Americans are Obsessed with Working Hard. What is it Getting Us?
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. Americans have a unique relationship to work. It's part of our national culture, maybe even our actual religion. We're told in ways large and small that work is what makes us worthwhile.

A new book from Adam Chandler called 99% Perspiration investigates how this myth got started, how it's been sustained in our country, and what might exist beyond the old American abracadabra, as he calls it. That's all coming up next, right after this news.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. You know, who doesn't have a weird relationship with work these days? I hate to say this, but I learned from Adam Chandler's new book, 99% Perspiration, A New Working History of the American Way of Life, that we've lost even Dolly Parton. She of the famous movie and song 9 to 5, the anthem of worker resistance. Yes, listen in to this remake that she made a few years ago for Squarespace.

called Five to Nine. Five to Nine.

Oh, Dolly, a hustle culture anthem. There's something strange in the American culture of work. There always has been. And multiplied by the Internet and the pandemic and AI, it's gotten truly out of control. Here to share his research with us and to answer some questions about work and life, we're joined by Adam Chandler, who is also the author of Drive Through Dreams, a tour through the fast food industry. Welcome, Adam.

Hey, thanks so much for having me. So, you know, I think a lot of people are familiar with this idea of like a Puritan work ethic as a kind of legacy American attitude towards work. What did you find about the sort of those early origins of sort of how Americans came to bind so much of our identity with our work? Well, it's important to note that we saw work originally in the early days, even before America was country, through the prism of

religious vocations, of it being a higher calling, of it being important to not just your identity, but your future, your salvation. And it moved from being a religious expression into a secular one in American life. And that's part of what's so fascinating about it because we have a relationship with work that is so different from other countries. That's so...

How does it kind of interact with the ideas of kind of this rugged individualism? You know, people have talked about that and this idea that you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Like, how has that kind of played into this religious kind of overtone? Absolutely. It's fascinating to look at why we started venerating people like Columbus or like Benjamin Franklin as these sort of avatars of a new world that

shed a lot of the feudal baggage from Europe where you were born into your title of nobility, you inherited land, you controlled people. And the U.S. was meant to be a break from that. You know, we have it written in our constitution that there are no titles of nobility. It's meant to be a place where we don't have that feudal baggage and where we can be socially mobile. You can do whatever you want. And that's centered around work as the driving force of that idea. Yeah.

You know, in the book, though, of course, it takes these conceptual components of the American psyche and sort of deflates them. This is really how this works, right? Sorry. Yeah. Tell me. Tell me a little more. You know, like how true or untrue is the idea you can pull yourself up from your bootstraps in this country?

Well, any history buff will tell you the bootstraps myth itself, the idiom, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, was originally meant as a joke because it's physically impossible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And this is still persisted as a way that we think about opportunity and access to a good American life. It's through hard work. And what that really does is it takes the emphasis off of structural things. It takes emphasis off of community. Right.

If you look at someone like Thomas Edison, who gave us 99% perspiration in a quote, he's somebody who had mentors. He's somebody who had access to government research and he had teams of people working for him. He benefited from taxpayers. He benefited from education.

Everyone around him. But we hold him up as a singular genius who did it all by himself. And that is something that is a trope in American life that has some damage to it because we underplay the importance of community and our interdependence in American life as a result of that. Yeah.

You call this sort of complex of encomiums about the value of work, you call it the American abracadabra, implying like there is some kind of magic to it. There is something to it. Do you think there's anything, I don't know, significantly positive about the way that a lot of Americans feel about work?

Yeah.

The American abracadabra is this spell that says, ultimately, if you can't succeed in America, the land of opportunity, it's because you didn't try hard enough. And the only thing you can do is try harder. And what that does is take the emphasis off of

like I said, sort of structural factors, the cost of living, all of these things that make success so difficult in American life and places it on the individual. And there's a lot of shame in that. That means that if you fail, it's because you didn't have the moral characters to succeed. You didn't have the grit, whatever it is. And I think that emphasis on self-reliance is part of what's driving a lot of anger right now, because there are so many millions of people who are working unbelievably hard right now, and they're not getting ahead. They're not even having stable lives. Yeah.

You have some great stats here. I'm just going to rattle some off. These are from the book. 2023 Gallup poll, 39% of Americans say they're failing to get ahead despite working hard. That's up from 23% in 2002.

