Work less. More specifically: toil less.
Toil is work that is without intrinsic joy, placed in opposition to leisure, and is often aimed to improve performance on some metric that is defined by an external force. The key elements of toil are coercion and joylessness. We don’t choose it freely, and it isn’t fun. Maybe its rewards are ephemerally enjoyable, but the work itself is not rewarding, or at least not so rewarding that you would do it without any external incentive. Often, toil is work that has no purpose whatsoever: it is work for work’s sake. You, and the world, would be better off if you engaged in less toil. As Lewis Hyde wrote, “Your life is too short and too valuable to fritter away in work.”
Work for work’s sake
The eulogists of work—Behind the glorification of “work” and the tireless talk of the “blessings of work” I find the same thought as behind the praise of impersonal activity for the public benefit: the fear of everything individual. At bottom, one now feels when confronted with work-and what is invariably meant is relentless industry from early till late-that such work is the best police, that it keeps everybody in harness and powerfully obstructs the development of reason, of covetousness, of the desire for independence. For it uses up a tremendous amount of nervous energy and takes it away from reflection, brooding, dreaming, worry, love, and hatred; it always sets a small goal before one’s eyes and permits easy and regular satisfactions. In that way a society in which the members continually work hard will have more security: and security is now adored as the supreme goddess.
Nietzsche, The Dawn (Kaufmann), #173.
It’s possible that the majority of work in the modern era is unnecessary. One of many paradoxes of modernity is that we aren’t working less even as automation reduces the necessity for work. As the economic rationale for work goes away, work is vested with more and more psychological weight. As Paul Lafargue wrote in 1883, “the laborer, instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardor, as if he wished to rival the machine” (The Right to be Lazy, ch. 3). Psychological research finds that most individuals see unproductive, unnecessary work as moral, and individuals who practice superfluous toil tend to be evaluated as ‘better people’ (The Moralization of Unproductive Effort). Under two centuries of industrial capitalism, our culture has reached a new peak: it sees pointless high-effort as a virtue.
In Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber argues that huge swathes of the working population are toiling away in pointless occupations. 37% of UK workers believe their job does not make a “meaningful contribution to the world.” To be fair, Graeber’s statistical evidence for this thesis is weak—there’s significant evidence that far more workers than he estimates believe their work is meaningful—and his theory is somewhat vague and non-rigorous (Bullshit about Jobs). To validate the theory, we’d have to somehow quantify how many jobs make a ‘meaningful contribution’ rather than just relying on opinion polls. That’s an incredible difficult task.
But Graeber assembles a variety of evidence beyond these polls. For example, office workers in 2016 spent only 39% of their time on their actual jobs, devoting most of the rest to emails, wasteful meetings, and administrative tasks. He also chronicles five types of bullshit jobs: flunkies (who make their boss feel more important through managerial feudalism), goons (who mainly oppose goons in other companies), duct-tapers (who repeatedly create band-aid solutions instead of permanently fixing problems), box-tickers (who fill out paperwork as a proxy for action), and taskmasters (who manage people who don’t need managing). Each of these types are supported by a series of anecdotes. Are you involved in one of these bullshit jobs? Or even worse, are you unconsciously or consciously training to fulfill one of these meaningless roles?
In praise of play
Fundamental hominid psychology evolved in the hunter-gatherer populations of Africa over the last 2.8 million years. Around 300,000 years ago, our species emerged, and it would be. ‘Behaviorally modern’ humans, who used specialized tools, rituals, exploration, trade, art, and more, did not exist until the Upper Paleolithic around 60,000 years ago. Agriculture began about 10,000 years ago. Why this review of dates and human evolution?
Well, our psychology has been influenced by agriculture for only 3% of human existence. Humans have been living in industrial society for only .08% of our time on this planet. And we’ve been living in the current ‘postmodern condition,’ with the Internet and other innovations of the last 30 years, for only about .01% of human existence. We are not evolved for our current conditions. Our psychology was built for a radically different world. We should take advice from our ancestor’s conditions to understand what types of life are more ‘natural’ and perhaps better for human psychology.
