Workaholics 👨🏻💻
"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
—Shakespeare (Hamlet)
> late to the resistance | vilified
A swollen fallacy became visible during a debate we had about tardiness at a Tulsa coffee shop where I worked in sobriety from alcohol.
- Americans often view themselves as having an unrivaled work ethic.
- But we can't tell you why it's so important for us to prove to strangers that we have an unrivaled work ethic.
Many of us hold the decidedly unscientific view that someone who is late by a few minutes is also lazy and has a poor work ethic. ⏰
Although "work ethic" sounds vaguely scientific, it's just another way of saying lazy. And laziness is individually perceived and interpreted, unlike productivity.
That means each of the 8.1 billion people worldwide has subjective, individual interpretations of laziness as they "see" it. In America, we attack you for not overworking like the rest of us.
We measure laziness with our feelings and emotions and assume everyone else perceives laziness and work ethic the same way we do.
Time, meanwhile, is a measurement conceived by humans. Timeliness itself is not a metric for work ethic or laziness or productivity. 📈
Should so many of us, then, be so vilified by the rule-followers for not always conforming to America’s terminally irrational workaholism?
Why is it important to us to impress total strangers with the number of sick hours we've never used?
No one ever said before their final breath that they didn't overwork enough.
- next time "We'll stridently defend the status quo."
- listening Baroness "March to the Sea"
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