The Pleasures of Workaholism

The Pleasures of Workaholism

There will be a reduction in the formal working week from 40 to 35 hours. There is a 45-hour weekly cap in most nations. It would appear that the trend over the past century has been rather clear: less work, more recreation.

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. Workaholism has devastating effects on a person's health, including weight gain, inactivity, and stress, as well as on their family life and intellectual development. Workaholics, who are often characterized as "alpha" types, have three times the risk of heart attacks than the general population.

However, where does this phenomenon originate from economically and socially?

In a nutshell, it's the outcome of the increasingly porous boundaries between work and play. The gradual blurring of the line between work time and leisure time, which existed for thousands of years, is one of the most significant and far-reaching societal shifts in human memory.

What led to this revolutionary transformation was a confluence of several other changes in the nature of people's work and home situations.

Among these, the most consequential changes have been the more mobile workforce and the malleable character of both work and the office itself. The workforce's mobility was enhanced with each successive shift from the agrarian to the industrial, the services, and finally the information and knowledge societies. A farmer's mobility is severely limited. Because he lacked access to modern refrigeration, preservation, and transportation technologies, his goods were primarily consumed within his immediate vicinity. A nomadic trader tribe emerged from the margins. When the industrial revolution began, the size of this group skyrocketed. Yes, most workers were still rooted to the factory floor and unable to move. However, both the raw resources and the final goods had lengthy journeys to distant marketplaces. 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 characters in it were no longer limited by where they lived. Their services were provided to numerous "employers" across different locations and in different methods. Today, at the dawn of the information and knowledge revolution, this trend has increased. Truth transcends geographical boundaries. You may take it with you wherever you go. Because it is transient, it lacks both temporal and spatial characteristics. In today's globally interconnected economy, it doesn't matter where anybody is physically located.

The rising mobility of people, things, and data (vocal, 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. Things like working from home and global corporations were initially made feasible. With the advent of the Internet, previously insurmountable physical and temporal boundaries were dissolved, thanks to facsimile messages, electronic mail, and other modem data transmissions. In addition to being virtual in space, virtual workplaces are now also virtual in time. This opens up the possibility of cross-continental and cross-time zone collaboration amongst employees. For example, they can use an electronic mailbox to delegate their task to someone else.

The term "work" and the idea of a "workplace" have become increasingly nebulous due to recent technological developments. Long gone are the three dramatic unity outlined by Aristotle. Work could be done in various locations, not all at once, by employees who worked part-time as their schedules allowed. Flexitime and working from home supplanted commuting as the preferred venue, with the Anglo-Saxon countries being particularly early adopters of these innovations. 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. As a private instance of liberalism and capitalism, this was all nicely wrapped in the notion of individualism. Individuals were urged to think and act independently. Instead of seeing people as constituent parts of a larger whole, the idea of people as isolated islands has begun to gain traction.

The extraordinary rises in productivity and increases in global trade occurred simultaneously and amplified each other, contributing to this trend. Modernization of plants, automation, robotics, new ways of managing inventory, advancements in manufacturing technology, improved methods of communication (allowing for more efficient transfer of information), and fresh ideas in design all contributed to these trends. However, automation rendered human workers unnecessary. The astounding pace of technological change is too much for any amount of retraining to keep up with. As a nation's level of technological development increased, so did its structural unemployment rate, which is a result of changes in the market's fundamental structure.

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.

The lines between work and play become more blurry as a result. The mores of our day now praised both of them. The once-dominant aspect of free time—work—became increasingly less regimented and unruly. 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. Work started to become so enjoyable for some people that it started to take the place of leisure time for them. They are extreme workers. While some people's hatred of labor persisted, they found themselves bewildered by the new, leisure-enriched setting. 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.

The State, parents, educators, and businesses were not prepared, and did not see it as their duty, to teach the public how to manage their free time and the overwhelming number of options available to them.

Many criteria can be used to classify economies and marketplaces. The work-leisure axis is one of many. Any economy or society that insists on keeping the old division between (loathed) work and (freeing) leisure will eventually collapse or fall far behind. The reason behind this is because they won't have produced a large enough group of dedicated workers to propel the economy forward.

The Big Lesson is that workaholism is essential to the establishment, upkeep, and growth of capitalism. People typically do not go into business for the sole purpose of making money, contrary to popular opinion among the ignorant (the conventional profit motive). They are driven by a love for the exhilarating and unpredictable Game of Business, with all its twists and turns, intellectual competition, market dominance, and thrill. Money is completely irrelevant to all of this. All of it pertains to the field of psychology. Money is the yardstick by which success is judged in the financial world, yet it quickly becomes an abstract yardstick, similar to monopoly money. It represents wisdom, understanding, insight, and shrewdness.

Business is synonymous with pleasure for workaholics. The pleasure principle is personified by them. They constitute the group of company owners, managers, and entrepreneurs. They are the driving force, the ones who make things happen. In their absence, we would have communist economies in which no one really owns anything. 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. Their careers deteriorate with time because no one can maintain a life filled with animosity and dishonesty. Happiness is a must-have component.

Herein lies capitalism's essence: the elimination of distinctions between work and leisure, and the simultaneous and mutually satisfying pursuit of the two. The (growing) freedom to do it whenever, whenever, and with whomever you like is paramount. Real change cannot occur until Homo East Europeansis alters his mentality. 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. What a prophet. Look at the United States and see how communism failed miserably.

Wow, that's funny!

Location:

Share :