You know, Americans work longer hours, take less time off, move more frequently for opportunity to retire later than those in our peer nations. 73% of Americans say having a job they enjoy is their top measure of what makes life fulfilling. And of course, there is this yawning and very deep racial wealth gap as well between, in particular, white people and black people in this country. Taking those sort of facts together,

What do you think might change people's relationship to this idea of the American abracadabra?

Well, it's critical that we not be naive about what all of our hard work is getting us. I think part of the anger that we're feeling has to do with the fact that we're working more for less. And Americans have grown 64% more productive since the 1970s, and they're only getting paid 17% more. Another way to put it, the economy, the U.S. economy has more than doubled in that time. And if you're a person of color or if you don't have a college degree, you're making less in real wages than you did 40 years ago.

So we have to be clear-eyed about that. And the reasons for that aren't because we're not working hard enough. It's because of the way that income and money and profits are flowing upward and how people are being left behind, how the cost of everything is factoring in, and how we don't support people in terms of our social safety net. So those are all big things that I think we could be clear-eyed about. But I also think an

An emphasis on community and on interdependence is something that has taken us away from understanding what everyone else in this country is going through. We're more sectioned off by politics and by economics in our neighborhoods than we have been in many years. They've looked at Stanford. Researchers have looked at how

became more segmented by economy and by politics in the last 40 years. And the findings were pretty alarming. It's harder to interact with or bump into people who disagree with you in the course of your day, in the course of your life than it has been in several decades. And that's meaningful. And not just political disagreement, too. I mean, it's harder to bump... I mean, this is a fascinating component of the book that...

It's just harder for people to run into people in their daily lives who have a different income level than they do and a different life experience. Absolutely. This is something as simple as boarding a plane or going to a baseball game. You can see how there are separate entrances and separate boarding protocols and separate situations that limit your interaction with people who come from a different income bracket than you. And there's a social cost to that.

You know, we are talking with journalist Adam Chandler about his new book, 99% Perspiration, A New Working History of the American Way of Life. We really want this to be an open discussion with listeners as well about the way that you're feeling about your work. You know, we know there has been an incredible amount of destabilization in the Bay Area, specifically across the country since the pandemic, but also now return to work. What's your relationship to work?

Have you tried to change your relationship with work or work ethic and how is that gone? You can give us a call the number is 866-733-6786

How do you define the American dream and how does it feel attainable to you? The number is 866-733-6786. You can email your comments and questions to forum at kqed.org. Of course, you can find us on all the different social media platforms, Blue Sky, Instagram, etc. We're KQED Forum or you can join the discussion over on the Discord.

I do want to touch a little bit on the destabilization. Specifically in the Bay Area, there have been a lot of rounds of layoffs in tech, which had seemed like everyone would sort of like, "Well, I don't know. I guess I'll get a job in tech if this other thing doesn't work out," because it was this massive economic engine. Over in DC, I was just there last week, there's all this instability, huge government layoffs.

In our universities, another place that had seemed like a semi-stable and sort of growing part of our economic picture, there's a lot of instability. What do you make of the – like how do people deal with that kind of instability within this American work culture that says you can control everything when these institutions themselves don't even control their own fates?

I would say very badly. It's unbelievably challenging to wrap yourself up in the identity of your job and then have that not work out for you, to have layoffs or all kinds of fascinating and strange business decisions be made that affect your future, that affect your future short-term and long-term. One stat that jumps out to me is over half of Fortune 500 companies that were doing business in 2003 said,

52% of them ceased to exist 20 years later. So they were lost to mergers and acquisitions and bankruptcies. And we're talking about some of the best companies you can work for. The dream jobs you could have have also been subject to the whims of an economy where there's corporate concentration, where...

bad management or hostile takeovers or all the sort of winds of change that strike down economies or reshape them the way that technology is doing. And so even if you have the dream job, you're still susceptible to all kinds of vulnerabilities.

Now that is a question I'd love to hear from listeners as well. Like, do you believe even now that there is such a thing as a dream job? You can give us a call 866-733-6786. We're talking with journalist Adam Chandler. The new book is 99% Perspiration, A New Working History of the American Way of Life. He's going to be at Book Passage.

next week, book passage in San Francisco, Thursday, April 3rd. You can see him there. We'll be back with more with Adam Chandler right after the break. Um, I think I just won my taxes. Yeah? I just switched to H&R Block in about one minute. All I had to do was drag and drop last year's return into H&R Block and bam, my information is automatically there. So I don't have to go digging around for all my old papers to switch? Nope. Sounds like we just leveled up our tax game.

