How it Became Awkward at Work

and the fallacy of work-life separation

AI-generated image using Dall-e 3.

The following is an excerpt from Chapter Nine of my new book - Our Worst Strength: American Individualism and Its Hidden Discontents

One of the first things Germans note when arriving in the United States is how much time we spend working each week compared to them. American workers work 30 percent more hours annually than Germans. And we have far less paid time off than the Germans too. However, overall, our average annual workload places America in the middle of the global pack of nations. On the other end of the continuum are Indians, who work 21 percent more hours than we do!¹ Farmers work hard.

We’re not workaholics in historical terms, either. Our American ancestors worked far more hours per week. Let’s follow the experts and accept that nineteenth-century American farmers worked, on average, 10 hours a day, 6 days a week.² That’s a 60-hour work week, roughly. Or roughly 3,120 annual hours . . . versus the 1,794 hours that the average American works each year today.³

America has reduced its average annual work hours by 42 percent in 140 years. And most of this reduction occurred in about 50–60 years surrounding 1900, due to federal and state regulations (and the transition of millions into factory shift work). Every generation alive today has worked under this leisure-forward standard of work.

Most Americans are not overworked. And yet this does not mean we are happy at work. Or that work doesn’t interfere with the rest of our lives.

What’s fascinating is that American workers today who put in the longest work weeks work in elite occupational roles or desperately entrepreneurial ones.⁴ For example, today’s management consultant or investment banker trying to make partner works significantly more hours than ye olde farmer types. I know some of these folks. Burnout is high. Eighty-hour work weeks are completely normal. A question often arises: Why am I working so hard to make old rich guys even richer? It’s a legitimate question for one’s therapist.

Table 3. American Work Hours Across Time⁵

• Nineteenth-century farmer: 60 hours/week

• Factory shift worker pre–World War I: 60 hours prior to labor laws

• Factory shift worker, 1920s: 50 hours/week (with overtime)

• Modern worker: 40 hours/week (5 days)

• Professionals: 45–60 hours/week (5–7 days)

• Management consultants: 70–80 hours/week (6–7 days)

• Entrepreneurs (mostly self-employed, small teams): 80+ hours/week (7 days)

Source: Robert Whaples, “Hours of Work in US History” and my estimates.

As a card-carrying member of the neurotic upper-middle-class tribe, I have worked roughly 50–70 hours a week for my entire career since it started in 2003. Sadly, the higher end of this range has been recently as a solopreneur. What am I doing to myself?

Upper-middle-class professionals work more than their nonprofessional peers and, on occasion, more than the nineteenth-century family farmer. We sad folks are the only ones who can claim that work hours conflict with other aspects of our lives. This is not a call for sympathy but to understand the prevalence of overwork. It’s actually not prevalent. At all. Mostly, it is the affluent who voluntarily choose their overwork or wake up with golden handcuffs tying them to jobs that fund equally optional, overwrought lifestyles (and mortgages).

The problem with work-life conflict in America is not our long work hours, despite elite media outlets writing increasingly about (their own) workism.⁶ Only a tiny percent of adults—professionals and entrepreneurs—work crazy hours. In my study of older Americans, they represent perhaps 3–4 percent of everyone I researched, probably less. And, no, “authors” don’t influence these numbers much (even if they work like hell).

Work-Life Separation Is an Absurd Cultural Expectation

The problem with work-life interaction in American culture is about something else that reveals the limits of individualism as a sensible way to frame our lives. The conflict between work and life is mostly about the rest of our lives requiring more flexibility, sensitivity, and understanding than your average employer has typically offered anyone, except their top (white, male) executives—that is, until the COVID-19 pandemic.

For example, it doesn’t take a long workweek to generate:

• Partner conflict over who has the most post-work energy to cook dinner

• A painkiller addiction that affects work performance

• Abusive or mismanaged work environments that generate Sunday scaries

• Insensitivity to off-hours work availability

• Insensitivity to working parents’ longer commute times (due to childcare drop-offs)

• Daytime availability expectations conflict for remote workers due to a plethora of residential situations

• Limited sick leave, despite a wide range in variation of immune system strength—hurting employees who empirically get sick a lot (cold/flu/COVID)

• Bereavement and grief overwhelm

• Conflict over how to accommodate workers taking care of the disabled, children, or the chronically ill

• Finding time for doctors’ appointments

• And on and on . . .

I’m just old enough to remember when precisely no one openly complained about these sources of work-life conflict with their work peers, let alone their managers. When the former CEO of a company I worked at asked me to take two days out of my fourteen-day unpaid paternity leave to help with a client presentation, I said yes, thinking this “was what you do for the guy at the top.” I was offered extra paid time off in return. Yippeee! I should have renegotiated my salary on the phone when he called because, apparently, I was pretty valuable. We older folks were trained to look at the latter as employee extortion that could easily backfire (i.e., leaving a sour taste in the CEO’s mouth).

