achievements will be in the trash the next day,” he wrote, “and the vacancy will be published in the newspaper before my obituary.”

Thirst for Mondays

The logical conclusion to overly active work, of course, is burnout. It is the subject of a recent popular essay by Anne Helen Petersen, a cultural critic with BuzzFeed, who carefully analyzes one incongruity contained in the fussiness of young people. Namely: if millennials should be lazy and well off at the expense of their parents, how can they be obsessed with work at the same time?

The Millennials, according to Petersen, are simply desperate to live up to their high expectations. An entire generation has been raised with the expectation that good grades and extra-curricular feats will reward them, providing meaningful work that can fuel their passion. Instead, they found themselves in an unreliable and meaningless job, with a mountain of student debts behind them. Therefore, attempts to pretend to be a person who “got up and plows,” and is looking forward to Monday morning, becomes just a protective mechanism.

Most of the work - even the coolest! - associated with a lot of meaningless hard work. Most corporations fail us in one way or another. And years after the empty slogan “make the world better” was made a repeating slogan in the satirical Silicon Valley show from HBO, many companies continue to glorify the virtues of work with all kinds of motivators. For example, Spotify, a company that allows you to listen to music, says its mission is to “unlock the potential of a person’s creativity.” Dropbox, which allows you to upload files and all that, says its goal is to “release the creative energy of the world by developing a more enlightened working method.”

David Spencer, an economics professor at the University of Leeds Business School, says companies, economists and politicians have had such an attitude, at least since the beginning of the course of mercantilism in Europe in the sixteenth century. “Employers are constantly trying to present the work in such a way as to distract workers from its unpleasant features,” he said. But such propaganda can go sideways. In England in the 17th century, work was praised as a remedy for vices, Spencer said, but the ungrateful truth only made the workers drink even more.

Internet companies may have miscalculated in their calls for workers to equate their work with their values ​​as human beings. After a long period of respect from the rest of the world, the tech industry is experiencing a powerful negative reaction from people, wide and furious, ranging from monopolistic manners to the spread of misinformation and incitement to interracial violence. And workers are opening up their opportunities. In November, 20,000 Google employees left their jobs by participating in a protest over how the company deals with sexual harassment. Other company employees refused a Pentagon contract to develop an AI that could make war drones more deadly.

Heinmeier Hansson points to protests as evidence that millennials must ultimately rebel against a culture of processing. “People will not support this,“ or buy into the promotion that by tracking the number and duration of their trips to the toilet they will receive eternal bliss. ” He was referring to an interview given in 2016 by former Yahoo director Marissa Mayer, where she said that you can work 130 hours a week if you “strategically approach the issues of when to sleep, when to wash, and how often to go away to the toilet. "

In the end, the workers themselves must decide whether they are enthusiastic about this level of devotion, or reject it. Meyer's comments scattered across social networks after the interview, but since then Quora users have begun to readily sharetheir strategies for copying her life schedule. In the same way, Mask’s tweets about the “pain threshold” caused a ton of criticism, as well as many followers and requests for a job.

The gloomy reality of 2019 is that requests for a billionaire to get a job on Twitter are not considered something shameful and are regarded as an acceptable way to get ahead. To some extent, it is worth respecting punchy people who see this whole painful system and understand that success in it requires a complete and shameless investment of all forces. If we are doomed to work tirelessly until death, we can at least pretend that we like it. Even on Mondays.