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Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here. We're talking with journalist Adam Chandler about his new book, 99% Perspiration, A New Work in History of the American Way of Life. I promised you we'd talk with you all as well. Greg in Sacramento. Welcome to the show. Thanks.

Thanks. It sounds like a great book. I haven't read it, but I look forward to reading it. I just wanted to say that I've worked for small to really big international companies, and my experience is similar to what you're talking about. There doesn't seem to be

It's hard to buy into the company as something that seems like a long-term prospect that would care about me as a worker, especially in more medium-sized companies where you see folks who've worked there for 20 or 30 years, and then they just get let go without any ceremony. At like 55, 60 years old, right? Exactly.

Exactly. Yeah. And so I've started my own business and it's specifically for that reason, because the other problem I found was I was having a very hard time just motivating myself to work for someone else, knowing that that sense of belonging or culture, that they didn't really care about me, you know? So I've started my own business and I love that a lot more, even though it's tougher to make a go of it, it's still the freedom in the sense that it's something that

at least I care about, you know, is great. Yeah, I appreciate that. Hey, Greg, thanks for that. I do feel like this is a major change, Adam. I mean, obviously there have always been small business owners in the United States. And in fact, I think actually even the creation rate of small businesses has gone down over time. But I do think a lot of the people who are starting these businesses are doing it out of a kind of loss of faith in the American corporation.

Absolutely. And we actually had a moment during the pandemic where we saw independent businesses and small businesses resurge, partially because we invested in people. We had all of these benefits that were finally making childcare a priority through the expanded tax credit or essentially giving people money or space through unemployment benefits and other expanded benefits to kind of take their destiny in their own hands.

in a way that's meaningful, in a way that's important. And so we did see this boom in small business come back. And I think a lot of that does speak to a disillusion in the corporate structure, a disillusion in what the actual meaning of work is and how to recalibrate it. I also, you know, I just haven't grown up with parents who had their own business and eventually lost it. I think it is easy to

underestimate the stress and the risk involved as well in running your own business. 100%. Let's bring in Anu in Palo Alto. Welcome, Anu. Oh, hi. Thank you. I just want to profusely thank Adam for bringing interdependence into the community conversation. I'm an immigrant from India and

you know, grew up in a household of lower middle class income to where I am now as a scientist in Palo Alto. It is a steep growth and a lot of that, you know, culturally, I grew up learning that one gives back, you know, one gives to their society. So interdependence, we couldn't do without interdependence. But in America, it's a capitalist society where interdependence

Interdependence is not valued at all. So you only, you know, winner, you know, independence who goes away and wins is alone valued and often really never crediting, you know,

what got them there. So I think that's what Adam is speaking to. You know, independence is a myth, right? Nobody got anywhere without someone else. And as a society, we've become very much someone who does not value giving each other. And I really, really appreciate that you bring this to the conversation. This is something I've spoken to my children about. I raised them with that. But in our society, that is not exactly valued. People poo upon being there for another. Yeah.

Well, Anu, I think, you know, it's such a great point. Thanks for that call. It's also these things are even tied together functionally, right? Because if you're working 65 hours a week, how do you give back to a community, right, Adam? I mean, it's almost like the overwork happening in white collar work across this country makes it even more difficult for community organizations to build across income lines and just to build in general.

I love this comment, Anu, and thank you so much for making it. Yeah, it is surreal to hear about work cultures in other places. People often ask, what is an alternative to the way that we're currently doing things here that could be imported or even what lessons can we learn? And some of them are very simple. In other countries, especially a lot of the countries we compare ourselves to, if you're working at your desk at eight o'clock at night, it's

it's not heroic. It's not seen as something that you are doing to,

serve the cause, it's questionable behavior. It leads to questions like, are we understaffed? Are you okay? Are you inefficient at your work? Are we doing something wrong here? It's seen as not a heroic sacrifice, but a questionable thing to do. And it's strange to think you shouldn't be at your office anymore. You shouldn't be at your desk anymore at these late hours. You should be with your family. You should be with your friends. You should be with your community. And these are all facets of American society.

work culture that have just become ingrained in something that you learn, you know, stay late when you're starting out a new job to show that you are committed to the cause. And that doesn't exist in other countries quite the same way it does here. And I think in other, you know, I do feel like many countries have, some countries, like let's say like Korea and Samsung, you hear a lot of

of intense stories about different kinds of work cultures that can take root in different places that might even be more intense in some ways than the American work culture.

