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WHY DO WE WORK SO HARD?

RYAN AVENT | MARCH 2ND 2016

https://www.1843magazine.com/features/why-do-we-work-so-hard

 

Maybe it’s because work is satisfying. Maybe it’s because we’re trapped. Or maybe, as Ryan Avent suspects, it’s because of a troubling combination of the two
 

 When I was young, there was nothing so bad as being asked to work. Now I find it hard to conjure up that feeling, but I see it in my five-year-old daughter. “Can I please have some water, daddy?”
“You can get it yourself, you’re a big girl.”
“WHY DOES EVERYONE ALWAYS TREAT ME LIKE A MAID?”
That was me when I was young, rolling on the ground in agony on being asked to clean my room. As a child, I wonderingly observed the hours my father worked. The stoical way he went off to the job, chin held high, seemed a beautiful, heroic embrace of personal suffering. The poor man! How few hours he left himself to rest on the couch, read or watch American football.
My father had his own accounting firm in Raleigh, North Carolina. His speciality was helping people manage their tax and financial affairs as they started, expanded, or in some cases shut down their businesses. He has taken his time retiring, and I now realise how much he liked his work. I can remember the glowing terms in which his clients would tell me about the help he’d given them, as if he’d performed life-saving surgery on them. I also remember the way his voice changed when he received a call from a client when at home. Suddenly he spoke with a command and facility that I never heard at any other time, like a captive penguin released into open water, swimming in his element with natural ease.
At 37, I see my father’s routine with different eyes. I live in a terraced house in Wandsworth, a moderately smart and wildly expensive part of south-west London, and a short train ride from the headquarters of The Economist, where I write about economics. I get up at 5.30am and spend an hour or two at my desk at home. Once the children are up I join them for breakfast, then go to work as they head off to school. I can usually leave the office in time to join the family for dinner and put the children to bed. Then I can get a bit more done at home: writing, if there is a deadline looming, or reading, which is also part of the job. I work hard, doggedly, almost relentlessly. The joke, which I only now get, is that work is fun.
Not all work, of course. When my father was a boy on the family farm, the tasks he and his father did in the fields – the jobs many people still do – were gruelling and thankless. I once visited the textile mill where my grandmother worked for a time. The noise of the place was so overpowering that it was impossible to think. But my work – the work we lucky few well-paid professionals do every day, as we co-operate with talented people while solving complex, interesting problems – is fun. And I find that I can devote surprising quantities of time to it.

