My initial point that I strayed from and perhaps obfuscated was that having 40 hour/week day job is an out of date, organizational solution that doesn’t work for a lot of people. But because it’s been around forever, you get marginalized pretty quickly if you don’t fit the mold. Even I am guilty of looking down on the occasional friend who can’t cut it in the 9 to 5 world. This is becoming problematic since I’m turning into one of those people.

The reason I brought up the work/efficiency thing (which I think would make sense if I could find the original source and cite it correctly) is that I’d like to take solutions from other cultures and augment the things we do well here as far as support for flexible lifestyles.

This is all, of course, opinion. I don’t mean to radiate a voice of authority as I struggle to articulate these musings to myself.

In any case, thanks for the discussion.

This misses the point; which is that nothing in the scenario with me and TO tells you whose program is closer to correctly valuing sit-ups as against alternatives. You seem to suggest that the fact that we’re less productive in the marginal hour after some unknown point is implicated in the proposition that American culture overvalues work as against alternatives, but, *alone*, it’s just not.

…they spend less time working and I think that’s qualitatively better than the attitude towards work here.

A lot depends on how you unpack “they” here, but I’m not convinced this proposition flies. I haven’t read anything about job-satisfaction recently, but my sense is that we pretty regularly rank above countries like England and France, and below countries like Denmark. That sort of an ordering doesn’t facially support the claim that we’re especially bad at this stuff. For what it’s worth, I think roughly the same ordering obtains with respect to average happiness.

To be clear, I don’t disagree with your ideas that American culture overvalues work and that this situation in some respects contributes to our leading less fulfilling lives than we might. I just don’t really see how what you say here diagnoses that connection.

I think it’s rare that wealthy parents imbue their children with a sense of humility, and this distorts a child’s expectations for themselves later on.

I’ll buy this one, but I also think it’s just a fact about human psychology that as more basic problems are solved, our needs become increasingly sophisticated (see, e.g., Maslow’s hierarchy). My own intuition here is that because, on the whole, we do such a terrible job of addressing “higher level” needs, young middle-class folks often misinterpret or misdirect those needs in a kind of impulse to get outside of ordinary life–your “king syndrome.” Inasmuch as I think a shorter work-week would be great, I tend to think it would only marginally impact this problem.

Anyway, interesting post, and thanks for the exchange.

Even without this anecdote, it’s my observation that people work unnecessarily hard to support the largess of industry. A few people are writing the rules to benefit themselves and screw a lot of people over, and no one says anything because it’s an implicit foundation of our culture that people should spend most of their lives working. I don’t agree.

It’s true that the generational tension I cite is also largely true for the boomers and their parents. But there’s a nuanced evolution to that phenomenon that I’ve experienced first hand, and in some ways I think it’s even more true for me and some of my peers. I think it’s rare that wealthy parents imbue their children with a sense of humility, and this distorts a child’s expectations for themselves later on.

If Terrel Owens does 3000 sit-ups a day, and I do 10, it’s possible that his productivity of sit-ups per unit of time drops below mine after whenever I quit (or after whatever point we decide to mark out as “additional”). That’s just brute diminishing returns.

Your fact about relative productivity doesn’t do any work, unless there’s decent reason to believe that folks in lower work-week countries are having better luck at self-actualizing (by avocationally pursuing passions, or whatever, in that “extra” time). Sounds great, but why believe it’s true?

Also, the generational tension you gloss (and link to) seems to describe the tension between boomers* and their parents more accurately than it does the tension between boomers and their kids. I don’t think the trop about self-denying predecessor generations is plausibly recycled here.

*Cf. “The Graduate,” “The Big Chill,” etc.