Workism: The American Religion

[ergophobe]

About 30 years ago I started personally using the phrase "Work Mysticism." I never fully fleshed out the idea, but I meant a number of things

- believing that work should be your passion
- constantly bragging, though always in the form of a complaint, about how busy you were
- the cult of productivity
- the belief that your work defined who you were
- etc

Now, apparently, people refer to this as Workism. This quote encapsulates the essence of what I called Work Mysticism (salvation through work, chillingly close to the slogan above the entrance to Auschwitz).

In a 2018 paper on elite universities, researchers found that for women, the most important benefit of attending a selective college isn't higher wages, but more hours at the office. In other words, our elite institutions are minting coed workists. What's more, in a recent Pew Research report on the epidemic of youth anxiety, 95 percent of teens said "having a job or career they enjoy" would be "extremely or very important" to them as an adult. This ranked higher than any other priority, including "helping other people who are in need" (81 percent) or getting married (47 percent). Finding meaning at work beats family and kindness as the top ambition of today's young people.

In most advanced countries, citizens are guaranteed access to health care by their government; but the majority of insured Americans get health care through—where else?—their workplace.

Like Christianity, this is a religion that is particularly strong and persistent in the US when compared to other wealthy nations. Like Christianity, it has its positive features and its negative features. Based on the many devout Christians and the many Work Mystics I know, however, I would say that on balance it's much happier life to be a Christian. And when you consider that Christianity has never been known as a religion of fun, that's perhaps worth contemplating.

Today's rich American men can afford vastly more downtime. But they have used their wealth to buy the strangest of prizes: more work!

Perhaps long hours are part of an arms race for status and income among the moneyed elite. Or maybe the logic here isn't economic at all. It's emotional—even spiritual. The best-educated and highest-earning Americans, who can have whatever they want, have chosen the office for the same reason that devout Christians attend church on Sundays: It's where they feel most themselves. "For many of today's rich there is no such thing as 'leisure'; in the classic sense—work is their play," the economist Robert Frank wrote in The Wall Street Journal. "Building wealth to them is a creative process, and the closest thing they have to fun."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-workism-making-americans-miserable/583441/

[littleman]

Thought provoking.

I think there needs to be some unwrapping of what work means.

Definitions of work:
1A) The process of trading some of ones life for things s/he needs.
1B) The process of trading some of ones life for things s/he wants (including both material & status).

2) Work can be the process of becoming an executive of a sphere of influence, this is usually empire building.  It is nether benign or evil, but does give someone the power of decision making that affects more than what a typical person 1A or 1B normally acquire. 

3) Selfless work, someone sees something that needs to be done and does it.

Nearly everyone is doing some combination of 1A and 1B -- I am mostly in 1A mode myself at the moment. 2 & 3 have a separation between task and personal need.

IMO most of the cult of work it really the cult of status.  Modern Christian capitalists are somewhat like Samurai Buddhists, both somehow able to hold opposing beliefs in their head at the same time.

[buckworks]

>> somehow able to hold opposing beliefs

I'd be interested to hear you say more about that. I consider myself both Christian and (mostly) capitalist and I don't see what's necessarily opposing.

The way some people do capitalism is definitely out of step with what Jesus taught but it doesn't have to be.

(For that matter, the way some people do "Christian" is out of step but that's a different discussion.)

[littleman]

I won't be able to do the topic justice right now due to being a bit overloaded at the moment.  Let me preface by saying that I am not anti-Christian nor am I anti-Capitalism*, I just see them at odds with each other sometime.

Here are some well known bits from the Bible on the topic of accumulating wealth and taking care of the poor.  I'm not going to paste them in, but they are easy enough to look up.

=============================
Pay your taxes: Matthew 22:15-22, Romans 13:1-7
The pursuit of wealth will knock you out of heaven:  Matthew 19:24
Take care of the poor and the sick: Acts 4:32-37, Luke 14:13, 14
God vs. Money: Matthew 6:24
Socialism: Acts 2:44-45, Galatians 6:2
=============================

Modern American right-wing Christianity seems to ignore all this.


*with limitations

>The way some people do capitalism is definitely out of step with what Jesus taught but it doesn't have to be.

I totally agree.  The local baker, auto-mechanic, SEO or doctor with a private practice could work in the free market and still live by those principles. The CEO of Walmart?  Probably not.  I thought about this.  It really isn't about size, but about the methods of wealth accumulation and what one does with it.  The executives from Enron or those pumped and dumped Subprime loans would have to act in non-Christian ways to accumulate wealth for instance.   On the other hand the Gates foundation seems to line up well with Christian values.