Working Hard or Hardly Working

you will own everything and be unhappy

there were other choices though

Elon Musk@elonmusk

Whoever said “money can’t buy happiness” really knew what they were talking about 😔

12:50 AM · Feb 5, 2026 · 101M Views

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125K Replies · 60.1K Reposts · 592K Likes

That speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Elon Musk, the richest person in the world and among the 10 or so most powerful and influential, expressing a profound unhappiness about his life. Musk, beyond his obvious success, is also clearly accomplished: he started and runs multiple companies he must be proud of. He has a wife and at least 14 children, and there’s no reason to doubt his relationship with thirteen of them. Musk is also a very hard worker: by most accounts he works 80 to 100 hours a week (at least ten hours a day), more recently he’s transitioned to working 120 hours a week (17 and a half hours), and he also, based on how The Economist tracks the hours of his tweets, sleeps very little and at very erratic intervals.

Why is Elon Musk, a hard working family man with an an active social and party life, so unhappy with his success then?

Losing my job… is not my choice!

One of the last movies I watches is Park Chan-Wook’s No Other Choice, a 2025 Korean black comedy about a recently unemployed man who decides to hunt down and kill all possible candidates that could compete with him for a job.

In a bit more detail, Man-Su is a middle aged man with two children, two dogs, a nice big house, and a beautiful wife (Miri). He has been working in a white collar position at a paper factory for 25 years, until Americans buy his firm and fires him for refusing to be the face of a wave of layoffs. He only gets a job at an Amazon (knockoff) warehouse, until he realizes he could get a job in the paper industry - except he flunks the interview and burns his shot with a different paper company. His plan is simple: put up a fake advertisement, ask for resumes, and kill everyone who could compete with him for a job in the other companies. The journey from nice family man to cold-blooded killer is farcical but, most interestingly, involves significant scouting of the men and their lives: one is an alcoholic shut-in with trouble with his wife; one works as a shoe salesman desperate to land a sale; one is a heavy drinker who lives alone in a gigantic seaside cabin.

The movie repeats multiple metaphors and images; the phrase “no other choice” is used by just about everyone to justify whatever they’re doing, be it the paper companies laying off their workers, or Man-Su murdering his former colleagues. The most notable recurring image is the divide between animals and vegetables: Man-Su’s wife describes him as “a vegetable” given his passion for gardening, but later, the movie draws up an analogy with a carnivorous snake - one that would eat its own mother if it could. The film’s more or less explicit thesis, also more or less explicitly reaffirmed in public statements by the cast and the director, is that the intense economic competition between workers led to them becoming fundamentally immoral and violent. Seeking to become a carnivorous snake and not a bonsai, Man-Su arranges the death of multiple other people; he also fractures his relationship with his wife, who suspects him of cheating due to the extensive sneaking around, and his son, who tries to steal cell phones from a store to help the family make ends meet. He can’t even explain why he wants the job so badly; when his wife asks why paper, Man-Su repeats verbatim what one of the men he killed told his own wife. When his scheme does secure him the job, his first responsibility at a new company is laying off all the workers to replace them with AI and robots. He gladly agrees.

The film fits neatly into the thought of 20th century French philosopher Simone Weil, particularly two core concepts: uprootedness (deracinement) and affliction (malheur). According to Weil, people need to have the ability to participate in the life of their community, and feel a connection to the time and place they live in; that is the only way people can then develop multiple levels of commitment (to their neighborhood, the city, their region, the country, etc) which provides them with moral development. However, under extreme economic and material dislocation, people become uprooted, which deprives them of the ability to lead a spiritually satisfactory life and instead disconnects them from their peers. Likewise, the concept of affliction emerges from suffering; certain forms of misery are so pervasive that they remove the ability to think about anything except “why”, over and over again. In this sense, it’s pretty evident how being “uprooted” from the paper manufacturing community could completely distort Man-Su and his family’s moral development; they simply became completely incapable of basic moral reasoning. The movie, in this sense, has an obvious Korean point of comparison: Parasite, which deals with similar themes - how economic deprivation can interfere with the duties of basic morality.