What is less clear to me, and to so many of my peers, is whether we should do so much of it. One of the facts of modern life is that a relatively small class of people works very long hours and earns good money for its efforts. Nearly a third of college-educated American men, for example, work more than 50 hours a week. Some professionals do twice that amount, and elite lawyers can easily work 70 hours a week almost every week of the year.
Work, in this context, means active, billable labour. But in reality, it rarely stops. It follows us home on our smartphones, tugging at us during an evening out or in the middle of our children’s bedtime routines. It makes permanent use of valuable cognitive space, and chooses odd hours to pace through our thoughts, shoving aside whatever might have been there before. It colonises our personal relationships and uses them for its own ends. It becomes our lives if we are not careful. It becomes us.
When John Maynard Keynes mused in 1930 that, a century hence, society might be so rich that the hours worked by each person could be cut to ten or 15 a week, he was not hallucinating, just extrapolating. The working week was shrinking fast. Average hours worked dropped from 60 at the turn of the century to 40 by the 1950s. The combination of extra time and money gave rise to an age of mass leisure, to family holidays and meals together in front of the television. There was a vision of the good life in this era. It was one in which work was largely a means to an end – the working class had become a leisured class. Households saved money to buy a house and a car, to take holidays, to finance a retirement at ease. This was the era of the three-Martini lunch: a leisurely, expense-padded midday bout of hard drinking. This was when bankers lived by the 3-6-3 rule: borrow at 3%, lend at 6%, and head off to the golf course by 3pm.
The vision of a leisure-filled future occurred against the backdrop of the competition against communism, but it is a capitalist dream: one in which the productive application of technology rises steadily, until material needs can be met with just a few hours of work. It is a story of the triumph of innovation and markets, and one in which the details of a post-work world are left somewhat hazy. Keynes, in his essay on the future, reckoned that when the end of work arrived:
For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.
Karl Marx had a different view: that being occupied by good work was living well. Engagement in productive, purposeful work was the means by which people could realise their full potential. He’s not credited with having got much right about the modern world, but maybe he wasn’t so wrong about our relationship with work.
MARX IS NOT CREDITED WITH HAVING GOT MUCH RIGHT ABOUT THE MODERN WORLD, BUT MAYBE HE WASN’T SO WRONG ABOUT OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH WORK
In those decades after the second world war, Keynes seemed to have the better of the argument. As productivity rose across the rich world, hourly wages for typical workers kept rising and hours worked per week kept falling – to the mid-30s, by the 1970s. But then something went wrong. Less-skilled workers found themselves forced to accept ever-smaller pay rises to stay in work. The bargaining power of the typical blue-collar worker eroded as technology and globalisation handed bosses a whole toolkit of ways to squeeze labour costs. At the same time, the welfare state ceased its expansion and began to retreat, swept back by governments keen to boost growth by cutting taxes and removing labour-market restrictions. The income gains that might have gone to workers, that might have kept living standards rising even as hours fell, that might have kept society on the road to the Keynesian dream, flowed instead to those at the top of the income ladder. Willingly or unwillingly, those lower down the ladder worked fewer and fewer hours. Those at the top, meanwhile, worked longer and longer.
It was not obvious that things would turn out this way. You might have thought that whereas, before, a male professional worked 50 hours a week while his wife stayed at home with the children, a couple of married professionals might instead each opt to work 35 hours a week, sharing more of the housework, and ending up with both more money and more leisure. That didn’t happen. Rather, both are now more likely to work 60 hours a week and pay several people to care for the house and children.
Why? One possibility is that we have all got stuck on a treadmill. Technology and globalisation mean that an increasing number of good jobs are winner-take-most competitions. Banks and law firms amass extraordinary financial returns, directors and partners within those firms make colossal salaries, and the route to those coveted positions lies through years of round-the-clock work. The number of firms with global reach, and of tech start-ups that dominate a market niche, is limited. Securing a place near the top of the income spectrum in such a firm, and remaining in it, is a matter of constant struggle and competition. Meanwhile the technological forces that enable a few elite firms to become dominant also allow work, in the form of those constantly pinging emails, to follow us everywhere.
This relentless competition increases the need to earn high salaries, for as well-paid people cluster together they bid up the price of the resources for which they compete. In the brainpower-heavy cities where most of them live, getting on the property ladder requires the sort of sum that can be built up only through long hours in an important job. Then there is conspicuous consumption: the need to have a great-looking car and a home out of Interiors magazine, the competition to place children in good (that is, private) schools, the need to maintain a coterie of domestic workers – you mean you don’t have a personal shopper? And so on, and on.
The dollars and hours pile up as we aim for a good life that always stays just out of reach. In moments of exhaustion we imagine simpler lives in smaller towns with more hours free for family and hobbies and ourselves. Perhaps we just live in a nightmarish arms race: if we were all to disarm, collectively, then we could all live a calmer, happier, more equal life.
But that is not quite how it is. The problem is not that overworked professionals are all miserable. The problem is that they are not.