Hunter-gatherer societies are deeply playful. “Their own work is simply an extension of children’s play…as their play become increasingly skilled, the activities become productive” (Play Makes Us Human). Hunter-gatherers typically work only around 20-40 hours a week. Unlike our closest primate relatives the bonobos, chimpanzees, and gorillas, which have a strict social hierarchy and high-ranking individual(s) which dominate lower social tiers, anthropologist have found that most human hunter-gatherer societies are “fiercely egalitarian” (Lee, 1998). Hunting trips are seen as a form of skilled play, and if any individual decides not to participate, they are allowed to without conflict.
In anthropology, play is distinguished by these qualities: it is self-chosen, self-directed, intrinsically motivated, guided by mental rules, imaginative, and involves an alert but unstressed state of mind. Play is necessarily egalitarian, in that if one individual threatened to dominate entirely, the others would stop playing and flee the game. The Human Relations Area Files, a primary data source in anthropology, show that hunter-gatherer cultures uniquely lack competitive play (Marshall 1976). Hunter-gatherer adults told researchers that their children spend almost all of their time playing – children spend only 2 hours a day foraging, and even when foraging, they continue to play (Draper 1988). However, the more a society transitions to agriculture, the less time children have to play.
And in the post-agricultural era, children play even less. In The Decline of Play and the Rise of Psychopathology in Children and Adolescents, the researchers find that for six to eight year olds between 1981 and 1997, there was a 25% decrease in time spent playing, a 55% decrease in time spent talking to others at home, and a 19% decrease in time spent watching TV over sixteen years. Meanwhile, there was an 18% increase in time spent in school, a 145% increase in time spent doing schoolwork at home, and a 168% increase in time spent shopping with parents. And as play disappeared, depression and anxiety increased by a full standard deviation, and 85% of young people in the 1990s had anxiety and depression scores greater than the average scores for the same age group in the 1950s. Between 1950 and 2005, the suicide rate for children under 15 quadrupled. And the average young person in 2002 was more prone to an external locus of control (more prone to claim lack of personal control) than 80% of young people in the 1960s. In 2007, 70% of college students scored higher in narcissism than the average college student in 1982.
Eliminating play in our children’s lives teaches them that life is a chore to be endured. Play teaches us how to to make choices, solve problems, cooperate with others as equals, follow the rules of the given game, and create new ways of playing. Most importantly, play teaches us how to experience joy. A study of happiness in public school students found that the children were by far the most miserable in school and the happiest when playing with friends (Gray 2013). While the conventional story is that schoolwork is a necessary evil that can’t be fun, what if the misery of this work comes from unnecessary forms of education that prevent joyful learning?
Play is not the same as entertainment. Most of the leisure time we have is filled with entertainment, used merely to numb us while we are not working, to encourage us to buy even more commodities, or to immerse us in the spectacle of lives that are not our own. This is entertainment. Play, on the other hand, is an active, creative activity, in which the imagined world or narrative is built and constantly changed by the participants — rather than disseminated by some unknown figure like a media corporation.
“But for all these people art exists only so that they will become even more dispirited, even more numb and mindless, or even more hasty and desirous.”
Nietzsche, Unfashionable Observations, pg. 287.
Ultimately, if we all devote ourselves to toil, then we are doomed to live in a Disneyland with no children: a world with immense economic prosperity and no one who remembers how to play.
The Protestant & Mormon work ethics
Weber’s 1904 sociological masterpiece, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, has shaped almost the conversations about the work ethic since. In Catholicism, work could not earn one salvation, and only grace and repentance could redeem individuals. For Luther, work was saintly, and “an individual was religiously compelled to follow a secular vocation with as much zeal as possible. A person living according to this world view was more likely to accumulate money” (Weber, 42). For Calvinists, who thought the saved were predestined, work was used to achieve financial success and thus earn the ‘mark of God.’ Calvinists could relieve anxiety about being spiritually unworthy by achieving the (material) blessings of God. In a footnote, Weber explicitly mentions the new Mormon religion, citing a Mormon scripture that states: “But a lazy or indolent man cannot be a Christian and be saved. He is destined to be struck down and cast from the hive” (Weber, 235). I’m not sure where Weber read this — if anyone finds the origin, let me know!
Mormonism, the homegrown American religion, takes this Protestant work ethic and advances it even further. Utah’s state motto is Industry and the symbol of the State of Deseret (the Mormon name for a pre-Utah state in the West) was the beehive. At a Mormon conference called Especially for Youth when I was 14, I asked an advisor about why he believed in the church, and he said a keystone of his belief was the material success of Mormon society. I of course don’t remember exactly what he said, but it was close to “Look at how successful Utah is and how much Mormonism has helped us prosper – you can judge the religion by its fruits.”