The idea that radical economic changes can produce social dislocation is kind of obvious. I’m currently trudging through Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, which deals with the topic of embeddedness: the relationship between the market economy and the rest of society, particularly politics, is not of independence but one of, well, rootedness: the market cannot exist with a society that can accommodate its effects. Instead of markets being some natural outgrowth of the rational and competitive telos of humanity, they were instead a social mechanism designed and created intentionally in the late Modern Ages; property, production, and exchange were until the creation of capitalism subordinated to political and community relationships. The separation of property rights and “human” rights was, itself, the delineation from feudalism and capitalism according to Ellen Meiksins Wood’s The Origins of Capitalism, which is itself a lengthy explanation of why the story of capitalism emerging from a desire to increase profits from international trade in feudalism is ahistorical, teleological, and assumes its own conclusions (RIP Polanyi and also the much hated Althusser). Per Polanyi, the introduction of capitalism and industry to English society produced immediate economic pains, with a “double movement” of market liberalization and social movements against the market, most notably the early socialists, cartalism (not sure what their demand was), trade unions, and whatever the hell the organization behind Speenhamland was. Polanyi’s (somewhat underargued) explanation is that British rulers, particularly the Tudors, held back the development of capitalism to avoid large mobs of displaced peasants becoming urban paupers; when British society was adequately prepped for capitalism, the Stuarts “let her rip” through the social fabric, producing an extremely powerful social reaction in the wake of the original Great Depression of 1873. This included a significant moral component: something I was surprised to find out about¹ is that Polanyi was very Christian and one of his main objections was that tearing down, frequently literally, peasant villages and towns to turn them into factory workers wasn’t just politically destabilizing, but also morally degrading, forcing them to exploit all family members to the fullest and inhabit in slums. The experience of reading The Great Transformation is best summed up by a friend asking me what other ideas besides embeddedness (free markets are a utopia and just leaving society to resolve them will result in disaster) it has, and it doesn’t, Polanyi just exposits on the relationship between markets and civic life at extreme lenght and in extreme detail in every period of time he can conceivably write about.

Interestingly the actual question the book is concerned about isn’t the abstract relationship between society and the market, but the precise question of how fascism emerged in the 1920s; Polanyi’s answer is that it emerged from the contradiction between markets and society. The evidence for the thesis that all manners of antisocial and violent attitudes can emerge from economic deprivation is pretty ironclad (and a longstanding bit on this blog and my other work in general): social trust, defined as trust in other people and in the government and institutions, is very closely correlated with prosperity and education: richer, better educated people trust others and The Other more than poorer people. It’s also related to community, particularly having more and more diverse social environments. Trust is also closely related to universalism: moral universalism, as defined by social psychologists as the level of care for people distant to oneself, is closely associated with social trust, is related to prosperity, since wealthier people are more universalist, while poorer people are more particularist. Both social trust and universalism are linked with support for democratic values: people tend to value living in a democracy more if that democracy can provide material benefits. A third, also related value is zero-sum thinking, the idea that in every interaction there has to be a winner and a loser, which is also strongly linked to economic growth according to recent research. Other clear example of Polanyi’s logic exist. In Brazil, unemployment increased attendance at conservative evangelical churches that then boosted the support of far-right candidates. And in the obvious example, Nazi Germany, areas more closely harmed by Weimar Era austerity programs saw the largest upswells of support for Adolf Hitler, and areas benefitted by his infrastructure program shifted to supporting him.

The community dislocation produced by mass economic shocks are also a no-brainer. A recent study, summarized in the Financial Times, concludes that markets both encourage cooperation between strangers and reduce their hostility to others different from them, but also reduce economic solidarity and community bonds. However, the broader Polanyi case isn’t that the market economy makes people immoral and antisocial, but rather that social dislocation has those consequences, particularly if it resolves itself in long-term economic penury. Research finds that, after NAFTA was implemented with the support of Bill Clinton, working-class voters began shifting to the right based on their cultural values, since there seemed to be little difference in the economic positioning of the two parties. A recent article about Reform UK narrates the decline of the Labour party post-deindustrialization in Northern England: after losing their jobs in the factories, workers had to shift to services, which involves 24/7 shifts as opposed to the more reflective and laid back pace of their factory work. One town, Mansfield, went from being “an amazing place on Fridays and Saturday nights” to a ghost town, hollowed out by joblessness and depopulation. Automation in manufacturing increases crime rates, by decreasing employment and earnings among industrial workers, which is itself linked to a higher likelihood of committing crimes. Prolonged economic downturns are also closely associated with higher likelihood of consuming drugs at the individual and community level. The relationship with “despair” and suicide is a bit more strained (particularly because of the specifics of American healthcare, American lifestyles, and American prescription drug policies in the 2000s and 2010s), but I think that it just represents a different impact of the same trends in a different environment - particularly because of the geographic and class concentration of the increase in mortality from suicide, alcoholism, and drug use.

