Objective:
Unlearn always-on work indoctrination that breeds burnout.
Pivot toward sustainability-focused thinking.
And every day, the world will drag you by the hand, yelling, “This is important! And this is important! You need to worry about this! And this! And This!” And each day, it’s up to you to yank your hand back, put it on your heart, and say, “No. This is what’s important.”
—Iain Thomas
A
t age twenty-three, Howard Scott Warshaw found himself eye to eye with Steven Spielberg, who was praising the Atari 2600 Indiana Jones video game Warshaw had designed. After its sweeping success, the time had come to take things to another level. Since making a name for himself in Silicon Valley, Warshaw was handpicked for the next big project: creating a game for the 1982 blockbuster movie E.T.
When Spielberg told Warshaw his first game made him feel like “he just watched a movie,” he says he took it as the “ultimate compliment.” As Atari and Spielberg haggled over rights for the game, precious production time was lost. Rather than the nearly full year it took to design the Indiana Jones game, Warshaw was given the task of creating the E.T. game from scratch in just five weeks.
He worked day and night, producing what ended up widely known as the “worst video game of all time.” The colossal commercial flop was so bad that game cartridges ended up being dumped into a landfill in New Mexico. The superstar programmer was set up to fail, which he did.
The games have long been buried; fortunately, Warshaw turned his early 1980s downward spiral into momentum. Today, he’s known as the “Silicon Valley therapist.” His failures—the game, being laid off from Atari, and losing his millionaire status—gave him unique perspective. He now spends his time counseling people in the same types of squeezes that led him to commit to something humanly impossible, then reap crappy results.
We all have our own versions of an E.T. game catastrophe. You go from having a reasonable amount of work and time to complete it to ridiculously insane expectations. This happens when we do well. More is expected. Today’s market forces us to rush; quality suffers. The consequences of Warshaw’s failure weren’t earth-shattering. He floundered for a while, but eventually settled. Not everyone is that lucky.
When Duty Calls, Answer Wisely
David Miller taps me on the shoulder. He had news to deliver. At first, it didn’t seem like a big deal, coming out of his usual California-chill tone. Our colleague Rachel, who was to introduce me for the talk I was on deck for, wasn’t feeling well; we’d have to improvise. Moments later came the full disclosure.
The news was disturbing. Rachel had had a heart attack in the wee hours that morning. The stress of the job had nearly killed her, but duty calls, and she still showed up. “Are you okay?” I asked, realizing the absurdity of the question just as it left my mouth. “No . . . ,” she muttered.
You might find this shocking, or chalk it up to stupidity, but Rachel holds a PhD and is cerebral as you can imagine. Always-on work indoctrination had gotten to her—the one that trained her to keep climbing 24/7, at all costs.
Like many of us, she was conditioned to stay in permanent overdrive and performance mode. Work indoctrination teaches that we must be there, that the show won’t go on without us. If we take time off, we’ll fall even further behind. God forbid we let duty’s call go to voice mail—we might let someone down. Driven by our ego’s desire for validation and recognition, and to be needed, we keep picking up the call of duty. Who else is going to do the work? Plus, we’ve got bills to pay and a ladder to climb.
For a few seconds, I got self-righteous about Rachel showing up post–heart attack. You may think the same thing. You’d never do that. It doesn’t mean self-neglect isn’t a thing—it might just be less dramatic or look a little different for you. Most of us answer duty’s calls, no matter what.
Rachel’s situation is not an isolated incident. A Yale study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association reveals that the very stress that often precipitates a heart attack is also a major hindrance in recovery. The 35,000 young and middle-age women suffering heart attacks every year report trouble finding time to get their bearings because of heaping family and work demands. There is not even time to mend a broken heart.
This problem isn’t unique to women, or Americans. People are paying the price across the world. The World Health Organization calls today’s global work environments “modern hazards.” In Japan, the term karoshi describes death by overwork, encapsulating the rising number of heart attacks, strokes, and suicides citizens face. A governmental annual report revealed that approximately 21.3 percent of Japanese employees work forty-nine hours weekly. Before her death by suicide, twenty-four-year old Matsuri Takahashi’s social media posts lamented on the consequences of her 100-plus hours of monthly overtime: “I want to die” and “I’m physically and mentally shattered.”
Always-on work indoctrination is dangerous. A report from Oxford Economics points to a pervasive workaholic paradigm as problematic: “Our 24-7, always on, hard-charging culture has created a nation of work martyrs—the type that take few vacation days, come into the office sick, and pride themselves on being seen at a desk.”
