Stepehn Marche asks, "Why Are You Working So Hard?"

Stephen Marche is an essayist, columnist and novelist. Dude writes. He wrote the following piece on the nature of work in America. I like how he thinks.

Why Are You Working So Hard?

No, really: Why? Nobody works as hard as the average American man. When most of us hear about a country like Sweden, with its eighteen months' maternity leave and its five weeks' paid vacation guaranteed by law, we don't think, How do I get that? We think, What a bunch of pussies. Russians say, "Works like an American" when here we would say, "Works like a dog." The richest man in the world (Bill Gates) has claimed that he will leave each of his children $10 million and no more; otherwise they might become lazy and not work. The United States is, above all, a nation of workers, and though the economic downturn has caused unemployment to spike to its highest rates in a generation, it's also offering us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reevaluate our culture's insane relationship to work.

And "insane" is the operative word here. In American pop culture, as in American life, work has become the ultimate cipher, simultaneously giving meaning to our daily lives and stripping it away, filling our time and emptying it, making us who we are and crushing our souls in the same sweeping and terrible gesture. Our alienation from work has been hovering at the margins of culture (Dilbert) for a few decades (Office Space), and the theme resonates today in genres as diverse as the Broadway musical (9 to 5: The Musical), the Hollywood film (Extract), and, most of all, network television. The great character-driven shows that once celebrated the nobility of the workplace and the worker — a grand tradition stretching back to the dawn of the medium with the likes of Marcus Welby and Perry Mason — died this past spring with the final episode of ER, and their ranks have been slowly replaced by a factory-line spew of procedural work dramas (Law & Order). These stories work themselves out with the frictionless efficiency of an iPhone connecting to a wireless network, and the characters are nothing more than user-friendly interfaces through which audiences navigate plot points. And those are just the dramas. These seeds of discontent have also sprouted into a unique species of mass-consumption alienation comedy. "I would say that I lost my optimism about government in about two months," says Mark in the pilot of Parks and Recreation. The heroine of that show struggles to keep her illusions about the power and purpose of public service alive, and it's no better in the privately run wasteland of Dunder Mifflin. For all his enthusiasm, Michael Scott earns nothing but contempt from his limp employees. The rest of us, like Jim and Pam, alleviate the monstrous deadness of office life with the occasional wounded, brief look into the camera that says, "Absurdity is now so normal, I no longer find it absurd."

We are now reaching the point where some of us long for a return to manual labor. Newer shows (Deadliest Catch, Dirty Jobs) on basic cable have small but devoted followings for their blue-collar stars, and, trust me, the viewers aren't mechanics or fishermen or janitors. They are the same people who have been tuning in to The Office for the past five years, the worker-drones who live the comfortable nightmare that Das Kapital predicted, a profound alienation from jobs with no clear purpose. They were also the readers who recently picked up Matthew B. Crawford's magnificent short book, an apologia pro vita sua of a man who abandoned his job as the director of a think tank to open a motorcycle-repair shop. For the pleasure of feeling useful and seeing the tangible results of his efforts, he chose a life of American Chopper over one of The Office, and he's happy. But the educated masses, the clean and the bored, would rather explore their working-class fantasies through books and cable TV than change their lives. It's so much simpler — so much more normal — to work at a place you hate, don't you think?

America's love-hate relationship with work goes back to the double origins of the country: the pioneers who hacked paradise out of the wilderness by their own efforts and the slaves who actually built the country. Work in America has always been both the most vital expression of a person's humanity and a persistent state of inhuman blankness, a contradiction that survives in the peculiar idiom "human resource." You can either be a human or a resource; you can't be both. The tension appears even in one of the most famous pieces of folk culture.

The song (“John Henry”), in which the hero beats a steam drill at hammering stakes, has been heard, at one point or another, by nearly every twentieth-century American, rich or poor, black or white, young or old. The contest ends in what is supposedly a victory for humanity over the machine, with Henry proving that "a man ain't nothing but a man." But the story's tragic undertones obscure its optimism. Henry knows at the age of three days that "the hammer's gonna be the death of me." Instead of joy at the invention of a machine that saves him from a lifetime of brutal labor, he experiences technology as a kind of death. Either the machine will kill him or his work will, and he chooses work.

Americans are still making John Henry's fatal choice, yet once the work started to disappear, we were left with free time and uncomfortable questions. What is the point of all this work if the end result is more work for the purpose of yet more work? Are we all, like Michael Scott, humiliating ourselves for the glory of a flat-screen TV? And could it be that for a huge number of people, despite all their genuine suffering, the economic catastrophe has been a relief — a relief not to have to work so much and a relief not to have to spend so much? We needed a pause and we got one, and we've started to ask ourselves what the hell we're working for. Jennifer, Rory, and Phoebe Gates, what do you have to look forward to? Ten million bucks and a lifetime as a human resource. Thank your dad. Then ask him why.