For young people today, we’re seeing increased rates of economic dislocation and increase rates of loneliness and isolation: the share of young adults working or in education has declined significantly post-pandemic, at the same time as job offers for recent graduates have declined notably, and a series of factors, particularly an oversupply of AI-generated job applications, have made the employment market a lot less transparent and meritocratic, much more openly run by cliques. It should be no surprise, then, that a generation that is less economically integrated and less socially active would also exhibit significantly less well adjusted habits: higher loneliness, more meals eaten alone, an excessive focus on self-improvement and exercise (solo, of course), and a frankly troubling rise in porn addiction and problematic gambling. This isn’t really exclusive to The West (whatever that means) either: China has also seen a stark increase in loneliness, uprootedness, and friendlessness. Chinese youth unemployment is higher than 20%, a measure that was discontinued briefly to cover up the rise in joblessness. The hottest app in Chinese phones is called Are You Dead and its function is contacting your family if a single young person living alone dies unexpectedly - since there is no way someone else would find out. China has its own tang ping (lying flat), equivalent to the Japanese hikkikomori, young people who don’t go to school, work, or leave the house. These NEETs, as they are called in the United States, don’t spend a lot of time doing much, and spend most of their time alone.

I think the broader question isn’t really why mass unemployment, caused by systemic economic restructuring, is bad on a social or economic level, but what to do about it. The obvious call, even from economists, is “redistribute the gains from the winners to the losers”. Typically it’s argued that trade benefits consumers (aka everyone) by lowering prices; however, it also harms workers by lowering employment and wages. In an economic that is a homogenous and featureless plain, this solves itself; in an economy with agglomeration effects, the results are deadly and destructive - some places just have their bottom fall out and turn into husks, homeowners stuck in place with decaying equity. The other problem is that the social safety net is grossly inadequate to tackle the missing income, and job creation programs usually result in worse opportunities - the Reform voters were particularly incensed that revitalization efforts under Tony Blair subsidized bad employers. Globalization and deindustrialization were one example, and the social consequences of barely compensated transformation to the global economies have been predictably dire. But welfare cannot replace the fundamental benefit from work: not income, but meaning, in some sense. Karl Marx once said that work dignifies man; well, does it?

All grind and no game makes Jack a dull boy

The current vibe is no drinking, no drugs, 9-9-6 [working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week], lift heavy, run far, marry early, track sleep, eat steak and eggs,” Daksh Gupta, the 23-year-old co-founder of an AI start-up, told the San Francisco Standard recently

Hannah Murphy, “Grindcore is the new hustle culture”, Financial Times (28/01/2026)

In 1996, Bill Clinton said, in a speech introducing his welfare reform initiatives, “From now on our nation's answer to the problems of poverty will no longer be a never ending cycle of welfare; it will be the dignity, the power, and the ethic of work”. This follows the lesson Clinton learned from his intellectual mentor, Carroll Quigley of Georgetown University: for Western society to move forward, it would have to combine the traditional Protestant work ethic (working hard and living frugally) with the New Age practices of empathy, compassion, and spirituality. Clinton’s own life followed this lesson, as a self-made striver who graduated from Yale and a a pot-smoking adulterer, but his broader political thought also showed engagement with the “New Age” side, particularly his early support of gay rights and the advice he received from communitarian philosophers like Michael Sandel and William Galston.

The merger of New Age and Old World values wasn’t, of course, limited to Bill Clinton; the type of person who mixes bohemian sensibilities with bourgeois careers is the exact target of David Brooks’s BoBos in Paradise, a favorite of this blog. Importantly, one chapter is dedicated to BoBo work habits, in particular, the seemingly inexplicable transition from company loyalty predicated on stable employment and upwards mobility (if performance warranted it) to company loyalty secured via alignment with broader values or social goals. Companies began having pool tables and other entertainment facilities, and began insisting on their employees socializing at happy hours and retreats; firms also developed missions, such as Google’s legendary “don’t be evil”. In The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank elaborates on this trend on the consumer side: firms were divided between “X culture” (conformist, hierarchical, traditional) and “Y culture” (revolutionary, egalitarian, innovative), and “Y culture” firms were usually associated with the counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s - think Don Draper’s colleagues in the later seasons of Mad Men wearing plaid suits, long hair, mustaches, and smoking weed in the office. These companies saw the New Age movements as a perfect vessel for consumerism for one simple reason: conformity meant buying less and buying frugally; rebellion could be used to sell more, sell trendy, and sell often. Advertisements frequently mentioned how little you would actually use the product given how quick fashions changed - with the implication that if you wanted to be conservative with your money, you were a boring square.