It seems absurd, yet we fall for it. You wouldn’t accept a lead role in a movie that required you to indefinitely gain fifty pounds, be your own stunt person, and stay on the set day and night, just for the sake of free bagels every Tuesday as consolation. Even if you’re raking it in, you’d probably think twice given the risks (unless Jennifer Lawrence was costarring).
But we accept the parts and answer the call of duty since we seem to have no choice. People are depending on us. If we try to modify the script, we pay the price. They’ll zing, criticize, look down on, or even fire us. We’re scared of hearing, “He’s not really a team player, and is just in it for himself,” or “She’s such a disappointment. She never stays late like the rest of us.”
Don’t Fry the Motherboard
Even when labor regulations and social policies exist, they are not always held up. Paid vacation time is not a given, either. Making a living in such a competitive, cutthroat market is hard. We get the message that we are dispensable. This is the fallout within societies where achieving status and acquiring money are prioritized over spiritual and community pursuits.
We live with the feeling we’re about to fry the motherboard and end up burned out. We’ve got a headache and a handful of Get Out of Sleep Free cards we’re clutching, zooming pass Go week after week, collecting our $200. We hope we’re invincible, until sickness comes knocking. I asked my students how their always-on work indoctrination has affected them. Natalie, who’d been at her company twelve years, saw it in full effect:
It’s Wednesday and I’ve already worked thirty-eight hours. I’m totally fried but I’ve learned to keep my head down and mouth shut. My boss is famous for saying once we get done with this project, things will slow down, but there’s always another one popping up. When I went to the doctor last week, my blood pressure was high for the first time ever. My friends think I’ve gone missing. I know I need to change, but last week someone was fired for not staying late when everyone else did. I swear they think we are computers.
Igor was confronted with strikingly similar conditions, even though he’d only been at work for two years:
In theory, I love my work, but in reality, it’s super stressful. No matter how much effort I give, it feels like it’s never enough. I have a strong work ethic, but it’s like we’re expected to be five people all at once. Oh—and I want to find a new job, but most of my friends my age are in the same boat. I doubt it’s much better anywhere else. The problem is, I can barely sleep. Even when I’m not at work, I’m anxious about it. Three people have gone out on sick leave, but no one talks about it. We just keep going, as if there’s not something seriously wrong with the whole situation, like it’s totally normal I don’t want to be the next one to drop, but it’s not looking good.
The fear of becoming fried was a consistent worry for my students—whether they were in corporate, nonprofit, education, or the private sector. They yearned for purpose and were earnest to do meaningful work, but the situations they were in required them to magically pull rabbits out of their hats. Change seemed to be the only constant. There was little appreciation for the epic stunts being performed. And since we need to preserve the one brain we’re given, we started to talk about what they would need to do to prevent the motherboard from billowing with smoke.
Eat Your Soup Now.
There Will Be No Cake Later
Rita worked at a prestigious university for thirty-three years. During her tenure, she secured $15 million in grant funding and was the go-to person for the entire department. She got things done. The classic work martyr, she prided herself on having taken a total of only three sick days in twenty-three years. She’s like the growing number of people leaving vacation days unused and skipping lunch to be more productive. No soup for us.
When her retirement finally approached, there was no cake. No card. No thank-you gesture—not even a trip over to Panera Bread. It’s not that she needed a parade in her honor, but something would have been nice.
Unless you’re situated in one of those rare organizations where humans are shown they matter, the always-on indoctrination will get you long before there is time to mourn your good-bye cake. The overwork will have already fried your motherboard, corrupting your health, sleep, relationships, and quality of life.
We don’t think about this when we’re up answering emails and chained to our desks. We think work has our back, that all the overtime we’ve clocked will be celebrated. But at the end of it all, someone else will come along and sit in our cube and, in time, end up wearing the same “Overworked and Unappreciated” T-shirt. Maybe they’ll be lucky enough to find that someone figured out there’s a bakery right around the corner when they decide it’s their turn to go. Or not.
Set Your Own Vault
When work dictates our every move, we can get hurt. The concept of stress originally came from engineers trying to describe how much weight a bridge could bear before collapsing. If we let other people determine how much to pile onto us, we’ll start to buckle. We’re more apt to come crashing down, like the gymnasts from the summer of 2000 Sydney Olympic Games.