Drinking coffee one morning with a friend from my home town, we discuss our fathers’ working habits. Both are just past retirement age. Both worked in an era in which a good job was not all-consuming. When my father began his professional career, the post-war concept of the good life was still going strong. He was a dedicated, even passionate worker. Yet he never supposed that work should be the centre of his life.
Work was a means to an end; it was something you did to earn the money to pay for the important things in life. This was the advice I was given as a university student, struggling to figure out what career to pursue in order to have the best chance at an important, meaningful job. I think my parents were rather baffled by my determination to find satisfaction in my professional life. Life was what happened outside work. Life, in our house, was a week’s holiday at the beach or Pop standing on the sidelines at our baseball games. It was my parents at church, in the pew or volunteering in some way or another. It was having kids who gave you grandkids. Work merely provided more people to whom to show pictures of the grandkids.
This generation of workers, on the early side of the baby boom, is marching off to retirement now. There are things to do in those sunset years. But the hours will surely stretch out and become hard to fill. As I sit with my friend it dawns on us that retirement sounds awful. Why would we stop working?
Here is the alternative to the treadmill thesis. As professional life has evolved over the past generation, it has become much more pleasant. Software and information technology have eliminated much of the drudgery of the workplace. The duller sorts of labour have gone, performed by people in offshore service-centres or by machines. Offices in the rich world’s capitals are packed not with drones filing paperwork or adding up numbers but with clever people working collaboratively.
The pleasure lies partly in flow, in the process of losing oneself in a puzzle with a solution on which other people depend. The sense of purposeful immersion and exertion is the more appealing given the hands-on nature of the work: top professionals are the master craftsmen of the age, shaping high-quality, bespoke products from beginning to end. We design, fashion, smooth and improve, filing the rough edges and polishing the words, the numbers, the code or whatever is our chosen material. At the end of the day we can sit back and admire our work – the completed article, the sealed deal, the functioning app – in the way that artisans once did, and those earning a middling wage in the sprawling service-sector no longer do.
The fact that our jobs now follow us around is not necessarily a bad thing, either. Workers in cognitively demanding fields, thinking their way through tricky challenges, have always done so at odd hours. Academics in the midst of important research, or admen cooking up a new creative campaign, have always turned over the big questions in their heads while showering in the morning or gardening on a weekend afternoon. If more people find their brains constantly and profitably engaged, so much the better.
Smartphones do not just enable work to follow us around; they also make life easier. Tasks that might otherwise require you to stay late in the office can be taken home. Parents can enjoy dinner and bedtime with the children before turning back to the job at hand. Technology is also lowering the cost of the support staff that make long hours possible. No need to employ a full-time personal assistant to run the errands these days: there are apps to take care of the shopping, the laundry and the dinner, walk the dog, fix the car and mend the hole in the roof. All of these allow us to focus ever more of our time and energy on doing what our jobs require of us.
There are downsides to this life. It does not allow us much time with newborn children or family members who are ill; or to develop hobbies, side-interests or the pleasures of particular, leisurely rituals – or anything, indeed, that is not intimately connected with professional success. But the inadmissible truth is that the eclipsing of life’s other complications is part of the reward.
It is a cognitive and emotional relief to immerse oneself in something all-consuming while other difficulties float by. The complexities of intellectual puzzles are nothing to those of emotional ones. Work is a wonderful refuge.
This life is a package deal. Cities are expensive. Less prestigious work that demands less commitment from those who do it pays less – often much less. For those without independent wealth, dialling back professional ambition and effort means moving away, to smaller and cheaper places.
But stepping off the treadmill does not just mean accepting a different vision of one’s prospects with a different salary trajectory. It means upending one’s life entirely: changing locations, tumbling out of the community, losing one’s identity. That is a difficult thing to survive. One must have an extremely strong, secure sense of self to negotiate it.
I’ve watched people try. In 2009 good friends of ours packed their things and moved away from Washington, DC, where we lived at the time, to the small college town of Charlottesville, Virginia. It was an idyllic little place, nestled in the Appalachian foothills, surrounded by horse farms and vineyards, with cheap, charming homes. He persuaded his employer to let him telework; she left her high-pressure job as vice-president at a big web firm near Washington to take a position at a local company.
My wife and I were intrigued by the thought of doing the same. She could teach there, we reckoned, and I could write. It was a reasonable train ride from Washington, if I needed to meet editors. We would be able to enjoy the fresh air, and the peace and quiet. Perhaps at some point we would open our own shop on the main street or try our hand at winemaking, if we could save a little money.
IT WASN’T THE STRESS OF BEING ON THE FAST TRACK THAT CAUSED MY CHEST TO TIGHTEN AND MY HEART RATE TO RISE, BUT THE THOUGHT OF BEING LEFT BEHIND BY THOSE STILL ON IT
Yet the more seriously we thought about it, the less I liked the idea. I want hours of quiet to write in, not days and weeks. I would miss, desperately, being in an office and arguing about ideas. More than that, I could anticipate with perfect clarity how the rhythm of life would slow as we left the city, how the external pressure to keep moving would diminish. I didn’t want more time to myself; I wanted to feel pushed to be better and achieve more. It wasn’t the stress of being on the fast track that caused my chest to tighten and my heart rate to rise, but the thought of being left behind by those still on it.
Less than a year after moving away, our friends moved back. They had found themselves bored and lonely. We were glad, and relieved as well: their return justified our decision to stay in the city. One reason the treadmill is so hard to walk away from is that life off it is not what it once was. When I was a child, our neighbourhood was rich with social interaction. My father played on the church softball team until his back got too bad. My mother helped with charity food-and-toy drives. They both taught classes and chaperoned youth choir trips. They socialised with neighbours who did these things too.
Those elements of life persist, of course, but they are somewhat diminished, as Robert Putnam, a social scientist, observed in 1995 in “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital”. He described the shrivelling of civic institutions, which he blamed on many of the forces that coincided with, and contributed to, our changing relationship to work: the entry of women into the workforce; the rise of professional ghettoes; longer working hours.
One of the civic groups that Putnam cites as an important contributor to social capital in ages past was the labour union. In the post-war era, unions thrived because of healthy demand for blue-collar workers who shared a strong sense of class identity. That allowed the unions’ members to capture an outsize share of the gains from economic growth, while also providing workers and their families with a strong sense of community – indeed, of solidarity.
The labour movement has unravelled in recent decades, and with it the network that supported its members; but these days a similar virtuous circle supports the professional classes instead. Our social networks are made up not just of neighbours and friends, but also of clients and colleagues. This interlaced world of work and social life enriches us, exposing us to people who do fascinating things, keeping us informed of professional gossip and providing those who have good ideas with the connections to help turn them into reality. It also traps us. The suspicion that one might be missing out on a useful opportunity or idea helps prod us off the sofa when an evening with “True Detective” beckons seductively.
This mixing of the social and professional is not new. It is not unlike Hollywood, where friends have always become collaborators, actors marry directors, and an evening out on the town has always been a public act that shapes the brand value of the star. Or like Washington, DC, in which public officials, journalists and policy experts swap jobs every few years and go to the same parties at night: befriending and sleeping with each other, exchanging ideas, living a life in which all behaviour is professional to some extent. But as hours have lengthened and work has become more engaging, this social pattern has swallowed other worlds.
There is a psychic value to the intertwining of life and work as well as an economic one. The society of people like us reinforces our belief in what we do.