But ours is so specific and almost seems so kind of religious and moral in its tone. For example, Casey on Discord writes, "I hate hustle culture and have tried my best not to engage in American work culture. As a graduate student, I saw in my lab how people believe that work being difficult makes you morally superior to others."

I know. Not a...

not a, not a perfect instantiation of the American dream there. Definitely not. But we also see, you know, time, time off has been proven to improve worker fulfillment and performance and increase loyalty. So there is a business case to be made for not having your workers be so burnt out or so overwhelmed by the amount of work that they have to do, or having the ability to disconnect from work after hours that pays dividends. I mean,

American businesses lose over a trillion dollars every single year to attrition, to people leaving jobs because they can't stand to be there anymore. The pay isn't good or the scheduling isn't good or there's just something about it that doesn't work out for them. And it's meaningful because these are things that if companies invested in their workers, they could be more profitable and have better workforce as a result of it. Yeah.

You know, one of the things that I've noticed, and of course it's in journalism all around me, but many other fields too, it's like the people who seem most disoriented or frustrated at this moment are even those who've had a measure of success in their field, but then have had that field kind of collapse around them.

Like, how do you think your book addresses that? Like this sort of the way that our economy seems to, you know, knock out not just all those Fortune 500 companies, but entire realms of work right now? Yeah, there's a big problem with, again, the identity around work. And that means working for a great company. And that also means working, you know, in a field that,

has a social mission or has some kind of public facing orientation to it. And that speaks to journalism and media too, which has had its share of upheaval. You know, you're willing to make sacrifices, whether it's lower pay or longer hours for a job that gives you some kind of fulfillment. But the sacrifices that you make often come back to haunt you when you're

you lose your job or when your work changes and your identity is so wrapped up in it that how do you define yourself? How do you say who you are, what you are, what are your interests or outlets outside of work that you've perhaps sacrificed in order to get ahead in your career or to focus on this dream job? And I do find it part of a, you know, a great social isolation that we're, um,

Talking about that the former Surgeon General was warning us about all of these different things. Yeah.

I mean, in your last book, Drive Thru Dreams, you wrote about the fast food industry, both kind of as a culture, workplace, etc. I thought it was really interesting. I heard you talk about interviewing people who had the sort of narrative of a fast food job being the beginning of their career. And they can imagine becoming like a franchise owner, whereas a lot of that narrative has been stripped away for people who are working in fast food now, right? Is that a generational change? Is it about...

just our economy doesn't work like that anymore, that people just get stuck on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder? What would you say? Yeah, I'd say it's generational. There's a big disconnect. It was fascinating to travel around the country and talk to franchise owners and corporate executives who started on the Friars in 1970 for $1.25 an hour and worked their way up and they own 10 McDonald's now or they're big executives. And

And they say, you know, I just worked. I worked hard and I got there. You know, I just I stayed late or I did whatever I could. And the modern fast food worker now is someone who is not a teenager working for pocket money, but somebody who's 25 or 26, statistically speaking, and may have some debt is battling all kinds of structural obstacles, whether it is the cost of housing or health care or child care or college or, you know, one stat that always blows my mind is

A recent study from Brookings found that 44% of jobs in America qualify as low wage. So it's not about whether you're trying hard enough. It's about the opportunities that people really have and the cost of everything. And great comment from a listener here.

You know, listener writes in to say on the Discord, all these tech bro CEOs and billionaires calling for 50 to 60 hour work weeks. Visualize the disconnect here. These are guys who haven't had to run a chore in 15 years, never had to pick up and drop off their kids to school, don't have to spend an hour driving in traffic both ways, don't have to cook for their family, clean their kitchen, don't have to spend a week preparing their house for visitors expected next weekend.

This is a tough to-do list for this listener as well. I hope you get everything done. Them saying we should leave the house at 8:00 a.m. and get back at 8:00 p.m. even on Saturdays. And I think it really speaks to something that you've really noted, which is that not only do we have this work culture, but we don't actually have the safety net or intergenerational culture that would even allow people to be able to work in this way with other supports around them, right?