During preliminary rounds, the vaulters sensed something was off, but their concerns were ignored and the competition went on. It wasn’t until several of them were injured that the officials finally listened. They discovered the vault was off by five centimeters, a critical variance that explained the gymnasts’ uncharacteristic falls. Their dreams were shattered, but nothing could be done.
A few centimeters can make or break us, too. Our vaults may be set with terrible imprecision by those in charge. You’d think we’d see through the smoke screens that prevent us from checking the vault. We’re too busy replaying our own landings, blaming a shaky performance, not the setup.
Even with steadfast effort and laser focus, we can land flat on our backs when expectations are improperly gauged. Our brains, like bridges, are weight-bearing mechanisms. Like the Sydney gymnasts’ knees, they can only handle so much force. We can’t leave our fate in the hands of those who carelessly calibrate our expectations for us, without respecting human thresholds. We must first insist that our vaults are set up in a way that showcases our talent without putting us in harm’s way. And like gymnasts who follow a careful regimen to prevent injury and keep their career going, we must do the same.
Rescue Your Brain from the Frying Pan
One of the most epic commercial taglines of the 1980s was “This is your brain on drugs”—complete with sizzling pan, two eggs fried to a crisp, and a big dose of fear. Maybe we need a version today that shows our brains as eggs on too little sleep and too much caffeine, and ravaged because of technostress, a fitting new term that illustrates how cooked our brains can become from information overload and constant screen sucking.
According to a Lancet 2012 Global Mental Health Report, the pressures of today are most intense between the ages of fifteen and forty-four, when we are trying to establish careers and families and set the foundations for our lives. This is what makes always-on work indoctrination so seductive. We need to earn our degrees, establish independence (if there is such a thing), put food on the table, navigate our relationships, and make our mark on the world.
Always-on work indoctrination within our Age of Anxiety leaves us fragmented, unsettled, and at risk for burnout. It starts early and lasts late into life. The World Health Organization reports that one out of five Americans experience mental health issues, and the National Center for Health Statistics says that 11 percent of us from ages twelve and up are on antidepressants. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention affirmed in a 2012 study that one out of four US women are on medication for depression or anxiety. Suicide is the tenth leading cause of death in the United States; men are four times more likely to take their lives than women.
Look for Sustainability
For short periods of time we can withstand the frying pan, but occupying it indefinitely leads to burnout. Pivoting to sustainability means ending long-term habits of passing Go and collecting $200 until we exhaust ourselves. Instead, we need to end behaviors that leave us at risk.
Some companies are willing to help us. Pedometer programs, free counseling, and coaching sessions are sometimes available to help mitigate intense work conditions. Biogen Idec, a global leader in biotechnology, decided to implement a concierge services program, complete with errand running—as in searching for plumbers, securing pet sitting, and even having shoes repaired for employees. Taking the running around off employees’ plates proved valuable, saving them each 12.5 hours per week, on average. As a result, the company saw increased productivity gains, and voluntary departures fell from 14 percent to 5 percent. Sign me up!
Unfortunately, few of us can relate to this rare privilege. Chances are you’re more likely to say, “That’s me!” to one or more of the other examples in this session: whether Warshaw’s fast growth trajectory, my colleague Rachel’s startling call-of-duty example, or Natalie’s or Igor’s takes that they should keep their heads down and mouths shut—and that the always-on conditions are inescapable.
Maybe you’ve had crashes like the Sydney 2000 gymnasts. or you know exactly how Rita felt after putting so many years in without even a crumb of cake to say thanks. Maybe you sense your motherboard is heading in the direction of becoming fried—or that karoshi, death by overwork, could happen to you or someone you love.
Sustainability isn’t about hiding away or quitting jobs we care about. It’s about pacing yourself at a reasonable level, not treating your brain like it’s a machine. When duty calls, we can certainly answer, but sometimes we need to turn off our ringers. We need to make sure we are eating our soup—mindfully taking breaks and enjoying life.
Sustainability helps us imagineer our vault to the threshold that inspires soaring without crashing. It’s about lifestyle medicine: engaging in activities that nourish through exercise, movement, and rest—ones that keep us from hanging out for extended periods in the frying pan, burning to a crisp. Pivoting toward sustainability means carving out space to invest in things that matter most to you, to help you stop thinking you have five weeks to create an entire masterpiece. None of us want to face seeing ourselves, or our work, buried.