The Problem With Working Hard
It’s a productivity trope that needs to go.
A few days ago Kim Kardashian offered the “best” piece of advice for women in business.
“Get your fucking ass up and work. It seems like nobody wants to work these days.”
Yeah, a great piece of advice there Kim. Especially since we know how hard you work your staff to enrich yourself.
Kim coming out and making this statement is another one to the pile of working hard attitudes and mantras and another individual who isn’t in a position to be talking about this in the first place.
These kinds of suggestions are riddled across productivity articles and from prominent individuals.
If we all work hard, we’ll make it.
Work hard, play hard.
Work hard in silence. Let your success be your noise.
Work harder than you think you did yesterday.
Put your head down and work hard.
All of these ideas of working hard can feel inspiring, but the reality is far from it. Instead, this ideology that we have is destroying us and this is nothing more than a tactic that’s being used by wealthy individuals to keep living an unsustainable lifestyle.
Look At “Inflation”
Over the past few years, companies have been saying things like “inflation is causing our costs to rise so we’re raising prices” and yet for some reason, these exact same corporations are making record-breaking profits.
Many media outlets have yet to realize the two events are connected, but The Young Turks pointed this out.
The reality is inflation is still a thing, but it’s not as severe as corporations and most of the media is talking about. The reality is wages are increasing at the same rate as inflation.
But on top of that, big companies are raising prices well above that. Even though at this point supply chain shortages are not an issue and the costs for certain products have only increased marginally.
What has increased is shareholders' and executives' greed.
How this plays into working hard is that for the average individual is that they’re not going to be able to get ahead. Prices for what they need to survive will still continue to rise at higher rates because executives want their large bonuses and the shareholders want those massive dividends despite not needing them.
It results in these individuals who profess we need to “work hard” having an entirely different meaning.
Work hard so that I can keep raising prices and live the cushy lifestyle I now have.
We Also Have A Bias For Working Hard
“But wait, Eric, these individuals have already put in hard work to get to where they are now. They deserve the lifestyle that they built.”
Oh, have they?
Donald Trump has been making his living out of conning people his entire life.
Kim Kardashian became famous over a sex tape. Take one look at her reality TV show and all you’d see is an insanely rich family walking about and whining about every little thing.
Yeah, that sure looks like hard work. It’s definitely comparable to the people who have to work two or three jobs just to survive.
The issue is our idea of working hard has changed and many people don’t realize it. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, productivity isn’t going up as fast as it was before.
Even though we have all these people screaming at us to be “working hard”. And for many of us we are definitely working hard. Harder than many.
The issue is that bias. When we think of working hard we generally mean putting in more time into tasks.
What we don’t mean is that we’ve been thinking about our work or that we know that our work is contributing to something important (on a personal level or for the benefit of the world).
This bias is reinforced many times over as so many of us are still focused on time. This makes sense though because, during the industrial age, time was a very important factor.
Back then, workers were running machines and those machines had a certain output. You even had philosophers come in and propose some ways to increase output and argue it should be adopted because more time means more productivity.
Since then it’s evolved into the whole working hard mantra and the belief that that results in higher productivity.
Hard Work Avoids The Hard Questions
The problem with that bias is that it no longer works. We see time and time again how wealthy individuals are getting wealthier and they’re not “working hard” to do it.
Instead, they continue to condition us that working those long hours is what is needed.
And there are plenty of examples like that in other successful individuals, and entrepreneurs. We have hustle cultures, #girlbosses, and unicorn entrepreneurs. We’ve romanticized over-working and these individuals continue to push for those ideals.
Why these movements — like The Great Resignation, anti-Capitalism, and people wanting to work remotely — are getting traction is that individuals realize all of this “work hard” stuff is nonsense.
The elements of the industrial age are slowly coming off and people are starting to turn to knowledge for their ideals.
What does work actually mean?
What gives us purpose?
What gives us a sense of fulfilment workwise?
On an employee level, people are grasping this faster since so many have seen where working hard gets them. So many of us are scrambling to survive so financial advice like putting money into a savings/investing account or budgeting isn’t always applicable.
How can you budget when everything you make is going directly to the things that you need to pay for in order to survive?
The issue is more to do with those higher up the chain who still have that bias and have yet to ask themselves the hard questions.
Success Is Clearly Not Tied To Hard Work Any Longer
People are tired. People are overworking themselves and are putting themselves at risk of various health problems.
Working hard is not something that’s tied to success as there are countless examples of wealthy individuals who are barely lifting a finger and are making millions to employees in positions where they do absolutely nothing at all.
Instead of looking at how much time we put into things, it’s worth looking at more important factors:
- What got accomplished?
- What does that mean for us and others?
- How did the work make us feel?
I’ve reached a point in my writing career where I’ve stopped trying to work hard all the time writing articles. I’ve stopped working long hours on client work or on these articles and instead focused on accomplishing a few tasks per day.
That new approach has resulted in me getting more ideas for articles to write, a better sense of direction and purpose, and getting my consistency in writing back after years of “working hard”.
We need to be making a shift in how we work and how we view work. It’s no longer something that we should be tying our self-worth to. Rather, work should be meaningful and afford us to live decently enough.
And just working hard and hustling to build that big empire isn’t the answer.
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