Theological elements of Mormonism encourage this work ethic. Joseph Smith rejected the concept of immaterial substances: “There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure and can only be discerned by purer eyes” (D&C 131, 7-8). God himself is a material being in Mormon ontology. Further, in Mormon theology, it is possible to become like God, create a world, and populate it. This heavenly culmination of a spirit’s life is achieved through a combination of faith and works. The idea of eternal progression is closely tied to the work ethic.
“Wherefore, because thou hast been faithful thy seed… shall dwell in prosperity long upon the face of this land; and nothing, save it shall be iniquity among them, shall harm or disturb their prosperity upon the face of the land forever.”
2 Nephi 1:31, The Book of Mormon
In an intensive analysis of the Book of Mormon, a group of scholars traced the development of the work ethic in the primary Mormon religious text (Material Values in the Book of Mormon). Anyone who has read the Book of Mormon is familiar with the story of the pride cycle: a group is righteous, which leads to material rewards, and these rewards corrupt them, leading to a collapse or loss of their success, which then leads to humility and righteousness once again. Though their wealth is destroyed again and again, when the people repent of their sins and turn back to the Lord, they start to prosper once more (Helaman 4:15-16; Ether 7:26). The Lamanites, the recurring antagonists of the Book of Mormon, are portrayed as a group who survive by robbing and plundering rather than laboring for goods with “their own hands” (Alma 17:14). In contrast, the Mormons are exhorted to work and avoid laziness: “Thou shalt not idle away thy time…neither shalt thou bury thy talent that it may not be known” (D&C 130:18-21). In Mormon theology, labor is tied to righteousness, which is in turn connected to prosperity.
“And now, because of the steadiness of the church they began to be exceedingly rich, having abundance of all things whatsoever they stood in need…And thus, in their prosperous circumstances, they did not send away any who were naked, or that were hungry, or that were athirst, or that were sick, or that had not been nourished; and they did not set their hearts upon riches; therefore they were liberal to all, both old and young, both bond and free, both male and female, whether out of the church or in the church, having no respect to persons as to those who stood in need. And thus they did prosper and become far more wealthy than those who did not belong to their church.”
Alma 1:27-31, The Book of Mormon
I don’t mean to frame Mormonism as a hyper-capitalist religion; there are many verses that condemn material wealth (e.g. the description of the ‘great and abominable’ Church in 1 Nephi 13:6-8). The Church also encourages charity and generosity. And the Book of Mormon also describes the problems with class structures and economic inequality: “And the people began to be distinguished by ranks, according to their riches and their chances for learning…And thus there became a great inequality in all the land” (3 Nephi 6:12-15). The same verse describes how the devil exercised his power in “puffing them up with pride, tempting them to seek for power, and authority, and riches, and the vain things of the world.”
There are also many parts of Mormon scripture that could be characterized as socialist-leaning. After the coming of Christ in the Americas, the Book of Mormon describes how “they had all things common among them; therefore there were not rich and poor” (4 Nephi 1:3). Over the next two centuries, this righteous, communal society fell back into class structures and status-signalling: they became “lifted up in pride, such as the wearing of costly apparel, and all manner of fine pearls…And from that time forth they did have their goods and their substance no more common among them” (4 Nephi 24). Early LDS societies also attempted to practice a form of theocratic communalism called the United Order, in which private property was eliminated and the land and goods of Church members were owned by the Church.
However, these more anti-capitalist and communal strands of Mormonism are hardly visible in modern Mormon society. Around 70% of Mormons are Republican, and around 75% of Mormon Republicans believe government aid to the poor does more harm than good (Pew Research). One sociological study found that Mormons perceive wealthier members as more spiritual or blessed, and are more likely to attribute flattering spiritual qualities to materially successful members — and poorer Mormons were even more likely to buy into this myth of wealth & righteousness (Rector 1999). Contemporary Mormonism represents a zenith of the toil addiction.