There are other ways of running a society other than this. Yes, absolutely. And a lot of that comes down to what our family lives look like, what safeguards and institutional support we offer. And some of that is childcare, which is its own crisis, which would benefit the economy if we invested in parents being able to drop off their kids or stay home with their kids in order to allow other people to work more or provide

pursue other things. It's not the sign of a dynamic economy or a durable economy for people to feel so stuck in the ways that they are. Let's bring in Jason in San Francisco. Welcome, Jason. Hi, guys. Thanks a lot. This is a great discussion. I guess my initial thought is from a macro level, the frame here seems to be these big companies should

should go on forever people should work for those employees forever and everything should be very you know like utopian almost but I feel like the natural order for a macro level is evolution and evolution is you know it things moves quickly things get broken

Things change. Old companies die. New companies come up. You know, new people can go from poor to rich still in America better than anywhere else in the world other than nine countries. And I highly encourage people to go live in another country for three years and take what they see there and try to see that. But I guess back to my original point of the macro of the evolution, I would say what the guy Adam said, he went and started his own company because he was disillusioned with the big company.

That's what we should be motivating people to take agency of their own life and make good decisions. You have to save for the future. You have to assume things will go wrong. You're going to break your arm one day, save some money for that expected outcome. Or you need to buy a house. You have to think very diligently about that. But yeah, I guess the self-agency part and also we should embrace. That's great that these big companies die because that allows the next generation

person to make a new big company. If the big companies stayed around forever, you would never have a chance to make a new one. I'll keep that in mind. Jason, yeah, no, and I appreciate this comment as well. And just the, yeah, like the mid-century corporation model might have had its benefits for some people, particularly white men who were able to be in control of all these companies. On the other hand,

A different structure of the economy with many more small businesses working in different ways doesn't seem on its face necessarily worse. My prediction for what you might be thinking about this though, Adam, is that it's about the safety net that surrounds people as they try to do these things. It wouldn't be the companies necessarily taking care of people, but broader social factors.

Your prediction is correct. Yes, I think that if we want people to be socially mobile in this country, or we want them to start their own business, we need to give them the tools to do that. And so, you know, I'm a freelance journalist. I write books and I write for other publications, but my health insurance is terrible and very expensive. Mm-hmm.

If I wanted to start a company, it would be very difficult for me to kind of give up on all of the things that I want, that support me right now, limited though they are, and try to do something really ambitious because of the obstacles that I face. And I...

I know that there are people with much worse circumstances, with better ideas than I have, who would like to do the exact same thing. And so I do think it is about how we support people and how we make it possible for people to be socially mobile. That's important to talk about. I also just think, you know, the tying together of health insurance and like the 20th century American corporation was obviously a bad idea in retrospect, but we have done it. And now we're...

You know, we're this many years on from Obamacare still trying to figure out how to undo that or at least make it make more sense.

Speaking of which, Patrick writes, "Can your guest discuss how employers have optimized offering lowest possible pay and benefits while still maintaining a workforce? The gig economy appears to be in favor of employees in terms of flexibility, but really is a trap. Flexibility really means you have to work all the time and upward mobility is impossible." What do you think? Well, the gig economy is something that has come to replace traditional jobs that offer you benefits like health insurance.

And don't give you a guaranteed salary. And those are things that, again, provide a measure of stability that we're relying on businesses to do. And so there's the challenge there. But, you know, that contractor or gig economy worker has grown. It's basically over a third of the country now has either signed on for these jobs or they do it on the side because their normal job or regular job doesn't provide enough to get by on.

So we've come to rely on these

platforms that don't really care about us at all and don't necessarily value our time. You're only making money if you're an Uber driver when you have a passenger in the car and the rest of the time you're waiting around. You're waiting around for the next customer or you're idling, you're wasting gas, whatever it is. These are all parts of the greater equation that we tend to miss when we talk about how good these companies theoretically are for people who want to do something by themselves. Right, right.

Yeah, I mean, like, you can talk with people who are like, oh, well, you know, I can work from 5 to 9 a.m. Like, you can find people who are using these...

companies in a way that seems to make a lot of sense for them. But the system as a whole seems like it has some really serious problems. They've done a lot of studies about how essentially minimum wage is not something you earn when you are a platform or gig economy worker because of all the extra time that goes into it that isn't paid. The sort of ancillary buffer time that you do setting up for whatever it is that you're working toward. And that's alarming to hear.

We're talking with journalist Adam Chandler about his new book, 99% Perspiration, a new working history of the American way of life. He's going to be at Book Passage in San Francisco next Thursday if you want to talk with him. And of course, we want to hear from you. I mean, do you believe there is, even in the concept of a dream job, what's your relationship to work experience?

Does your job continue to define you, or have you given that up? You can give us a call, 866-733-6786. If you can't get through on the phones, you can try the email forum at kqed.org. You can find us on all the social media platforms, Blue Sky, Instagram, etc., or you can join, which seems to be a pretty good discretion, over on the Discord. I'm Alexis Madder. We'll be back with more right after the break.

