We tend to have an attitude, at least in America, that being a workaholic is a good thing. It’s virtuous. You’re a hard worker. You’re successful. You achieve things. You focus your attention in the right areas, especially if you’re a man. You eat what you kill, goddamn it!
The workaholic is often deified. We think it might not be that way for millennials — The Uber Generation, chasing freelance — but millennials might end up the same way as Boomers via economic realities.
Work is virtue. Hard work is great. So it stands to reason that the workaholic is among the greatest of us all, right?
Wrong.
It’s time to end the deification of the workaholic, especially among males. Let’s discuss.
The Workaholic And Productivity
This is where you really need to start any of these discussions — we’ll get into happiness and all the actually important things in a second — because if you’re spending a ton of time at work and focused on work (i.e. you’re a workaholic), shouldn’t your work be productive in some respect?
Well, yes and no. See, it should — but a lot of people really have no clue what productivity is. Our focus is often on the quantity of work, and we often confuse the terms ‘busy’ and ‘productive.’ At the most basic level, a…
