"I can be utterly depleted yet energized by that depletion. There’s a masochistic pride to overworking. How heavy a workload can I truly handle? How many plates can I keep in the air? When I get to the end of a particularly overloaded day, my voice hoarse from teaching, my mind buzzing from far too many e-mails, questions, and deadlines, I vow never to let that happen again, knowing full well that, as soon as I’ve achieved a new level of exhaustion, my id will push me to try to exceed it.... My closest friends and relatives... have no idea what I do in a day and no idea why I chose to write. 'Is writing even work?' some of them wonder. Or do I just sit around coffee shops, smoke, drink, and wait for inspiration to strike? How do you know what to write if no one tells you?... If you’re my father, then you are direct: 'You don’t have a real job, Weike, and I can’t understand why.'... Had my father not worked so hard to improve our means, would I have the luxury of writing these words about him today?"
From "Notes on Work There’s a masochistic pride to overworking. How heavy a workload can I truly handle? How many plates can I keep in the air?" by Weike Wang (The New Yorker).
I thought that was a pretty cool essay, so I was motivated to look up Weike Wang's 2 novels on Amazon: "Chemistry" and "Joan Is Okay: A Novel."
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32 comments:
I worked 150 hour weeks just because I liked the work. It's nothing about plates in the air.
"I work too hard!" is the ultimate humblebrag.
How the brain decides to do things or not do things, motivation, energy are all chemical interactions that are being uncovered and better understood.
There isn't much difference between a masochist and an exercise enthusiast at a basic level.
I am currently around 8-10% body fat. The line between lean and anorexic is really non-existent.
You can decide what you want and train your brain to push you in the direction you want to go.
The hardest day for me is recovery day to be honest.
Been watching a lot of David Sinclair the Harvard scientist doing anti-aging research. A guy like that is 100% into his work almost every waking hour. I assume he is in a "flow" state much of the time.
Most of us will never achieve that. Working very hard and not being in flow will not end well.
This guy needs to read Rework by Jason Fried and DHH
But if you keep doing it and "are energized by that depletion", is it really masochism? Maybe it's not being "neurotypical". It's being different, with a brain that doesn't work exactly the same as most others.
There are too many psychiatric terms (especially the ones that break into pop culture) that are scientific-sounding ways of judging people, "that's bad" or "that's good".
"There’s a masochistic pride to overworking."
If one does indeed "overwork" (for some definition of "overwork") the pride should come from accomplishing something of value -- finishing a long blog post, painting the living room, completing and submitting a scientific paper.
In reality, overwork too often is the result of bad planning. Or no planning. Neither should result in pride.
"The hardest day for me is recovery day to be honest."
Yes, "The only easy day was yesterday."(TM)
Looks interesting. I'll give one of her books a read.
For Nietzsche hath said:
What is heavy? so asketh the load-bearing spirit; then kneeleth it down like the camel, and wanteth to be well laden.
What is the heaviest thing, ye heroes? asketh the load-bearing spirit, that I may take it upon me and rejoice in my strength.
Jordan Peterson has a similar message. I think that is why Peterson is so popular despite his general goofiness -- there are few people today advocating these ideas.
As Achilles notes, weightlifting performs a similar function.
Note how the posted quote tries to discredit hard work with snarky adjectives: "workaholics," "addicted," "solace," "extreme," and "high."
A straightforward sentence would take the wind out of the sales and make the article a "duh": "Some people enjoy hard work."
Does a workaholic know he or she is overworking? I think it's like a fish doesn't know it's wet.
"There’s a masochistic pride to overworking."
If one does indeed "overwork" (for some definition of "overwork") the pride should come from accomplishing something of value -- finishing a long blog post, painting the living room, completing and submitting a scientific paper.
In reality, overwork too often is the result of bad planning. Or no planning. Neither should result in pride.
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So will this writer is calling for Biden to carry on M'Man or resign from President
"Some people enjoy hard work."
Sure. Because hard work, not genius, is the prime driver of progress. Personal, societal, or otherwise. It’s the lazy fuckers that are dragging themselves and us down.