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Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're here with Adam Chandler. His new book is 99% Perspiration, A New Working History of the American Way of Life. Let's bring in Ellen in Santa Barbara. Welcome. Yeah, hi. I've just resonated with so much of your conversation. I'm 59. I'm a teacher. I'm ready to make a career change, not ready for the R word, retire, because I have been programmed

to, you know, work, having graduated from college in the 80s, and that's just what you do. So kind of the old grind culture, not the new grind culture. But I have no idea, you know, feel a little trapped, have no idea how to make a career change at my age. Terrifying. You know, you mentioned health insurance, the reliance on that. There's just, and that steady paycheck, I just feel it's

It's so risky, and at my age, it's pretty scary, yet I am in no way ready to... Oh, no. Ellen. Absolutely, Ellen. It's such a tricky thing. You know, people get deep into their career. They're thinking about what it is that they want to do.

do maybe with another chapter of their lives, but also how do they do it? I mean, Adam, as you've been out on your book tour talking to people about their relationship to work, have you gathered things that have helped people make the kind of changes they want to make in their life to have that kind of agency? Well, it's important to sort of think about how we emphasize career in general as being part of

who you are and what you, you know, who you are as a person. And that goes into a second career or third career. When you're, when you are growing older, you have a sort of

in an energy and experience that we tend not to fully understand or embrace as employers and as a society. And so there are these really great mentorship programs. There are these really important community-focused groups that pair people who are later in their career who have experience

all this experience to share with younger people, whether it's apprenticeships, these are things that are opportunities for people to plug into. And they're not, not just volunteers. There are real jobs that you can do to benefit people around you who need to learn, who may not have had access to the same things that younger generations had in terms of the time or the mentors or the people around them. So I think some of that is just kind of looking immediately around you and seeing how you can plug yourself in. And that is really,

really a surprising thing when you stop and talk to people because they say, you know, I didn't actually realize what my community on the state and local level in terms of jobs I could do. Hmm. Hmm.

Also, perhaps healthcare is a big piece of it for a lot of people. Another listener writes, I think the biggest obstacle to achieving a healthy workforce and workplace is the lack of universal healthcare. Companies hold employees hostage by offering this benefit, one that prevents independent entrepreneurial folks from exploring other interests.

Oh, good. We have to. Well, we have to make this case as a business as a business case for people who don't want to absorb that it actually is less beneficial for us to do what we're doing. We pay twice as much in health care costs per person than a country like France, which I study kind of extensively in the book and our health outcomes. We have a shorter we have a shorter life expectancy by over five years than the French do.

That is wild and totally inefficient. So if we're going to make these arguments, we absolutely have to make it on terms that people who are business leaders or who want a more dynamic and efficient economy will appreciate because the math is very ugly here.

On this same sort of topic, Matthew writes, "I was a director of international business development for a startup in the 90s and worked in the Netherlands. During a crunch time, one of our key workers was off to Spain for five weeks. When I asked him to stay because we were in surge mode, he said, 'There's never a good time, and I need to rest.'"

The Dutch work culture is very serious, but they keep their long vacations and actually use them. I read that a large percentage of U.S. workers don't use all their paltry two weeks. Why is this the case and why doesn't leadership change this? It's just not efficient to work people to the bone. I love it. I love it. In part because...

Even if you have unlimited time off, unlimited PTO is a huge perk, obviously in tech, but in a lot of forward-thinking companies. Yeah. Is it, though? Well, it is, except...

People don't take those days off. They take fewer days off when you have an unlimited amount of them than they do when you have a set number of them. That's how arbitrary it feels to people. It feels like those days don't really belong to you. And that's another facet of this that is so fascinating to me is the way that we kind of absorb our commitment to work. And that can be whether you eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner at your office because they offer it or because you're just that busy or whether some companies obviously offer lunches

women employees to freeze their eggs, to delay their family planning. In theory, it's a perk, but it's also a way to keep you in the workforce before settling down. It is, again, one of those tricks that you keep seeing over and over again that you have to question, why is it a good thing for me to go to my office gym instead of go for a walk outside and touch grass? Yeah. Let's bring in Michelle in Davis. Welcome, Michelle.

