Work Ethic etc.

I really like Mark Kleiman. It's because of folks like him that I'm glad to be a member of the reality-based community; he exemplifies a kind of intellectually-flavored seriousness and humanism.

So I thought it would make sense to link and briefly discuss this post of his concerning the American work ethic.

Simply put, we work too damn hard in this country for- for what?!?

This is a discussion that more people should have. There's the distinct sense in this, among the wealthiest countries on the planet, is working itself to death without really stopping to enjoy the fruits of that labor. If you ask me, one of the primary problems is that people also don't stop to think, and that the pace of modern life in part explains the cultural backwardness of large parts of this country. When people are working stressful, enervating jobs, they don't want to expend that sort of energy on their leisure, hence the unfortunately common practice of decompressing before the crap deluge of television, and the embarrassingly high American tolerance for said crap.

Kleiman also makes a point that I must repost here:

Yes, many people can't fill the leisure they now have with anything they actually enjoy. That's what keeps the networks and cable companies in business. Perhaps that would be less true if we didn't think about our educational system primarily in terms of preparing people for the workforce.

Our economic system (and this isn't and shouldn't be seen as an endorsement of any other system) has a rather incredible tendency to instill economic anxiety to the exclusion to other drives. Any idiot knows that looking at education as primarily a road to wealth is an awful and stupid, and yet that's how we tend to look at it.

I daresay that an economy in which there was a greater measure of economic security, and one where there was a greater perception of security, would allow a culture that wasn't so goddamn cheap.