This year, an employee of a major company protested his employer working with ICE following their murder of two civilians in Minneapolis; this worker wrote “In my opinion ICE are the bad guys. I am not proud that the company I enjoy so much working for is part of this”. The company was Palantir, a major security state and IDF contractor owned by fascist lunatic Peter Thiel and run by also fascist lunatic Alex Karp. Karp also held a call with his employees to assuage their concerns that the openly and explicitly evil company they were working for was doing evil work by… telling them to sign an NDA to know more. This is an extreme example, but it’s not an isolated case: a 2022 Harvard Business Review piece examined the case of employees who felt demoralized by making moral compromises at work. Based on the psychological research on “moral injury” (psychic harm caused by being responsible for violating your moral code), the authors examine the impact of broken promises, hypocrisy, unrealistic standards, and gaslighting when it comes to ethically charged endeavors - for instance, a company that takes a public pledge to increase diversity, but privately runs the process with the open intent to hire internally and without honoring those promises. In this sense, while corporate “wokewashing” is usually a shallow and dishonest exercise in marketing (Frank cites Virgina Slims cigarettes for women weaponizing feminism back in the 1960s), it can also be used for the purpose of ensuring employee morale and recruitment - ESG targets, for instance, tend to attract highly educated workers to firms. Likewise, the BoBo ethic of seeing work as having a mission is just an extension of this logic: companies that give workers trainings on the meaning of life and its relationship to work (and you complain about DEI anyways) see an increase in employee performance, in large part because less motivated employees tend to just quit and go work somewhere that is more ontologically aligned.

According to Erik Baker’s book Make Your Own Job, the idea of being committed to your job as part of your self conception dates back to the 1940s, with the start of mass industrial society; early business science guru Peter Drucker coined the term “the managerial attitude”, where an employee defines their entire self by their “partnership” in a company, that is, their commitment to the business. In Baker’s telling, nowhere is this more obvious than in Silicon Valley, where alignment with a company, its founder, and its mission takes an almost religious dimension; it should be no suprirse, then, that Silicon Valley billionaires seem to be legendarily bad bosses: Elon Musk, according to his insanely sycophantic biographer Walter Isaacson, would routinely demand impossibly tight deadlines required 100+ hour workweeks for no plausible reason. And it is Silicon Valley that is introducing another incredibly sinister development in work hours: the 9-9-6 workweek, where one works 9am to 9pm (so 12 hours a day) for six days a week, that is, a 72 hour workweek. First introduced by Chinese tech firms (Chinese work culture, of course, is legendary for demanding so much of their workers they commit suicide on the clock), 9-9-6 as a mindset is sustained by two pillars: first, an existential fear of being replaced by AI or their competitors (in the Bay or across the Pacific ocean), and the second is, you guessed it, extreme devotion to their mission: an AI founder is quoted as saying “This work culture is not unprecedented when you consider the stringent work cultures of the Manhattan Project and NASA’s missions, We’re solving problems of a similar if not more important magnitude”. I’ll let you be the judge of that. This is, so far, limited to San Fransicko, but not to Silicon Valley: worryingly, employers outside of tech but adjacent to it are starting to observe the trend, and pushing for their own workforce to go all the way on never leaving the office.

There’s two obvious facts to note here. The first is that working extremely long hours is associated with higher earnings at an individual level - the number of hours worked is a key component of income variation, explaining around 20% of the variance in lifetime earnings. The authors attribute it to preferences, but I wouldn’t go so far: the concept of “greedy jobs”, professions that require extreme work hours, is a key part of the gender pay gap in large part because of relatively strict social expectations on whether mothers should cut back on work to look after their children. A by this point legendary paper on young MBA graduates from Harvard Business School finds that the main explanation for the gender pay gap among them is that the female business leaders of tomorrow tend to take long career breaks after they have children and tend to work fewer hours in large part to look after their children. Studies of bus and train operators, meanwhile, find that the main reason for the gender pay gap on an equitable and unionized workplace is that women are less likely to work extensive overtime hours and more likely to take unpaid time off. Female conductors, especially the ones that have children, tend to focus on stable and predictable work hours - in particular, by pursuing occupations that allow for flexible yet predictable arrangements, such as pharmacist. This responds primarily to gender norms: when couples move, studies find that the career of the man is prioritized over the woman’s career, even in couples where the woman would earn more in the new city. In this sense and more recently, return to office mandates tend to increase employee resignations, particularly for female employees who require greater flexibility in their work arrangements. Work from home itself is broadly seen as related to domestic and care duties within families, and could in fact be a significant factor in improving the labor force attachment of mothers. 42% of women who leave the workforce, in fact, cite the lack of support as caregivers as their reason for doing so.

The other fact is that working extremely long hours is not especially productive for most workers anyways. Historically, work hours have declined or at least held steady, primarily due to the fact that people tend to not want to work at night if they can manage it. In the UK, in particular, the decline has been less pronounced than in France and the US, owing to greater employer labor power - meaning that, in accordance with common sense, making everyone work extremely long hours isn’t going to reward them financially the same way that a single person working the same amount of hours would be rewarded. This is especially notable considering that working extremely long hours is frequently unproductive if not counterproductive: even ignoring psychological burnout, working long hours tends to extract small increases in performance by completely tanking next-day outcomes, mainly due to sleep deprivation and other physical forms of exhaustion. The expectation, if not the demand, of greater and greater working hours by employees cannot be understood as a productivity measure; it has to be understood as an increase in the supply of labor for any given wage, thus decompressing the labor market - if one person does the job of two, why hire a second? In fact, paid overtime laws were introduced in the New Deal to decrease unemployment by incentivizing more hiring. What they were not designed to do was ensure fair compensation of extra work - they were designed to eliminate it, and thus set aside “eight hours for sleep and eight hours for what we will” on top of the eight hours of work.