Popular culture’s recognition of the Mormon work ethic is part of the reason American press coverage of Mormonism has become more positive over the last half-century (Stathis 1981). For example, in 2008, The Economist published an article about the economic success of the state of Utah called The Mormon work ethic, and The New Republic in 2012 published a much longer article on The Mormon Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The powerful synergy of Mormonism and American capitalism have created a uniquely compelling work ethic.
American fantasies
Social innovations like the Protestant work ethic generate a race to the bottom. One group adopts a hyper-industrious culture that mandates its population give up personal happiness & the pursuit of individual freedom for the sake of the herd’s productivity. Neighboring groups see that they will be unable to compete with the hyper-industrious culture unless they adopt a similar work-ethic. Soon, the addiction to work is exported globally. Now we live in a global culture in which difference is being rapidly erased as the gospel of toil spreads into every corner of the planet. Globalization creates a race to the bottom: corporations will primarily harness the labor of the countries with the most relentless, life-erasing, humanity-eating work ethics.
The economy is then detached from its purpose – to serve humanity – and we begin to serve the economy. Our limbs are harnessed to the dance of numbers. All incentives orchestrate together to favor work over individuality, joy, or the pursuit of projects that do not increase established metrics. GDP, comparative advantage, the constant pressure to rise into higher social tiers, to have certain products, to leap through the correct hoops at the right times – these control our behavior in innumerable seen and unseen ways. We have forgotten entirely what it would be like to be free of this obsession with toil, and we have forgotten the normative aim of our constructed human systems: to promote human flourishing.
Toil is especially an American addiction. Maybe the most toxic element of our culture is also the most-praised: the ‘work ethic.’ This is the constant, all-consuming, corporation-connected drive to labor that erases our individuality. America is the 9th-most overworked nation in the world, and Americans are working more and sleeping less today than in the 1970s (Covert 2018). Unlike most countries, the US does not have a limit on the maximum length of the work week. And according to the ILO, “Americans work 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, 260 more hours per year than British workers, and 499 more hours per year than French workers.” Even as toil becomes less necessary, it is devouring more of our time. And as American workers strive to be more productive, they are rewarded less.
The American dream: if you are capable enough, you can rise to the top; you can become anything if you have the talent. The if puts us in a psychological trap: to reject the American dream seems to be an admission of incapability. The desire to believe in the American dream is ingeniously tied to the desire to believe in oneself. If I negate the dream, am I just admitting that I am not enough to become? That I don’t have the capability to succeed, and thus don’t want to believe it’s possible? I, the American individual, want to be the psychological type that is able to fulfill the American dream – the ‘great’ person who comes up from the bottom, the Benjamin Franklin, the Jay Z. To lose faith in the American dream seems to be an admission that I am not a person of this type.
This fear, this personal insecurity, encourages a blind faith in the dream and a denial of the material conditions that define both what we are striving for and how it is achieved. Any rejection of the promise of the American dream seems to be a mere product of ressentiment. Thus the ideology undermines the ground on which its opponents stand.
College and indoctrination into toil culture
The addiction to the work-ethic, and the compelling stories of success that are connected to it, especially affects ambition-filled young people. This is why 36% of Harvard graduates go into finance and consulting – and going to Harvard makes students significantly more likely to work in these fields. At Dartmouth, where I go, even more are seduced – almost 50% of students end up working in finance and consulting, and many of the remainder go to work for high-status tech companies. These firms woo aspiring students with impossible-to-refuse offers. Their recruiting methods weaponize student’s vague fear of not being “successful” the lack of any specific vision. They play into student’s desires to continue ‘upward momentum’ by fulfilling a conventional success story and succeeding in yet another selective admissions process. It’s tempting to talk oneself into these toil-filled careers.
The flood of students into consulting is less of a brain drain than a spirit drain – it sucks our most energetic, dream-filled, neuroplastic, capable youth into careers where they will do nothing but optimize the existing system. They slowly lose their independent mind, grind away their capacity for creativity, and are rewarded amply for it.
Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?
Peter Thiel, Zero to One, pg. 36
Thiel’s alternative – working on a entrepreneurial project – is only somewhat better. It also encourages toil, just more independent toil that is tied to metrics like money that are more directly relevant to life in capitalism than academic grades. It too is coercive and relatively joyless, as the student must relentlessly work on the project to become financially ‘successful’ when the fellowship ends. As a whole, these students are also far more incentivized by the status of the Fellowship, and the vision of being an entrepreneur, than by their intrinsic enjoyment of the labor. It has also changed over the last few years, and it now almost exclusively funds projects with a high chance of profitability. The Thiel Fellowship is another Toil Fellowship.
