Is work really the virtue it's claimed to be? No! It's time to wake up!

Erik Baker, Elon Musk Is the World’s Richest Man. Why Is He Sleeping on an Office Floor? NYTimes, Feb. 27, 2025.

This association between incessant work and entrepreneurial success is pervasive in American business culture today. Jeff Bezos reports working 12 hours every day of the week in the early years of Amazon. The Apple chief executive Tim Cook is famous for sending emails at 4:30 a.m. Mr. Musk’s ostensible boss, despite his well-known fondness for TV news and social media, also insists that “no president ever worked harder than me.”

These boasts, plausible or not, reveal something important about the American valorization of work, and help explain why this class of supposedly busy billionaires has come to believe they’re entitled to dominate our national life. For Mr. Musk and his associates, a herculean enthusiasm for work isn’t merely a way to get things done; it’s also a mark of innate superiority, a “superpower” that confers the right to impose their vision on the world. Mr. Musk’s decades in the highest echelons of the tech industry, surrounded by other executives who justified their lordship over their private empires by trumpeting their inexhaustible work ethic, have taught him that if you work harder than everyone else, you should be rewarded with unquestioned rule over your dominion. [...]

While the scope of Mr. Musk’s project may be novel, the archetype he embodies has a long history. The Austrian-born economist Joseph Schumpeter, who taught at Harvard from 1932 until his death in 1950, helped popularize the idea that entrepreneurs possessed a special set of personality traits that set them apart from lesser businessmen and managers. Entrepreneurship, according to Schumpeter, smashed economic routines. That took “will and personality.” [...] They were superheroes.

These days:

In recent decades, two trends in American life have supercharged the spread of this entrepreneurial work ethic, helping to push busy billionaires to the center of our politics. First, more and more ordinary Americans learned to think of work as something scarce. As deindustrialization ravaged wide swaths of the country and unionization declined, they got accustomed to cycles of layoffs and the need to retrain in new occupations or new industries. [...] the bosses atop our class pyramid correctly perceive how such jobs have become a status symbol: [...] We see them working constantly while we hunt for extra shifts or struggle to string part-time jobs together, and we marvel at how special they must be.

Then there is the looming threat of a seismic technological breakthrough. Many tech leaders today believe that the development of artificial intelligence is poised to automate most jobs into oblivion.

But if that is so, and I fear that it may be, then a national culture based on the moral value of work is doomed to breed massive discontent and ultimately failure.

We desperately need a new value system, perhaps one based on the concept of play, Homo Ludens, to use the title of a profound book by Johan Huizinga. That's what Charlie Keil and I had in mind when we published Playing for Peace: Reclaiming Our Human Nature (Kindle, Paperback).

Meanwhile, read Ezra Klein's interview with James Suzman, Why Do We Work So damn Much? Here's most post excerpting it: Why are we as a culture addicted to work? [Because we have forgotten how to play.] In his introduction Klein notes, referring to the book:

Hunter-gatherers were usually healthy. They were usually well nourished. Even in very unforgiving climates, they tended to have diverse diets. And they did it while only spending about 15 hours a week on hunting and gathering.

Suzman’s new book is called “Work, A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots.” And the overarching argument is that the way we work today isn’t driven by what we need. It’s driven by what we want. It’s also driven by how, socially, we regulate or encourage wants, which is part of where his research on hunter-gatherers and how they approach this comes in.

But the big thing here is that Keynes had it backwards. Humanity solved the problem of scarcity and achieved a 15-hour workweek long before modernity. But as we’ve gotten richer and built more technology, we’ve developed a machine not for ending our wants, not for fulfilling them, but for generating new ones, new needs, new desires, new forms of status competition.

Yes! I've worked in start-ups. I've felt that status competition. I've lived it. It's insidious.