Hi. So I have a question slash comment. So I work on a university campus, and I see all day long students come into my office, and they feel like they're a failure because they haven't found the job or the employment or the career that they feel super passionate about. And they feel like there's that one thing out there for them. So I'm wondering in your work, did you find anything about, like, when this idea of identity and employment start to fuse? Because it seems like it happens pretty early. Hmm.

Yeah, I'm interested in it both in life, but also I'm interested in kind of history too. Absolutely. Well, someone you may know, Alexis, named Derek Thompson, had a theory called workism, which basically...

posits that in the last couple of decades, we've seen work take on this meaning of identity that extends beyond the normal role of a job. And it's a modern iteration of these old sort of Protestant and Puritan work ethic ideas. But essentially, it's in a knowledge economy, you prove your worth by staying late, you prove your worth by showing that you are needed and in high demand. And

And all of these things are meant to make you feel as if your career should be that important. But again, it is one of those things that looking at studies of happiness, of loneliness, of isolation, of all these different facets of American life, you just continue to find evidence that not prioritizing work and having a healthy balance with it is something that provides you more stability and more opportunity

of your basic needs to be met in terms of what you require as a social person, as a social creature.

So here's something, you know, I mean, in the abstract, I think everything you're saying, everything Kalle is saying, all the things, it all makes sense to me. It's like, yeah, this work culture, there's something really deeply broken about it. But then when I was thinking about the comment that our listener wrote in about his Dutch colleague taking five weeks, right, when they were trying to do something, there's still a part of me, and I would imagine there's a part of listeners who are sort of like, man, how could he do that? You know? Right.

And that's, you know, do you stamp that out of yourself? How does that, do I need to go to a reeducation camp here to try and like learn to take, maybe the camp could be on Spanish beach for five weeks perhaps? Something like that, you know? I don't know, it's interesting to just, you know, feel my own feelings about this and watch my own thought process when I can agree in the abstract, but in a specific circumstance I might want someone to just push through and work hard.

Right, right. Sorry, everyone. I love this idea of going to a re-education camp on a Spanish beach. Sign me up. I think that we have a balance, and I think other countries have their own balances, and I'm not saying that we should become France, but I do think that there are things that we can signal as a culture that provide guidelines that we could absorb. French work culture has...

written into their labor code, actually, that you have to take an hour off of work for lunch. And it was something that started in the Industrial Revolution to air out offices for tuberculosis. And then they realized this is actually something that provides a benefit to workers because they're able to get out of the office, socialize, spend time with people, and they work almost as productively as Americans do.

They have something called the right to disconnect, which we made a lot of fun of 10 years ago when it first debuted, where you don't have to respond to work emails. Not only that, they turn your email off, right? At least in some places. In some places. It's not the law of the land. It's something that you have to work out between employers and employees. And essentially it says we need to find a way to make it so that

If you're getting an email at, you know, 11 o'clock at night or a phone call or a text or Slack or whatever the million ways that your office can reach you, you don't have to respond to it unless there are some preset conditions where you find a way to make it part of the equation that you're prepared for. And that gives you life outside of work where you're not checking, constantly checking your phone and everything.

finding that there's something new to do for your job. And so these are just ways to restore a balance. I'm not saying we need to have all of August off, though that would be great. And I do think that there are ways to restore that balance without, again, becoming a country that is inefficient or complacent in the ways that everyone fears we might if we were just given a little bit more time off. Yeah. Yeah.

He's such a... It's so complex to be a part of a culture that you can also see has these problems, you know? Let's bring in Robert in Pacifica. Hi there. Hey, Robert. Hello? Yes, go ahead. You're on. Oh, you know, I came in sort of halfway through your show, but I gathered it was about getting into a career and being satisfied with it. I started out just as a college student and did some pre-med, and this was...

uh, seven years ago. And I, I retired a decade ago after 50 years as an emergency physician, which was an amazing career that you could not have any idea how it was going to turn out. I mean, you just didn't know there. Um, it's been a, it's, it was an extraordinary, uh,

A career that took up a lot of, took up all your energy, really. And now I'm retired for a decade. And I'm enjoying it immensely, although it took a couple of years to let go of the career. It was so, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that's really, you know, it's interesting, you know, just listening to the texture of sort of Robert's comment. Obviously, some people do find a thing that they really love, find it very difficult to give it up and move on to, you know, another chapter of their lives. And one thing that I have been wondering about as, you know, as I read the book and I was listening to Callers is,

Do we maybe have some of the causality of this confused that actually American life outside of work can be actually kind of brutal and lonely? And you people go to work because it's one of the few things that provides employment.