Limits to the quantity of work aren’t just important for a healthy work performance, they’re actually important for a healthy career. One of the major boosts to career prospects someone can get is having friends: not friends in the field, not friends with important jobs or fancy degrees, just regular friends from school that talk about sports with them. For teenagers, having one more friend resulted in an increase to earnings or 7% to 14%, doubling the regular results from going to school. Likewise, moving from the least friendly 20% of students (in terms of self-reported number of friends) to most friendly 20% in high-school results in a 10% wage premium up to 40 years later. In both cases this is driven by the importance of having deeper and more developed professional networks, because having a broad social circle improves labor and education outcomes for young people. But obviously, gains from personal networks are not limited to tots, since friendship is economically valuable for adults too: Facebook research finds that having a broader social group (i.e. more friends who aren’t friends with each other) increases your chances of finding a job when looking for one, at the same time as broader social networks make people less likely to be unemployed and more likely to be hired, and also increase your wages for similar positions compared to other seekers. For example, immigrants who have established social groups among the existing immigrant community have better labor market outcomes than “pioneers” who arrived without a community, and Black job applicants tend to face a much smaller penalty on LinkedIn job applications when they have a more robust professional network. And close friends are doubly important, because getting a referral from a close buddy is important - since referrals make a big difference. One final example is that being a member of exclusive clubs has significant income benefits over the long run, such that (for example) economists with close professional relationships are likelier to accept papers from each other, or that attending the most elite schools in the United States (and also Dartmouth, Cornell, and Duke) makes you 60% more likely to be in the top 1% of incomes, doubles your chances of a prestigious PhD admission, and triples your odds of an elite professional career. The ultimate example of the power of friendship is none other than Jeffrey Epstein, whose island life was described by the Financial Times as a “social Ponzi scheme”: Epstein was able to secure and procure favors of various kinds (including, of course, sexual access to very young women and underage girls) for powerful and influential people, which got him information that made him wealthy, which got him access to more powerful and influential people, etc, etc.

I'll go somewhere and do something

The idea that work is not just a part of the meaning of life but the meaning of life can be found in probably the weirdest place of all: Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1998 movie about the adult entertainment industry Boogie Nights. The movie, which follows a series of porn performers as they rise into stratospheric fame and fall to sex work and drug addiction, seems to mostly be about what makes someone a somebody and what makes them a nobody. Early on in the movie, Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg’s character) tells his girlfriend “Everyone has one thing, you think? I mean, everyone’s given one special thing, right?” in reference to him being good in bed. When leaving home, he tells his mother “I’ll go somewhere and do something”; the implication is that his purpose in life is being in porn.

Aristotle wrote in the Poetics that tragedies should focus on highborn characters whose excessive pride or self confidence (hybris) leads them to commit a fatal mistake (hamartia), which causes a subsequent fall from grace (peripecia) that only ends once they acknowledge their error (anagnorisis). In almost all cases, the hybris is believing themselves mightier than the gods, leading to the defiance of their fate (moira), which is nevertheless inescapable. On the contrary, comedy occurs to lowborn characters with great gifts, who use them to ascend to sideral heights while still remaining humble to their fates. In this sense, Boogie Nights is a profoundly Aristotelian story: whenever Dirk Diggler embraces his fate as the world’s greatest, uh, adult performer he soars; when he deviates from it, it’s one low after another - until he acknowledges his mistake. The same is true for Julianne Moore’s character Amber Waves: she starts the movie unhappy and disconnected from her son, who’s kept from her due to her lifestyle as a porn actress; after taking Dirk in as her putative son, her life improves, only to worsen when the two begin an actual relationship.

A similar concept of fate, with a similar gendered dimension, is found in Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity. According to Bauman, contemporary society moved through two spaces: traditionally, mass society formed what he termed solid modernity, similar to the “X culture” of the 1950s: homogenous, egalitarian, conformist, and relatively repressive. In this society, each person’s life had a purpose determined beforehand for them - men were supposed to be providers and heads of household, the producers who made the world run. Women, on the other hand, were supposed to stay in the home and focus on the family, on children, and on nurture. This mode of social organization was defeated not by the perfidious demands of far left activists, but by reality: as described by 2023 Nobel Laureate Claudia Goldin, the economy began shifting from focusing on goods (where men’s relative advantage on physical strength received a premium) to focusing on services, at the same time as female education increased in large part to secure a wealthier husband for them. Paired with political action by the feminist movement and a generation of men whose mothers had worked during World War Two, the shift away from a manufacturing-dominated macho economy to a services-oriented #Sheconomy seemed inevitable.