Working effectively at a good job builds up our identity and esteem in the eyes of others. We cheer each other on, we share in (and quietly regret) the successes of our friends, we lose touch with people beyond our network. Spending our leisure time with other professional strivers buttresses the notion that hard work is part of the good life and that the sacrifices it entails are those that a decent person makes. This is what a class with a strong sense of identity does: it effortlessly recasts the group’s distinguishing vices as virtues.
Life within this professional community has its impositions. It makes failure or error a more difficult, humiliating experience. Social life ceases to be a refuge from the indignities of work. The sincerity of relationships becomes questionable when people are friends of convenience. A friend – a real one – muses to me that those who become immersed in lives like this suffer from Stockholm Syndrome: they befriend their clients because they spend too much time with them to know there are other, better options available. The fact that I find it hard to pass judgment on this statement suggests that I, too, may be a victim.
My parents have not quite managed to retire, but they are getting there. Even with one foot in and one foot out of retirement, their post-career itinerary is becoming clear. They mean to see parts of the world they couldn’t when they were young and had no money, or when they were older and had no time. Their travels occasionally bring them to London to see me and my family. On a recent visit the talk shifted, as it often does, to when I might be planning to return to the east coast of America, much closer to the Carolinas, which is where they and most of the rest of my extended family still live. As my father walks around the house, my three-year-old son trotting adoringly behind him, they ask whether I couldn’t do my job as easily closer to home.
I get hung up on as easily. The writing I could do as easily, just about. Building my career, away from our London headquarters, would not be so easy. As I explain this, a circularity threatens to overtake my point: to build my career is to make myself indispensable, demonstrating indispensability means burying myself in the work, and the upshot of successfully demonstrating my indispensability is the need to continue working tirelessly. Not only can I not do all that elsewhere; outside London, the obvious brilliance of a commitment to this course of action is under appreciated. It looks pointless – daft, even.
And I begin to understand the nature of the trouble I’m having communicating to my parents precisely why what I’m doing appeals to me. They are asking about a job. I am thinking about identity, community, purpose – the things that provide meaning and motivation. I am talking about my life.

