Why Do We Work So Much?

It's the system, man!

Americans, like most modern humans, work too much. Do we really need to?

In a 2019 Gallup poll, 52% of full-time workers in the U.S. reported that they worked more than 40 hours a week; 39% worked at least 50 hours. That doesn’t even include getting ready for work, commuting, and so much more. Americans also take much less time off than people in other developed countries.

I could write extensively about overwork, but I don’t want to make you work too hard to read an overly long post. So I’ll try to stick to an overview.

We didn’t always work this much

The Kung people of the Kalahari worked an average of three hours a day prior to being subjected to Western influence. The pattern was more like two days of work followed by two days of hanging out. 

People in most ​​hunter-gatherer societies spent about 15 hours a week working. Not only did they work much less than we do, but their lives were not necessarily “nasty, brutish, and short,” as was once assumed. 

For several decades, anthropologist James Suzman studied the Ju/'hoansi, a group in the Kalahari who continued their hunter-gatherer lifestyle until the 1960s. They spent about two hours a day foraging and “cheerfully spent the rest of their time on more leisurely pursuits such as napping, playing games, and making art,” Suzman reports. The Ju/'hoansi, it turned out, were “well fed, content and longer-lived than people in many agricultural societies.” (This changed, sadly, when their lands were taken away and they were “resettled.”)

So is agriculture the culprit? The move away from hunting and gathering and into large-scale agriculture, with its attendant societal changes, has been blamed for many of our current ills, including overwork. 

But work hours increased even more during the Industrial Revolution, when factories could continue operating through the night. The same Industrial Revolution was thought to herald a new era of greater prosperity and less work, to be brought about by mechanization and labor-saving devices. Things must have looked promising in 1930, when the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2030, most people would work no more than 15 hours a week. 

With just a bit over seven years to go, that’s not looking likely. We now have the means to work less, but we’re not taking advantage of that. Whether the shift to an agriculture-based society or some combination of factors got us here, we seem to be stuck in an overwork rut.

What we get for all this work, and what we give up

Most people would not want to forego central heating, running water, and Netflix to switch to a hunter-gatherer life. 

That’s in spite of the fact that we really work more than 40 hours a week, if you include shopping, cleaning, cooking, paying bills and taxes, dealing with the many complications of modern life and technology, and running errands of various kinds. I don’t know exactly what’s counted as work in the 15-hour hunter-gatherer work week, but many of those activities wouldn’t have existed. 

Sure, hunter-gatherers didn’t have a lot of the comforts we have. They didn’t have a lot of the material things we have. But they also didn’t have a lot of our headaches.

What did they have? Community. Freedom. A sense of belonging. Ease. If we were plucked out of our current existence and magically dropped into their world, we’d likely freak out. But back in the 1700s, white people who were captured and taken to live with Native people didn’t want to return to their previous lives; Native people who were captured couldn’t wait to get back. Benjamin Franklin, writing about this in 1753, noted that the Native people had “few but natural wants and those easily supplied,” while the white people had “Artificial wants, no less craving than those of Nature, and much more difficult to satisfy.”

Work, or the lack of it, is only part of the equation. But the fact is, we spend way too much time and energy striving for those “artificial wants.”

Americans are particularly prone to this. In some countries (though not all), people take more time off and part-time work is more acceptable. In some of those countries (though not all), people have less disposable income but more free time and stability. 

Is that a tradeoff most of us would make?

Slow Work

They get up every morning from their alarm clock's warning
Take the 8:15 into the city
There's a whistle up above and people pushin', people shovin'
And the girls who try to look pretty
And if your train's on time, you can get to work by nine
And start your slaving job to get your pay

There’s growing support for what’s known as the Slow Work movement, inspired by Slow Food and its many offshoots. Slow Work can mean literally slowing down, working fewer hours, finding time for uninterrupted work — or even de-prioritizing work. The pandemic has extended this to what some call “quiet quitting,” or doing the bare minimum at your job. But that puts the onus on the individual. And it sounds like defeat.

It’s the system we need to change. I’m lucky that, thanks to my circumstances and age, I can (just) afford to work as a consultant now and have gained more flexibility. My friend who’s an aesthetic tree pruner makes it a point to enjoy life now, rather than waiting for retirement. My therapist friend can slow down by taking on fewer clients. But most people don’t have this luxury and are chained to increasingly fast-paced jobs and a workweek that can expand way past 40 hours.

Is that necessary? Working less doesn’t have to reduce productivity. The most productive countries aren’t necessarily the ones where people work the most hours (the chart at this link shows hours worked per week, but Americans work more weeks per year than people in many other countries).

A few small signs of progress pop up here and there. Some companies are trying out a four-day workweek with significant success. In 2021, the Thirty-Two-Hour Workweek Act was introduced in Congress.

These kinds of changes could bring us closer to the European approach. Europe has its issues, and every country is different. But some of them, at least, provide glimmers of a better way: The French prohibition on sending emails after work hours. The five weeks of annual leave in Scandinavian countries. The work-life balance in Switzerland described by Chantal Panozzo, an American who lived there for a decade.

Why can’t we have that here?

Whatever version of Slow Work we’d like to adopt, getting there would be challenging. We would need a huge systemic shift, which seems to go against our very culture. And despite all the talk about the Great Resignation and quiet quitting, it doesn’t feel like the pandemic has materially changed American attitudes toward work.

I’d love to be convinced otherwise. I hope I will be. In the meantime, I’ll continue trying to lead a balanced life — even when it feels like swimming upstream.

Have you found ways to slow down your work? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!