But I agree with Thiel’s conviction that colleges indoctrinate youth into a pointless work ethic, encourage conventionality, and serve to erase dreams. Elite institutions serve the additional purpose of status-signalling for the upper class — for many, an Ivy League education is merely a form of conspicuous consumption. I can’t speak for all college cultures, but Dartmouth culture is dominated by the toil ethic. Students constantly chatter about how busy they are, list their work obligations, study in visible public space, and signal about their high-effort. What’s the point? Work for work’s sake?
Human beings must be broken in to serve the purposes of the age, so that they can be put to work at the earliest possible moment; they are supposed to go to work in the factory of general utility before they are mature — indeed, so that they do not become mature — because allowing them to mature would be a luxury that would divert a great deal of energy away from “the labor market.” Some birds are blinded so that they will sing more beautifully.
Nietzsche, Unfashionable Observations (Stanford), pg. 134.
Who is Moloch?
Our economies have become unhinged from the original force that sets them into motion: joy. The human desire for joy, for happiness, for conscious positive experience, is what motivates the creation of barter and currency. And yet now we have forgotten that our economies are our instruments and not our masters. This has now evolved into our vast interconnected systems of steel and concrete, punishment and incentive, which exist not to further human flourishing but to maintain themselves.
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed…What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? … Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! … They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven!”
Allen Ginsberg, Howl
In his howl against the unseen forces that maintain a soul-destructive system, Ginsberg names these forces Moloch after the Canaanite god of child sacrifice. Everyone hates this system, and yet the system remains. What could possibly keep it going? It seems almost like there is some malevolent being, assigning everyone life-draining toil, generating task after task, reinforcing processes that no human being with a semblance of spirit would choose to create. The reality is more complicated. In Meditations on Moloch, Scott Alexander lists a series of examples of toxic, self-maintaining systems, where certain features prevent participants from cooperating to fix the system. Moloch is a name for the features that define this type of system. A human tendency is to invent gods as explanatory forces when we do not understand a system. Moloch represents the complex set of forces that create and maintain the system we inhabit.
Imagining out of toil
A simple way to avoid toil is through the imagination. Imagine that money was no object. Then, imagine there were no social incentives like the desire to signal high-status careers. Finally, imagine that work for work’s sake was unnecessary. This imaginative reduction enables us to get at the core of our authentic desires. Like Rawls’ veil of ignorance, it encourages us to imagine a world in which particular social motivations and contingencies did not govern our behavior. Like Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, this method tries to escape the abstractions and concepts that usually determine how we experience the world. If we were immune to the toil ethic, ignorant of which careers were tied to status and money, what would we choose?
“Let the young soul look back on its life with the question: What have you truly loved up to now, what attracted your soul, what dominated it while simultaneously making it happy? Place this series of revered objects before you, and perhaps their nature and their sequence
Nietzsche, Unfashionable Observations (Stanford: 1995), pg. 174.
will reveal to you a law, the fundamental law of your authentic self.”
Most people will never do this. Even fewer will take this imagining seriously, and follow the guidance of their more authentic nature. Imaginations are too limited, “the world as it is” is too blinding, toxic incentive structures are too motivating. Many use toil precisely as a means of escape, a coping mechanism and a way to avoid themselves. Our lives themselves are becoming products we manufacture. As Debord wrote in The Society of the Spectacle, “The more his life is now his product, the more he is separated from his life.”
All of you to whom furious work is dear, and whatever is fast, new, and strange-you find it hard to bear yourselves; your industry is escape and the will to forget yourselves. If you believed more in life you would fling yourselves less to the moment. But you do not have contents enough in yourselves for waiting-and not even for idleness.
Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (Kaufmann), pg. 158.
I hope we at least realize that the most common defense of conventionality – “this is the way the world is, and we have to work within it” – is what makes the world the way it is. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Working within existing structures validates those structures. Toiling for toil’s sake encourages others to do the same, and maintains the system that instills the toil ethic in our minds. Change will only happen when we stop believing this prophecy. If you’re on a hamster wheel, the answer isn’t to run faster. It’s to get off.
And, of course, those who don’t believe they can make a change never will.