Until recently, and throughout the careers of older Americans, employers have tended to behave not unlike high-functioning autistics: they’ve been incredibly insensitive to the diversity of the personal worlds of their employees. Without careful leadership, bureaucracy has a fantastic ability to undermine the basic rules of human community bonding. Honestly, most leaders have little real idea of what individual employees are going through at home. Nor do they ask. Remember the sacredness of privacy from part one? Workers have also trained employers not to ask about their personal lives.

Increased lifestyle diversity among employees increases the likelihood of employee A being offended by the atypical lifestyle behavior of employee B in ways that my grandparents’ generation could not have possibly foreseen.

And our corporate answer to this has been: “Don’t ask. Don’t tell.”

This adorable phrase signals an old behavior that did not begin with managing homosexuality in the military. “Don’t ask. Don’t tell” started as soon we left the confines of family businesses in the nineteenth century and began trading our labor full-time with total strangers. I once had a boss who repeatedly told me, “I don’t want to know about anyone’s personal life. Work is for work.” I bet you know someone who still thinks like this at work. It might even be you. Gulp.

I now want to use an anthropologist’s perspective to illustrate how this rigid belief is weird and show you what it enables.

For the rest of this chapter, consider the possibility that a rigid separation of work from life is simply impossible for the human mind, let alone the American mind. Human beings don’t have a magic wand to keep emotional problems from intruding onto their work existence. For most of human history, humans didn’t even have a concept of “work” as a distinct domain of activity. You lived and existed all day with your clan. Work was family labor. You knew exactly where you fit in. All day long. You had no reason to hide your personal life from your family who knew everything anyway.

Ever since factories drew us away from lives working for family farms, stores, or trades, Americans have had to decide what to share, or not share, with their colleagues at work. Coed offices only complicated any desire to share personal beliefs or activities. Better to keep things at a minimum. Especially, if you couldn’t stand your work peers. Don’t give the office gossips any more ammunition.

We are good at keeping our personal lives behind a veil of privacy; we have become skilled in pretending while at work that everything at home is OK (even if it is a nightmare). We can fake contentment when colleagues ask us rhetorically, “How are you?” We can repress negative emotional impulses using that enormous neocortex designed for precisely this thing, up until a limit. Ironically, when we do break down at work, we become undeniably human to our colleagues. And we find out blindingly quickly if we work in an inhuman, toxic Reichsministerium.

The best way to prove that no one is pulling off anything like pure work-life separation inside their heads is to share a few common scenarios:

• The mysteriously exhausted peer who shows up for work, but, from your chair, looks like someone who should take two days off, minimum

• A sleep-deprived new mom not able to pay attention well in meetings and who needs more support at home (and a sick day)

• Someone who partied too hard on Thursday night and can’t contain their hangover the next day

• The ridiculously sick worker who, absent sufficient sick leave, shows up anyway, and coughs his way through the day, turning his sleeve into a wet mess and otherwise being supremely slow and unproductive as well as making at least two other people ill

With the spread of hybrid work, white-collar workers now have the luxury of concealing some low-productivity days. Yet, I suspect that for hybrid workers, these hidden, unbalanced days squander valuable opportunities to become human to your colleagues in return for reducing embarrassment and maintaining the sacredness of our privacy. We like the concealment power of remote workdays and forget the bonding power of being human in front of others.

Continued in the book…

James F. Richardson

writes

Homo Imaginari

.

1. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), “Hours Worked” (indicator), 2022, doi: 10.1787/47be1c78-en, accessed June 8, 2023, https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm.

2. Nineteenth-century agricultural workers, mostly family farmers, worked about sixty to sixty-nine hours per week on average, with seasonal fluctuations. Hours declined from 1830 to 1880. Jeremy Atack and Fred Bateman, “How Long Was the Workday in 1880?” Journal of Economic History, 52, no. 1 (1992): 129-160. Cited in Robert Whaples, “Hours of Work in US History,” Economic History Association website, accessed June 2023, https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/.

3. Based on seasonally adjusted averages for May, June, July of 2023, today’s average American works 34.5 hours per week, US Bureau of Labor and Statistics, “Table B-2. Average weekly hours and overtime of all employees on private nonfarm payrolls by industry

4. Migrant farm workers and undocumented meatpacking plant workers may also work more than the average, but data is scattered and unclear for this, class of worker and national underreporting of overtime is common.

5. Robert Whaples, “Hours of Work in US History.”

6. Derek Thompson, “Workism Is Making Americans Miserable,” Atlantic, February 24, 2019, accessed June 8, 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-workism-making-americans-miserable/583441/.