 

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The pace of life and work cycle has changed.  

Previously we bring work home.  Now, we are on-call 24/7.

 

Things don't look too rosy but we can make the best out of it.

Think positively that we are still "needed"... not overtaken by some robots and computer programmes. 

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Guest labourer
7 minutes ago, abang said:

... not overtaken by some robots and computer programmes. 

 

 

The foreign 'talents' beat them to it.

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Guest 想一想

Just a story to share .....

 

非洲的某個土著部落迎來了從美國來的旅遊觀光團,

部落裡的人們雖然還沒有什麼市場觀念,

可面對這樣好的賺錢商機,自然也是不能放過。

部落中有一位老人,他正悠閒地坐在一棵大樹下面,

一邊乘涼,一邊編織著草帽,

編完的草帽他會放在身前一字排開,供遊客們挑選購買。

他編織的草帽造型非常別致,而且顏色的搭配也非常巧妙,

可以稱得上是巧奪天工了,遊客們紛紛駐足購買。

這時候一位精明的商人看到了老人編織的草帽,

他腦袋裡立刻盤算開了,

他想:「這樣精美的草帽如果運到美國去,

我敢保證一定賣個好價錢,至少能夠獲得十倍的利潤吧。」

想到這裡,他不由激動地對老人說:

「朋友,這種草帽多少錢一頂呀。」

「十塊錢一頂。」老人向他微笑了一下,繼續編織著草帽,

他那種閒適的神態,真的讓人感覺他不是在工作,

而是在享受一種美妙的心情。

商人滿心歡喜地估計收益

「天哪,如果我買10萬頂草帽回到國內去銷售的話,我一定會發大財的。」

商人欣喜若狂,不由得為自己的經商天才而沾沾自喜。

於是商人對老人說:

「假如我在你這裡訂做1萬頂草帽的話,你每頂草帽給我優惠多少錢呀?」

他本來以為老人一定會高興萬分,

可沒想到老人卻皺著眉頭說:「這樣的話啊,那就要50元一頂了。」

要每頂50元,這是他從商以來聞所未聞的事情呀。

「為什麼?」商人沖著老人大叫。

老人講出了他的道理:

「在這棵大樹下沒有負擔地編織草帽,對我來說是種享受,

可如果要我編1萬頂一模一樣的草帽,我就不得不夜以繼日地工作,

不僅疲憊勞累,還成了精神負擔。難道你不該多付我些錢嗎?」

 

當工作不能成為一種享受而成為一種循環往復的單調,

確實會令人感到乏味,

然而我們還是不得不為了特定的利益而奔走勞累。

 

「你為了什麼而工作」

這卻是需要你我仔細思考的一個問題。

只有真正熱愛工作的人,才是工作中真正幸福的人。

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Guest Shake Leg

It's ingrained and brainwashed.  Our ancestors worked so hard to build Singapore what it is today.  So we have to work harder to survive SG100.  If Singapore has a huge hinterland and vast resources like Australia, maybe we can afford to work 5 hours a day.

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  • 11 months later...