meaning, interaction, colleagues you love, you know, stuff like that. Is there something in that, you think? Absolutely. It is a dangerous bet, I will say, to wrap yourself up at work, given how unstable it can be and how quickly it can change. But what I really love about Robert's point, and this also speaks to the college administrator we were talking to a few minutes ago, about how do you counsel students who feel like they're left behind or they're already, you know,

They haven't made up their decisions about who they're going to be and what they're going to be and how that manifests through jobs. We don't really have the experimentation and the exploration that we used to. Summer jobs are something that teenagers used to do more of, and we've moved away from that. Some people are taking on internships that'll look good on college resumes, or they are

doing other things that, again, don't really speak to understanding the economy and having jobs that are kind of bad or having jobs that are different from what their interests are. I was lucky to spend a few years before I got into journalism, bartending and working in nonprofits and doing all kinds of service work that, again, kind of changed my perspective on how everything works. And we've gotten away from that experimentation. And that shows up in

partially because of college being so expensive, that people don't go to school necessarily to have a well-rounded education. They're there to focus on one specific thing. And so all of this has kind of a knock-on effect in how we are curious about ourselves and about the world around us that I do think costs us. Mm-hmm.

A listener writes, I've been laid off four times over my career. I taught my kids, do not look for fulfillment in a job. The purpose of work is to build enough capital such that you no longer have to work. To quote James Baldwin, I have no dream job. I do not dream about it.

of labor. As a tech worker, I decided during the pandemic to never again do private work and now work only for social good. The pay is low, but so far so good. Another listener writes, "From a Bay Area blue collar trade perspective, it's hard to buy into the idea that hard work will really pay off in the end when the cost of living is so high it forces you out of the area you grew up in.

Even if you clear $100,000 a year, the $4,000 a month in living expenses makes it infeasible to do what was once considered a basic task, such as buying a house near where you end up working every day. Yep, that's right. Let's go to Jose in San Rafael.

Oh, hi. I read an article a couple of years ago regarding the concept of quiet quitting and how during that time a lot of people...

you know, got to rethink their work relationship and really focus on, on doing more or less the minimum for work and put an emphasis on, on, on your personal life. And, uh, maybe out of being, uh, not as interested or, or, uh,

engage with your work environment. But for some people like me, it really made me realize after reading that that I need to make a better balance for myself and doing things like taking three and a half weeks for vacation during the summer. So I wonder if that's still a trend for people where they're not as engaged for work in general in America. Yeah.

Yeah. Jose, what a great catalyst to bring into this conversation. I think you're totally right that it's such an interesting question of whether quiet quitting has been able to sort of sustain itself through, you know, what has been a lot of economic instability these last few years. Thank you so much for that, Jose.

I love this. I love this so much in part because quiet quitting itself isn't that controversial. It's like, I'm going to do the basic minimum of my job and I'm not going to bend over backwards to work extra hours or take on extra duties. And again, that attitude, the posture itself seems very hostile or perhaps antagonistic toward the world of work, but just being, just doing the basic mechanics of your job and not stressing yourself out to do extra or to scramble to get ahead is

is a totally reasonable thing to talk about, right? How do you maintain a balance if you are trying to impress somebody? And what does that performative work actually do to benefit yourself or your career, especially if it comes at the cost of your social life? So it is a really important thing that I love that became a trend in part because if you looked at it from outside of the U.S.,

Quiet quitting is just kind of doing your job. Yes, exactly. One of our listeners writes in and says, I was quite mystified by the phrase quiet quitting. I heard recently, which means only doing what's actually in the job description, not going above and beyond, staying late, et cetera. How is that considered anything less than doing a good job? Yeah, it's funny. I mean, and just the reaction that I bet a lot of listeners have of like, no, but there is something. You should stay late. You should like, this is the point, you know? Yeah.

And other listeners saying, Noel on the Discord, for example, writes,

Absolutely. Third places are so important to who we are. Civic groups that we've lost, the organizations, churches, synagogues, all these things have seen a decline in membership as a result of partially our work and our need to work. Yeah.

The book is 99% Perspiration, A New Working History of the American Way of Life. There's so much more in the book that we didn't get to. Adam's going to be at Book Passage in San Francisco next Thursday, April 3rd. Go ahead and leave work early and go read the book and then you can go to the event. Adam, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, Alexis. This was a real treat.

And thank you to all of our listeners for your calls and your comments and sharing your stories with us. I'm wishing you good work, life balance. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with me, Kim.

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