This, in turn, gave way to what Bauman termed liquid modernity: a world where there are basically no fixed norms or structures, and where every individual has both absolute freedom and absolute anguish from their radical ability to self define. In particular, this self definition happens not at the locus of production, but at the locus of consumption: the dominant mode of self expression is spending money. Consumerism, paired with globalization and digitalization, fostered a culture of short-term gratification and social disconnection: traditional channels for civic life and engagement such as family, religion, and community participation are replaced by working and spending. Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells agrees with Bauman’s characterization of modernity, but considers it a positive development, or at least not a wholly negative one: particularly, he emphasizes the fact that liquid modernity does in fact entail greater and meaningful freedom. However, the combination of digital life and globalization has resulted in a society in a greater and greater sense of crisis with less ability than ever to actually solve any of those crises; thus, writes Castells “in a world of global flows of wealth, power, and images, the search for identity, collective or individual, attributed or constructed, becomes the fundamental source of social meaning. This is not a new trend, since identity, and particularly religious and ethnic identity, has been in the origins of meaning since the dawn of human society”. For Castells, increasingly, the conflict in society is becoming between the self and the network, that is, between the individual and the hyperconnected Other.

The relationship of these ideas to work is clearly paradoxical: on the one hand, there has clearly been a closer and closer alignment between personal identity and personal meaning and work, as detailed above. But on the other, both of these authors tend to prioritize consumer spending and various cultural attributes as determinants that supersede employment as determining a person’s identity above their employment. However, the way around this can be understood via the magical world of self-published romance: a woman interviewed by the New York Times details her advancement from self-publishing 12 books a year (that is, one a month) to generating them with Claude, an AI, and publishing four a week. She asked the journalists “If I can generate a book in a day, and you need six months to write a book, who’s going to win the race?”. But the important thing to note is that she isn’t attached to writing as a creative endeavor to express some inner truth; she is attached to her identity as an author, which she wants to derive her ability to earn a living from. This is a classic phenomenon of the social media era: someone who wants to live as some identity (a trad wife, a “man eater”, an influencer, name your pick) exclusively via performative short-term consumption and aesthetic signifiers; the point of dressing as this or that microtrend is to be the type of person that microtrend is supposed to emulate without actually putting in any of the effort. Say you want to be “Old Money”, a term with a million different iterations over the years - does this mean shopping consciously for high-quality, durable brands and emulating the cultural and intellectual habits of, say, Lee Radziwill or Silvina Ocampo? No, it means shopping for a polyester cardigan at Zara and pinning the same four pictures of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy as “inspiration” (for your Shein hauls). Even the original inscrutable self-published romance drama, the one between wolf porn writers Addison Cain and Zoe Ellis, was about identity: about Cain’s identity as the inventor of wolf porn for straight people, and the weight it carried for her to not have it be associated with anyone else.

As I’ve argued before, the differential sources of meaning are a major explanation for current political and social phenomena. The labor market has shifted structurally to favor white collar services, and the education system is increasingly dominated by women, in large part due to cultural factors (for one, this disparity is 20 years old and reversed over the previous 20). Lower labor demand for men reduces men’s incentives to participate in the economy, at the same time as lower earnings and employment reduces men’s appeal as partners. At the same time, women’s lower response to financial incentives and career decisions more motivated by passion and purpose than profit: women tend to prioritize helping others and helping society above money. This puts straight couples on a clear collision course: women can derive meaning from the “girlboss” identity, as well as their identity as consumers (since women make up the majority of consumer spending, given the obvious bias against frivolity and frill), while men don’t have the dominant producer role to fall back on - even the men who are employed in white collar work don’t have a clear “I made this” to point at and be proud of. Men, as a group, have much greater adherence to male identity rules than women about female ones, particularly younger men, and their behavior tends to follow a (mistaken) view of the majority consensus - that is, the last thing men have remaining from their once unimpregnable position at the top of society is the saying “boys don’t cry”, and cry they won’t - nor work in “pink collar” jobs.

