The American Fetish with Hard Work
American schools give kids more homework than schools in other countries, but the homework tends to be easier. At least, this is what I remember watching in some Ted Talk a few years ago — I can’t actually find the original talk. But, I believe it because it seems to fit with elements of the American culture at large.
David Graeber talks about this attitude with respect to college, in his book Bullshit Jobs. He recounts:
There was once a time when most students in college whose parents could afford it, or who qualified for scholarships or assistance, received a stipend. It was considered a good thing that there might be a few years in a young man’s or woman’s life where money was not the primary motivation … Nowadays it is considered important they should work. However, it is not considered important they should work at anything useful. In fact, [some of them are] barely expected to work at all, just to show up and pretend to do so.
Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber — p 75 (Note: Affiliate Link¹)
Now that I’ve entered the later half of my 30s, I am slowly internalizing one very important thing:
My time is not infinite.
I don’t know how, or where, or when, but one day I’m going to hit my sell by, and that will be it. I’ll be gone.
While I’m ok with how things have gone so far, well, I’m not thrilled to put it bluntly. I’m pretty happy with the friends, family, spirituality side of things, but not as happy with the work side of things.
And, the main frustration with work is how much of my time has been wasted. I’m angry at how much my consciousness has been spent, has been burned, concentrating on things other people wanted me to do; how much time I’ve spent building things I often (secretly) thought were dumb, but that other people with the power to deprive me of my livelihood thought were good ideas; how when I was younger, I’d spend time trying to convince people to do things a different way, then when I became older I stopped trying so hard.
And, I’m angry at how I’ve watched project after project fail, and be washed away — like mandalas of shit.
So, when I hear of people raising their kids to expect this — to normalize it — to start doing these useless, repetitive tasks in grade school, it infuriates me.
THOSE ARE YOUR FUCKING CHILDREN! And you are burning their life energy, with busy, useless work to prepare them to grow up into adults who will tolerate doing useless busywork.
This is so deeply fucked. (I already did a YouTube rant on it, but I could talk forever on this topic, I think.)
It’s worth pointing out; I say Americans are obsessed with “hard work” — but that’s a highly propagandistic phrase. Because, generally, people aren’t working hard, they’re working long hours. That, actually as I remember, was the original point of the Ted talk I remembered from the beginning of my post; it was a Ted Talk about why American kids scored so low on international tests of educational achievement despite having more homework than kids in other countries. And, the reason was, the American homework was easier but more voluminous.
At times, I have tried to help young people learn how to program, and one of my frustrations is that many of them have not actually been taught to problem solve as much as they’ve been taught to copy. And, you know, I don’t blame the kids or anything; it’s not their fault, it’s the way their system has failed them. Sometimes, as things start clicking for them and they start solving problems, they start reflecting back to me things like “That was really tiring,” and I’m like, “Yes, really solving problems feels more tiring than copying solutions,” but I say it more tactfully.
One of the interesting paradoxes, actually, is the more we value “hard work” the less we end up doing “deep work.” When I supervise junior people who are transitioning into the work place, I try to make it clear to them that I don’t expect them to do “deep work” for 40 hours a week. Frankly, I worry that if they try to do that, they will be tempted to switch to doing “copy/paste” coding instead of really trying to figure out problems because it’s easier, and they’ll probably get exhausted trying to “deep work” for 40 hours so will be driven to short cuts.
Some of the worst coders I’ve ever met were “hours jockeys” who ostentatiously sat churning out code late into the night, but wrote absolute hot garbage.
Now, I don’t want to say that there don’t exist people who can do high concentration work for like, 80 hours a week but… they’re rare, and often unusual in some way. I think I can literally think of 2 coders out of the maybe 100+ I’ve worked with over my career who could do this, and it’s not like they generated way more code than a solid programmer working normal hours. Don’t get me wrong, they can be fun to have on a team, but this should never be an expectation.
Like, it’s sort of hard for me to talk about this, because I do see the MEGA PROGRAMMER as the “ideal” people strive for when they think of “hard working” — and, this is a difficult thing to say, but truthfully the vast majority of coders simply aren’t capable of this level of output. And, that’s fine — in fact, there’s an opposite type of coder who I secretly think of as the “lazy coder” who I also like to have around. The “lazy coder” is someone who puts in less hours than the average coder, but is strong enough that they can solve very difficult problems in those few hours, and they tend to come up with highly creative or out of the box solutions. In fact, for this type of coder, their laziness can become an asset as they will often find deeply creative solutions in an effort to avoid coding more than the bare minimum. Frequently, their their labor-saving insights can enhance the productivity of an entire team if they’re willing to share their ideas, ultimately 5xing their efficiency. So, in my mind, it really takes all types.
However, in the world, we’re basically taught to worship the MEGA programmer, and somewhat ostracize the lazy programmer. But… think about it for a sec. Imagine you have 2 teams of 5 coders, one has a MEGA and one has a lazy, and the remaining 4 of each team are all top coders with no special attributes. Now, the MEGA programmer is highly efficient, and generates 2X what a standard “top” programmer generates. Unfortunately, they also create a culture of high work hours, and so the remaining 4 programmers become “hours jockeys” to compete. Now, their productivity is functionally 0.75 what it was, because they need to spend more time re-factoring their now worse code. This is actually leads to the productivity gains of the MEGA programmer being offset by increased inefficiency on the rest of the team.
Conversely, let’s say the lazy programmer generates 0.5 times the amount of output as a normal “top” coder, but also improves the efficiency of the rest of the team to 1.25 with their energy saving insights — you actually now have a team efficiency gain of 0.5 total output OVER the the team with the MEGA programmer. Or, to phrase this another way an individual’s output is generally less important than their impact on team efficiency because no matter how good one person is, they are not as good as 5 people.
So the question remains: why do people get so fucking hard over MEGA programmers, or their counterparts in other professions? And… I think the answer comes down to a type of individualism. In America especially, the fantasy of the exceptional individual — the superhero, the lone cowboy, the vigilante — is a deeply held idea. And, a very disconnected idea. One of the strange things about superheroes, is how much they seem to depersonalize — or even look down on — the people they are supposedly saving. Those people aren’t people, they are numbers to demonstrate the superiority of the hero. Batman saved Gotham again! Who actually lives in Gotham? Who cares? But, there are 25 million of them, and Batman saved them all!
And it is this internalized feeling of if I just keep pushing, and keep pushing then I can be the hero that I think drives so many people in the US, frankly, past the point of productivity with respect to their work. Because simply stated, for most of us, the capacity for deep insight requires some degree of rest and recovery — and, especially, the capacity for empathy requires rest. Yet, in our efforts to achieve this narcissistic thrill of “being the best” we push ourselves to a deeply bland place, devoid of deep and insightful thinking and full of fevered hours behind a desk.
Then, we push our kids to do it too.
¹ I’m experimenting with affiliate links, to see if eventually I can have more time to write without full time work. I’m only using them in areas where I would have organically quoted and linked to the book anyway.