万般带不去

唯有业随身

鍾意就好,理佢男定女

 

never argue with the guests. let them bark all they want.

 

结缘不结

不解缘

 

After I have said what I wanna say, I don't care what you say.

 

看穿不说穿

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Try the alternative: sending lots of resume, scrolling thru ads not knowing when the next paycheck comes...

 

This is not to say we forget abt work life balance. But to remind ourselves the alternatives.

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Guest Fatty
On 18 March 2016 at 0:00 PM, badpuppy said:

i work so hard for better life.

i work so hard for my partner better life.

i work so hard for my parents better life.

 

thats why i work so hard! :whistle:

Your partner leech on you?

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Water increasing by 30%... motivated enough? LOL

** Comments are my opinions, same as yours. It's not a 'Be-All-and-End-All' view. Intent's to thought-provoke, validate, reiterate and yes, even correct. Opinion to consider but agree to disagree. I don't enjoy conflicted exchanges, empty bravado or egoistical chest pounding. It's never personal, tribalistic or with malice. Frank by nature, means, I never bend the truth. Views are to broaden understanding - Updated: Nov 2021.

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Guest Bean stalker
24 minutes ago, upshot said:

Water increasing by 30%... motivated enough? LOL

Your writing has become so uncharacteristically pithy. Has electricity fees increased too? 

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9 hours ago, Guest Bean stalker said:

Your writing has become so uncharacteristically pithy. Has electricity fees increased too? 

You are too bias or too narrow minded to understand what I am saying. So let me put it this way for a simpleton with an impartial bent towards me, my beloved fanboi.   THINGS ARE ALWAYS GOING TO BE GOING UP.. TODAY 30% water TOMORROW.... what else? I use 30% water as CONTEXT. THINGS ARE ALWAYS GOING UP STUPID. So what can you do to ensure you KEEP UP with that ever increasing trend FOR EVERYTHING IN LIFE. CAN YOU STILL FIND 20 CENTS FOOD IN A SCHOOL TUCK SHOP? CAN YOU FIND PETROL YOU PAY 30 YEARS BEING OFFERED TODAY?  EVEN YOU SALARY. YOU ALSO WANT TO SEE GOING UP. For the right or wrong reasons that cost gets jack up that we have no control, how can you counter it? THEN WHAT DO YOU DO???? SIT BACK AND JUST DO MINIMUM WORK AT WORK AND HOPE PEOPLE (AND YOUR GOD) WILL GIVE YOU MORE MONEY OR JUST COMPLAIN AND COMPLAIN LIKE YOU TYPICALLY ENJOY DOING IN HERE? Sometime maybe you think you are working hard but in fact not that hard thus you get what you earn? How do you benchmark your work effort? So time to reflect on YOURSELF.

What is your solution? NOTHING WRONG IN VENTING BUT AT LEAST SOMETIME COME IN HERE and MAKE SENSE.  USUALLY YOU NOTICE ME OFFERING THAT IN LONG PARAGRAPHS BECAUSE I CARE OR MAKE TO MAKE A DIFFERECE BUT TODAY I FEEL LIKE MAKING A SHORT RANT. 

 

That you still find fault. Once you HATE you ALWAYS HATE eh stalking pondan? IT IS VERY TELLING WHO AND WHAT YOU ARE. A COMPLAINER.

 

As the saying goes.. you are either part of the problem or part of the solution.

Is that PITHY enough for you? 

Edited by upshot

** Comments are my opinions, same as yours. It's not a 'Be-All-and-End-All' view. Intent's to thought-provoke, validate, reiterate and yes, even correct. Opinion to consider but agree to disagree. I don't enjoy conflicted exchanges, empty bravado or egoistical chest pounding. It's never personal, tribalistic or with malice. Frank by nature, means, I never bend the truth. Views are to broaden understanding - Updated: Nov 2021.

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WORK LIFE BALANCE IS A MYTH. A CURRENT BUZZ WORD. IDEALISTIC to make people feel good about themselves. If you actually do it, you get no where fast in a world that is forward moving, scarcity of resources, cost saving, and competition.... Over time what you do similarly everyday will not move you forward NOR running on the spot but BACKWARD.