The collision between men and women is most obvious when it comes to family: as I’ve argued in the past (like, a good third of this blog), a major driver for the decline in marriage rates is the mismatch in desires between who should have the responsibility of keeping the house in order: according to a recent study, the perceived fairness or unfairness of domestic work arrangements is a major driver in fertility decisions. In particular, the desire of women to remain working (particularly when, as outlined above, women make career decisions to maximize purpose) is incompatible with the desire of men to be “providers” but not really parents; the 9-9-6 enthusiast quoted above wants to have multiple kids early in life, and also… not spend any time with them beyond Sunday. The decline of marriage rates is also a key driver in the decline of fertility rates: firstly, the number of kids had by married couples has not declined much, and it is the number of married couples which has (in fact, the amount of housework done by married men increasing could itself be a consequence of this, driven by selection effects - that is, by “performative men” being more likely to get married); second, while looking at individual women, millennial women tend to have two children over their lifetimes, just much later after getting married; the decline in Gen Z birthrates, thus, may be driven by a disappearance in early and unplanned pregnancies that could get corrected (but might not) later on. In two recent papers, Claudia Goldin elaborates on her interpretation of the current decline in fertility: given the structural economic changes outlined below, men simply do not have enough control over women’s livelihoods to retain the same historical social and cultural norms. Put another way, the vast majority of women don’t want to be trad wives - not even the trad wives themselves, who are in most cases self-employed content creators running a business. It should also not be forgotten, though, that there is a broader and all-pervasive crisis of loneliness happening in the background; the decline in marriage rates of the last decade, and particularly of the last six years, also corresponds to a broader decline in relationship formation and socialization. If millennials had kids later because they waited to get married - what does it says about Gen Z, who is dating much less and much later as well?

One of the crucial factors, and the one that nobody wants to admit, is that the desire of men to reassert themselves over women who they have limited control over is a fundamental driver in contemporary politics. The backlash against Me Too, which was as swift as it is now undeniable, was driven not by reasonable concern about overreach or unintended consequences, but as part of a well organized project to drive women out of the labor force - since harassment and violence in the workplace, or in education make it extremely likely that a woman will leave her employer, and an increase in sexual violence increases the likelihood of a woman not working at all. The right wing project to remove women from public life altogether is explicitly tied to restoring traditional gender hierarchies, particularly within the household. One of the major players in organizing and financing this backlash, as journalist Moira Donegan talked about her own defamation lawsuit in a recent podcast episode, was anti-woke eugenicist extraordinaire Jeffrey Epstein - not especially an ally of women’s participation in the work force, or in anything beyond sex.

Conclusion

A woman may be scrubbing a floor and not be bored because she is enjoying making a muddy mess vicariously, through identification with her horrid child who, in moments of creative living, brings in the garden mud and tramples it in. (…) Or a man may be as near bored as possible working on a conveyor-belt, but when he thinks of the money, he is also thinking of that improvement he hopes to make to the kitchen sink or he is already watching Southampton surprisingly beat Manchester City on his TV, only half paid for. The fact is that people must not take jobs that they find stifling - or if they cannot avoid this, they must organize their weekends so as to feed the imagination, even at the worst moments of boring routine. It has been said that it is easier to keep the imaginative life going in a truly boring routine than in an area of somewhat interesting work

Donald Winnicott, “Living Creatively” (1970)

One of the more common Gen Z debates is what is “our” tv show: Gen X had Seinfeld, Friends, and Sex and the City; millennials had Girls. What do we have? Well, the likeliest candidates so far are clear heirs to their predecessors: the sex, drugs, and drama focused Euphoria, the mix of hangout comedy and coming-of-age of Adults and Overcompensating, and Rachel Sennott’s entertainment-centered I Love LA. But all of these are, in some way, about social, romantic, and sexual life; the central defining trait of Gen Z, as has been argued a million times before, is the lack of them. Thus, the clearest candidate is Industry, an HBO show about British bankers who waste their life on non-stop work and extremely unsatisfactory sexual and romantic entanglements. The problem is that, in an old fashioned Pedro Mairal sort of way, the creators of the wannabe Gen Z show want to show people who “have a life”; the problem is that the core life experience of Gen Z is to not have one.

The core Gen Z figure isn’t the activist, as was believed in the distant past of a few years ago, but the striver: a person who devotes every part of their being to accumulating “human capital”, whatever that means, and securing a stable existence through grindset hustle culture and influencer side gigs. Even better, Gen Z culture has combined them both, lionizing “teenage CEOs” trying to change the world by not changing anything at all. As Martin Dolan writes in an essay bemoaning the lack of a progressive work culture: “In hindsight, the Bernie-coded millennial thinkers I was reading emerged from a distinctive historical moment (…). From the perspective of Gen Z, that moment has passed. (…) Today, their point of view seems almost anachronistic. Things are different now, more dire. Entry-level jobs are drying up. Everything is more expensive, even while online—forced down our throats by bad actors and black-box algorithms—wealth culture rules. Side hustles and get-rich-quick schemes are everywhere. Nihilism is the mood.”