I have been trying to practice inducing satiation through neuromodulation. Recently.
I would take a bite and put the fork down and focus on chewing and feeling the juices of the food coming out. Long pauses in between bites. The feeling of satisfaction etc.
Food entering your GI Tract trigger neurons in your gut that send signals to the brain signaling different things.
Amino Acids trigger serotonin which promotes satiation. Other things like sugar trigger dopamine which promotes desire/motivation.
I do feel full.
But I ended up really liking the food I am eating which is basically lasagna with the pasta noodles traded out for sliced zucchini. It helped that it is really tasty in the first place.
Not the intended result, but still a useful tool.
Gerda Sprinchorn said...
Note how the posted quote tries to discredit hard work with snarky adjectives: "workaholics," "addicted," "solace," "extreme," and "high."
A straightforward sentence would take the wind out of the sales and make the article a "duh": "Some people enjoy hard work."
Exactly.
People do not want to accept that they can control what they want and who they are because they think they like being lazy.
It is really impossible to be unfair to the vast majority of modern journalists. They are just generally stupid lazy people who are dishonest as a general way of life.
Why are the workaholics "they" and the marathon runners "her"?
I used to work for a narcissistic "Coffee Achiever" (remember them?) who seemed to be proud of how exhausted he was from overwork; his girlfriend, too. Then he hired me (the biggest mistake of my life), and "magically" his overwork became my overwork. Due to his narcissism, he never noticed how I no longer had any life of my own (if he did notice, didn't care). When I finally had a chance to "jump ship" and stop sacrificing my life and goals for his, I did. His girlfriend had wised up and jumped ship my months before.
I used to be a workaholic for much of those reasons. I did enjoy the work, but I also enjoyed being a good worker who could out perform expectations, both my own and my employer/mentor. This started really full-steam when I began my PhD in late 2008 and continued for a decade.
Two things even before that blunted my workaholic tendencies. One, as part of a very heavy work load, seven days a week of writing, teaching, etc. and so on, I had to prepare a lecture on the Sabbath. Workaholic and sabbath don't go together well, and I really started realizing how much wisdom there is in taking a full day off a week and not living my life for the performance and achievement. Really, it was an expression of my Christian faith, to trust God rather than to indulge the frenzy (which I honestly did enjoy). It took years to cycle down, where I could stop for a day without feeling guilt or inner pressure to do more, be more. But there's peace on the other side of this. I became someone who said yes to everything, to saying no more and more for the sake of better reality.
The other thing that coincided and eventually broke me was that in my field, academia, there is immense hypocrisy and dysfunction and oppressing, where a good many with power will happily take the overworking, high achieving, participants and use them until they are broken husks. Vampirism is rampant in academia. People with power sucking the life-blood, out of the hopeful for their own benefits and success and reputation. Christian academia is rarely any different.
It hit me that I was a workaholic and being taken advantage of. I could get extremely high course evals, strong publishing, strong service, doing all the things extremely well that I was told I needed to do well, and then just get kicked to the curb, not get even to a second stage of applications, and otherwise implicitly told that there was no doing enough for me, as I wasn't the right type of person.
So workaholics do thrive on that thrill, that solace in fatigue and pouring one's whole self into the work, but also need success, or at least correlating responses that the work being done has a correlative reward. Sometimes that reward is just personal value, but when the work morphs from investing in what I enjoyed about the process to just doing a lot of the duties that privileged faculty didn't want to do, then I realize that being a workaholic is an affront to both God and my own soul and self-identity.
I don't want to be someone who works so that others can feel better about their roles in oppressive and dysfunctional systems, whose success is built on taking the hard earned money of students and overworked underpaid efforts of others to do as little teaching as they can get away with.
I can still be in this dysfunctional system and find a way of thriving in it, contributing and making a way, speaking against the dysfunction rather than being complicit in it. I certainly also have to see that life needs a lot more balance and that I can be a positive voice for change in the system only if I keep my soul and life-blood where it should be.
of course, what 'workaholics' are REALLY addicted to; are amphetamines like Adderall; but shhh
don't talk about That!
