Near the end of this excerpt, you add some crucial nuance about how things like domestic labor (which are not counted in your work hours above) contribute to a general feeling of overwork. I would suggest that private lives have also become infinitely more complicated. As a father of three who manages an increasingly baroque shared calendar with my ex, I can scarcely comprehend how a 40-hr work week could coexist with my parenting duties -- and this doesn't count sick days.
My grandfather often worked overtime, when he could get it, at a Montana sawmill. But this assumed that my grandmother was handling everything with their three kids. Few professionals have this luxury now, and it doesn't matter how many hours a week you're working when the public school decides to delay opening for two hours because the temperature dips into the teens, or school gets canceled overnight for snow. I'd like to see statistics on how many people lose jobs for taking those snow days with their kids.
While I'm ranting, I'll also add that work becomes the word for everything in our private lives. Our marriages require work, anti-racism is about "doing the work." Calculate the work week all you like, but our lives are saturated with the sense that we're always laboring, always producing. That is far different from the historical models, yes?
Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club, has said that one of the ideas for the novel came from personal experience: on a weekend camping trip, he got beat up when he complained about other campers’ loud music; but on Monday at work, no one asked about his bruised face — it was a level of intimacy his co-workers were not willing to go to. In Fincher’s film of the novel, this scene is repeated several times, with Edward Norton’s office-worker character coming to work looking increasingly battered.
I suppose the question this poses but doesn’t ask is what is the proper relationship between workers, and between employer and employee. Work is not therapy; we’re not trained to be therapists. It’s called work for a reason.
Sometimes I think about the language around work. For example, in German one work relationship is quite clear: Arbeitgeber (work giver) and Arbeitnehmer (work taker). In English, we use practically the same word for both: employer/employee, or perhaps more recently the euphemistic: Leadership Team/Associate (connected by “Human Resources,” a term right out of dystopian science-fiction).
You start with a note about how Germans think it's weird how much Americans work, but I'd also be interested to know whether people in other countries think it's weird how atomized and anti-social Americans are. Because I certainly do.
I moved from the USA to another country over a decade ago. When I first got here, I like an American, wanted to work all the time, and indulged in this bleak fantasy of work/life separation, thinking that, too, was something I wanted. Now, every weekend is a get-together at some co-worker's house; I cover for people when they're sick, and they cover for me when I'm sick; we support each other and grieve with each other when tragedy befalls one of us; we celebrate with each other our joyful personal events. And my life is much, much better for it. I feel sorry for Americans who think the "wisest" course of action is to not let peers at work know about your personal life. What a lonely, scary world that must be.
So--while it looks like your book is focused on Americans, it would be interesting to know how this jaded work/life separation idea compares to even other Western countries.
Thank you for joining us here, James.
Near the end of this excerpt, you add some crucial nuance about how things like domestic labor (which are not counted in your work hours above) contribute to a general feeling of overwork. I would suggest that private lives have also become infinitely more complicated. As a father of three who manages an increasingly baroque shared calendar with my ex, I can scarcely comprehend how a 40-hr work week could coexist with my parenting duties -- and this doesn't count sick days.
My grandfather often worked overtime, when he could get it, at a Montana sawmill. But this assumed that my grandmother was handling everything with their three kids. Few professionals have this luxury now, and it doesn't matter how many hours a week you're working when the public school decides to delay opening for two hours because the temperature dips into the teens, or school gets canceled overnight for snow. I'd like to see statistics on how many people lose jobs for taking those snow days with their kids.
While I'm ranting, I'll also add that work becomes the word for everything in our private lives. Our marriages require work, anti-racism is about "doing the work." Calculate the work week all you like, but our lives are saturated with the sense that we're always laboring, always producing. That is far different from the historical models, yes?
Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club, has said that one of the ideas for the novel came from personal experience: on a weekend camping trip, he got beat up when he complained about other campers’ loud music; but on Monday at work, no one asked about his bruised face — it was a level of intimacy his co-workers were not willing to go to. In Fincher’s film of the novel, this scene is repeated several times, with Edward Norton’s office-worker character coming to work looking increasingly battered.
I suppose the question this poses but doesn’t ask is what is the proper relationship between workers, and between employer and employee. Work is not therapy; we’re not trained to be therapists. It’s called work for a reason.
Sometimes I think about the language around work. For example, in German one work relationship is quite clear: Arbeitgeber (work giver) and Arbeitnehmer (work taker). In English, we use practically the same word for both: employer/employee, or perhaps more recently the euphemistic: Leadership Team/Associate (connected by “Human Resources,” a term right out of dystopian science-fiction).
You start with a note about how Germans think it's weird how much Americans work, but I'd also be interested to know whether people in other countries think it's weird how atomized and anti-social Americans are. Because I certainly do.
I moved from the USA to another country over a decade ago. When I first got here, I like an American, wanted to work all the time, and indulged in this bleak fantasy of work/life separation, thinking that, too, was something I wanted. Now, every weekend is a get-together at some co-worker's house; I cover for people when they're sick, and they cover for me when I'm sick; we support each other and grieve with each other when tragedy befalls one of us; we celebrate with each other our joyful personal events. And my life is much, much better for it. I feel sorry for Americans who think the "wisest" course of action is to not let peers at work know about your personal life. What a lonely, scary world that must be.
So--while it looks like your book is focused on Americans, it would be interesting to know how this jaded work/life separation idea compares to even other Western countries.
Life is too short to work long hours. I'm content to be a poor writer/poet with a roof over my head and enough food in my gut.