The Pleasures of Workaholism

The Pleasures of Workaholism

The new standard for an official workweek is 35 hours rather than 40. There is a 45-hour weekly cap in most nations. Less work, more recreation has been the clear trend throughout the past century.

What is true for blue collar laborers and government employees may not be true for liberal professionals in white collar jobs. Those in the legal, accounting, consulting, managerial, and academic professions often work 80-hour weeks. "Workaholism" is an insulting combination of the terms "work" and "alcoholism" that describes the phenomena and its harmful social effects. A workaholic's health suffers greatly as a result of their obsession with work: they gain weight, don't exercise, and experience increased stress. Their family life is also negatively impacted. Workaholics, who are often characterized as "alpha" types, have three times the risk of heart attacks than the general population.

Where does this phenomenon originate from, socially and economically speaking?

The lines between work and play have become increasingly porous, and this is the end result. An fundamental and profound social development in human history is the gradual elimination of the clear divide between work time and leisure time, which existed for thousands of years.

This tremendous shift occurred as a result of a confluence of several other changes in the nature of people's work and home situations.

The most consequential, if not the most important, was the loosening of restrictions on movement of workers and the evolving definition of work itself. Workers were able to more easily move from one industry to another as the world shifted from an agricultural to an industrial, a service, and finally an information and knowledge society. A farmer's mobility is severely limited. Due to a lack of effective refrigeration, preservation, and transportation methods, his products was primarily consumed locally, and his means of production remained fixed. Some outcasts took up nomadic trading. When the industrial revolution began, the size of this group skyrocketed. Indeed, the majority of the employees remained stationary and rooted to the factory floor. The final goods and raw materials, however, had to travel great distances to reach distant markets. It became clear that professional services were required, and therefore the professional manager, attorney, accountant, consultant, trader, broker, etc., became both an annoyance and an essential part of the production process.

Following that, the services sector emerged. The protagonists were no longer tied to a specific location. Dispersed over the globe, they served a wide range of "employers" in a number of different capacities. Today, at the dawn of the information and knowledge revolution, this trend has increased. Facts and information are universal. It can be effortlessly moved from one location to another. It lacks spatial and a-temporal properties due to its transient nature. The players' whereabouts in the modern era's economic exchanges are easily verifiable.

The rise in the mobility of people, things, and data (verbal, visual, textual, and otherwise) coincided with these tendencies. The globe has truly shrunk to the size of a global village due to the transportation and communications revolutions. It was the first step toward enabling phenomena like commuting and multinationals. The Internet eliminated not just physical but also temporal obstacles through the use of facsimile messages, electronic mail, and other modem data transfers. Virtual workplaces nowadays are not only spatially but also temporally virtual. Because of this, employees can work together regardless of their location or the time zone they're in. For example, they can use an electronic mailbox to delegate their task to someone else.

The basic definitions of "work" and "workplace" have been splintered by these most recent technological developments. Long gone are the three dramatic unity outlined by Aristotle. As a result of innovations like flextime and work-from-home, employees were no longer required to commute to an office every day; this was especially true in Anglo-Saxon countries, which have historically been at the forefront of technological advancement. This was perfectly in keeping with the current trend of social fragmentation, which is characterized by the breakdown of once-solid social structures like the nuclear (and extended) family. All of this was meticulously encased in individualism, which was portrayed as a private instance of liberalism and capitalism. Individuals were urged to think and act independently. We used to think of people as cells in an organism, but now we see them more as islands.

The extraordinary rises in productivity and increases in global trade occurred simultaneously and amplified each other, contributing to this trend. Technological advancements in management, manufacturing, inventory control, automation, robotics, plant modernization, communications (which allows for more efficient transfers of information), and even design concepts have contributed to these trends. However, automation rendered human workers unnecessary. Given the dizzying pace of technological advancement, retraining would be futile. The structural unemployment rate, which is a result of changes in the market's fundamental structure, increased as a country's level of technical development increased.

Its percentage of the workforce in Western Europe increased dramatically from 5% to 9% in just a decade. A reduction in the workweek was proposed as a means of controlling the influx of evicted people. One more was to help a big number of people who were out of work. Lastly, and most subtly, there was the matter of justifying free time. Protestant and Jewish work ethics, which have previously frowned upon sloth, have recently begun to advocate for people to "self fulfil," or indulge in habits and interests unrelated to work, in order to fully express who they are.

In the past, this helped to muddy the waters between work and play. The mores of our day now praised both of them. The fundamental aspect of free time, work, has become less regulated and strict throughout the years. It was possible to do, and more and more people did, their jobs from the comfort of their own homes. There was a complete domination of "home turf" over "work-place" territory. Time was the only determinant in the emotional leap. "Pleasure" was reserved for the times when people weren't working; in the past, working was a necessary evil. Both were either pleasurable or painful, or both, or some combination of the two. Some people started to love what they did for a living to the point where it replaced their free time as their primary means of satisfaction. They are extreme workers. Even though they were in a new, more leisurely setting, several people still hated work and felt lost. Too much time, no plan, and muddled instructions on who to do what to and when made them unqualified and untrained to handle the situation.

Nobody saw it as their job or part of the socialization process to teach people how to manage their free time and the overwhelming amount of options available to them, and neither did the state, parents, educators, or employers.

There are a lot of ways to categorize markets and economies. The work-leisure axis is among them. Societies and economies that cling to the outdated idea of a "work-life" divide will either completely collapse or fall well behind the curve. For the simple reason that they won't have produced a generation of dedicated workers capable of propelling the economy forward.

The Big Lesson is that creating, maintaining, and expanding capitalism need workaholics. Most people do not start a business with the express purpose of making a profit, contrary to popular opinion among the ignorant. For them, it's all just part of the fun of playing the game of business, with all its challenges, opportunities, challenges, ups, and downs. Nothing here has to do with cold, hard cash. All of it pertains to the field of psychology. While it's true that in the financial world, money is the yardstick by which success is judged, it quickly becomes an abstract yardstick, similar to monopoly money. Insight, cunning, wisdom, and prescience are all embodied by it.

Businesses bring a sense of joy to workaholics. The pleasure principle is personified by them. They are the ones who run the show, the companies, and the enterprises. They are the driving force, the ones who make things happen. In their absence, communist economies would emerge, in which no one really owns anything and everyone claims ownership of everything. People in these "collective ownership" economies go to work even whether they hate it, act out in ways that hurt the company, or just don't want to. No one can endure a life filled with animosity and dishonesty for very long, therefore their careers inevitably decline and end. One must have joy in order to have joy.

That is the essence of capitalism: doing nothing at all while simultaneously pursuing pleasure and labor with equal fervor and fulfillment. Most importantly, the (growing) freedom to do it whenever, whenever, and with whoever you like. There can be no genuine change until the Homo East Europeansis alters his mindset. The shift occurs first in people's minds, before it manifests physically. Changing people is more important than dictating, legislating, funding, urging, or offering them anything. It is consciousness that determines reality, according to Marx, a fervent non-capitalist. How accurate he was. Look at the United States and see how communism failed miserably.

No way!

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