Seriously... show me a 'workaholic', and i'll show you a speed freak
but we're NOT supposed to talk about THAT
rhhardin said...
I worked 150 hour weeks just because I liked the work
hmmm, let's assume you're serious
24h/d * 7d/w = 168h/w
(168h/w)-(150h/w) = 18h/w = (18h/w)/(7d/w) = 2.572h/d
2 hours and 34 minutes a DAY, to eat/sleep/sh*t/shower/shave/relax/commute/etc
I'm NOT saying you're Lying, I'm just saying you did NOT do that without massive stimulant overuse
ps here's your chance to say "i would NEVER use Speed! i just drank 50gal drums of coffee
Real workaholics produce durable goods or food and energy. THAT is why they are workaholics, the world literally rests on their shoulders. The world for humanity would grind to a halt if too many of them became slackers. On the other hand very few people would notice if the author disappeared entirely.
I've pretty much always identified with the expression "afraid of hard work." It's a matter of preserving your life.
It’s the day in/day out responsibility!
Achilles- you may be a tad- obsessed?
I wish I were.
For about 20 years I was kind of a workaholic, at least in time spent, was in graduate school and working close to full time (ca. 37 hour weeks). I found the evening and weekend work on my dissertation and such to be kind of relaxing; just me alone in a lab for a couple hours every night doing some work I enjoyed.
'Course, when that ended when I got my degree I didn't know what to do with myself and ended up sinking into anxiety and probably some depression, so go figure.
“I worked 150 hour weeks just because I liked the work.”
In my experience, the human body starts to break down if one works more than 20 hours a day for more than 2 days straight. I have heard of people being able to clock long hours like this in situations where they are being paid to be on call but not necessarily awake for the whole 20 hours.
Or getting up every morning a taking sunrise photos : )
M: well, those cows aren’t going to milk themselves- or clean or feed or…
farmgirl said...
Achilles- you may be a tad- obsessed?
I wish I were.
I am putting up a youtube channel on the subject. So far I am just putting up some short exercise videos.
I just got the backdrops for the extended videos and filming begins when my daedalus wallet finishes synching with the blockchain. I am at 97.5% but progress is logarithmic.
The first step I teach is accepting who you are and why your are.
The next step is learning to control what you want. I have people start with training themselves to like and dislike foods. I have made donuts and potato chips and soda's of all kinds repulsive. I have accidentally found out how to make other foods very attractive/desirable.
There is a lot of background information. Search for Andrew Huberman on youtube. Multiple videos on how your body receives food and releases hormones in response. 4 or 5 episodes on motivation, task bracketing, habit formation and goal setting. Mel Robbins has some good stuff on the reticular activation system. Jordan Peterson is more of a general philosophy source. There are many others.
Talking about this subject without mentioning stoicism is also a bit of an oversight on my part.
There is no way that she works 150 hours a week. Easiest way to suss that out is the comment that she does "teaching". So subjective.
A crock of an article. Ann, you should have picked up on that.
As a junior lawyer I had the misfortune of working for a genuine workaholic (during the '08 bust, when legal jobs were few and precious and if you quit one you might not find another). I clocked 140 hours in the office several weeks, though I must admit that included a few hours of 3am
catnaps snatched on the floor under my desk. It can be done for a week or two. After that, the brain and body just shut down and no amount of willpower can make them continue without a prolonged rest.
Fwiw, after a year in which I billed 3,000 hours (and probably spent closer to 4,500 in the office), I developed a debilitating autoimmune neuropathy that left me permanently disabled. While I cannot prove it to a legal standard, I am convinced that the grinding hours I worked that year precipitated my illness. I am also certain that my (now former) boss suffers from a serious mental illness that compels her to work (and require her subordinates to work) beyond all reason. I genuinely pity her. She is, now that she is not my boss, a very nice woman and I sincerely like her (though not so much that I'd have spent two Thanksgivings in a row at her home so we could continue our work while our respective families watched the football game in the next room). But she is a monster as a boss.
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