One of the thinkers Dolan mentions, and the one I thought was the most useful to make these points, is Elizabeth Anderson, particularly her 2023 book Hijacked. In Hijacked, Anderson examines what happened to the notion of the work ethic, which has “two wolves” inside of it: much like the BoBo culture, it tries to merge empathic egalitarianism (focused on helping everyone achieve their best possible life) with individualism, ambition, and self-discipline; in the terms of Francis Fukuyama, it combines both isothymia (the desire to be equal) with megalothymia (the desire to be superior). The Puritan ethic, which Anderson argues the modern work ethic borrows heavily from, emphasizes that true freedom is living in a well-ordered society; the Puritans, as well as many classical liberal thinkers (not to mention regular liberal or even socialist ones) wanted to live in a society “ that made work not just a natural but an ethical priority”. However, according to Anderson, the human desire to engage in meaningful and productive work was, well, hijacked by a conservative ethos "which tells workers that they owe their employers relentless toil and unquestioning obedience. It tells employers that they have exclusive rights to govern their employees and organize work for maximum profit. And it tells the state to entrench the authority of these executives through laws that treat labor as nothing more than a commodity”.

The fact that work can be valued as both a tool for the emancipation of individuals and the construction of a meaningful life and for their oppression and exploitation by their substantially more powerful bosses is a central contradiction in what it means to develop a work ethic. Anderson’s argument is to construct a progressive work ethic that can develop an egalitarian focus on hard-work, self-denial, and dignified conditions, which Dolan notes “might just be more compellingly “countercultural” than yet another broadside against the absurdity of having a job under capitalism”. However, as one reviewer pointed out, Anderson’s argument may “spread its wings only with the dusk (…) comprehending a specific form of life that is now already passing from the scene” in the age of AI- related workslop and displacement. Even without confronting the evidence on productivity or the potential disruption of large swathes of the white-collar labor market, in which case the work ethic will be a quaint concern of the past, AI has already wreaked havoc what it means to work and what it means to want to work. AI generated resumes and AI generated job postings are clogging up job seeking and job posting, which coupled with a decline in available jobs for early-career white collar workers, has resulted in a less meritocratic labor market driven by networks and connections (which Gen Z has less than ever, without counting family), particularly since AI tools also can reproduce existing biases.

In Olga Ravn’s The Employees, a series of human workers on a space station have to guard strange alien things, while accompanied by robot colleagues; in one especially pointed conversation, one of the humanoids responds to a human saying “there’s more to life than work” with ““But what else could a person be? Who would keep you company? How would you get by without work and without your coworkers? Would you be left standing in a cupboard?”. The humanoids live a life that is completely empty outside of work - they were purpose-built for their jobs. The humans, meanwhile… also live for work; they feel alienated and alone, and constantly miss out on their own life. The novel ends with a mutiny of the humanoids, who reject that they were “made for work” Blade Runner style; the corporation flying the ship kills all of them. Ravn’s interpretation of the ending of the novel, is that the very cause of this confrontation (which is what the book tries to figure out, framed as interviews with the crew) is the question “how is the work going”; this activity is what led to the humanoids reflecting on their purpose to begin with. Like most science fiction novels, The Employees wants to make you think whether humans are less human than we think - in this case, by making them refuse to join the humanoids in their anti-work crusade.

In the Republic, Plato introduces the concept of “pleonexia”, a condition where a person has an insatiable and burdensome desire for more that consumes their very existence to its core. In this sense, profound inequality (as defended by the conservative work ethic Anderson vilifies) is itself a kind of sin, one that involves ignoring “the legitimate moral concerns of others (…) to focus on one’s own selfish desires”. The idea that it is simply immoral to want more and more is profoundly controversial in today’s materialistic youth culture; but it cannot be attributed just to envy. The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk wrote that the central defining feature of humanity was the ability to domesticate man from the wolf of man into a friendly dog by virtue of repetition and exercise. Thus, Sloterdijk writes, the central tenet of human culture is the imperative to “change your life”, to exercise some fundamental ethical ability for self improvement and self discipline. Presently, this manifests nearly exclusively as an endless desire for self-advancement, self-promotion, and self-”care”; that is, grindset culture and a monastic devotion to diet and exercise. Herbert Marcuse once wrote that industrial technology blunted the mind with its endless focus on repetition; what, then, will devoting our rational faculties to work as well will do to our ability to pay attention and exercise our discernment?

Anderson takes a good first step by trying to reclaim the work ethic for progressives; however, her mistake is to still center work on the notion of a good life. Unless we rethink our relationship to employment as the main source of meaning, as opposed to seeing it as the material support for a true meaningful existence (one designed by exercising, in a social context, our rational and emotional faculties), we will only build a world that is lonely, exploitative, and unequal.

1. To be fair I found out in a book I read that collected his work on fascism, where every text includes extensive remarks about how fascism is anti-Christian because it denies the basic Christian premise that all men are brothers and created equal.