 

Your goals are always moving about... especially upward like it or not.  You don't do it? Fine. Your colleague will grab it, move with it and maybe to another level. Even if you are happy with what you do at your pace, that same pace might not be worth much 5 years down the road. When that happens, that minimum bar goes up higher. Can you keep up? There is HARD WORK  and there is WORK HARD by being SMART. No boss pays you a lot for being loyal. They pay you via KPI. It can also get harder to play politics to get ahead. So they put measuring standards to monitor your output. Machines and cheaper labor to do the work you do but faster and cheaper. When was the last time you audit your own work to what's available outside?

 

I always have this problem with the phrase WORKING HARD. I think we have to DEFINE what WORKING HARD really is for each of us.

 

All around me, I see people who think they work too hard but yet i see them having lots of fun time doing so many personal activities on their facebook or when topic at the office switch to off work activities. On the other hand, I see people doing twice as much work but they don't think they are working hard enough and are looking for ways to get more out of their time and LOVING IT. And then there are those who work themselves into poor health, those who work and toll till they retire with nothing to show for or gets replace out of their job by better colleagues or retrench when a company want to clear some dead weight. Retrenchment is not always a bad word but a necessity at times. Am I advocating working like a fucking slave? No.

 

I look at it this way, the more you want out of life, the more you need to work to earn that right to get what you want or need, short of cheating and marrying rich. Since we have dicks between our legs that last option is not for us.  :) WHATEVER it is, you need to understand basic cost of living is always going to go up. Google cost of things by comparison. That Includes YOUR SKILL SET that ALSO need to keep evolving and scaling up. Doing the same work for 5-10 years with no improvement is a BIG RISK, what was once a great job or work yesterday is today not worth half of what you think you should be paid or STILL PAID to do. That's the economical fact of life. The company is not your best friend. You still need to justify why they need to keep paying to keep you around.

 

Is there really toxic companies. YES for sure. When you are in one, leave. But if you are too scare to leave especially if you have skills not in demand. YOU JUST IDENTIFY what's wrong with that picture. Loving motivational MEMES and HEARING SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE TALK ABOUT HOW THEY GOT THERE IS EASY but to emulate what those people toll and sacrifice to get there, 99% of people will not do it. That is why they dare to share their secret. It's not the secret. It's what they are made of and how HARD & SMART they work to get to it or die trying. And even if I can not make it, I am not envious or jealous of them. They most likely earned it.

 

The moment you think WORK LIFE BALANCE is real. Average is what you need to learn to live on for life. It's becoming the only game in town in any country. In some countries EVEN if you want to work hard, no such opportunities are available. If you understand that, YOU now understand why we have people from Philippines , China, India...etc  coming here and one day if another place have even better job opportunities, they will head there. The day you see this happening...you know things will get worst here. Dare you leave Singapore like our Pinoy did from his home land too? Then you will truly understand what WORKING HARD really means.

 

Just my rant.... as usual my fanboi stalkers pondans will be here to give me my usual smack down for sharing nonsense. Apologies in advance.


NOW MAYBE SIMPLE PEOPLE WILL UNDERSTAND WHAT I WRITE " Water increasing by 30%... motivated enough? LOL " Earlier on.

 

Edited by upshot

** Comments are my opinions, same as yours. It's not a 'Be-All-and-End-All' view. Intent's to thought-provoke, validate, reiterate and yes, even correct. Opinion to consider but agree to disagree. I don't enjoy conflicted exchanges, empty bravado or egoistical chest pounding. It's never personal, tribalistic or with malice. Frank by nature, means, I never bend the truth. Views are to broaden understanding - Updated: Nov 2021.

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Guest Longevity Tortoise

I have learned to live out of this world and not from this world.  Than life will feel so much better.  No matter how hard your work or how much you earn.  You still have to leave all these behind, someday, depending on how old (remaining lifespan) you have now.

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