Overwork: Ancient and Contemporary Self-Help, Amiri Rivers-David, Pomona ’24

Overwork: Ancient and Contemporary Self-Help

Amiri Rivers-David, Pomona ’24

Staff Writer

It does feel sometimes as if we were born to work. Especially as a student, near-total time efficiency is assumed to be indispensable; if there is a goal and progress is not actively being made toward that goal, time is being wasted. Too, that goal must be respectable and in some sense lucrative. In these moments, where one sees endless drought-saddened fields of labor in their future—in these moments where one feels moon-landed, working infinitely to work infinitely more—in these moments of great stress and worry, it is quite easy to jump feetfirst into the pool of self-help. It is a shame, then, that much of the self-help that is appealing in these states results in deep dissatisfaction. It is of great utility to know exactly why this is the case—if one were to understand the fundamental axioms upon which this unfulfilling advice stands, not only does the advice become easier to rebut, but the individual’s relationship with work and productivity is also deepened and educated.

The drive to work tirelessly stems often from the unquenchable thirst for socioeconomic success. The notion that more labor equates to more happiness is stirred by the echoic memories of the ever-dead American Dream, an ideal still pervasive in the American collective unconscious. Of course, the emphasis on tireless work is not exclusive to American culture, but America’s particular history with respect to the idea influences the way it manifests. Many people still see America as a land of opportunity, through which one’s excellence will pervade and immortalize them with fortune and fame if they should desire it. However, even this fanciful meritocracy is deeply frayed at the seams. Edward Lyttleton, an ethicist writing about work culture in the 20th century, writes how, “A great deal of the work which has been most permanent in its effect has been done by men on the brink of breaking down.”1 Even those great among us, those brilliant young minds who have slaved through the proverbial ranks and have been acknowledged for their ingenuity—even these minds too often suffer still. We repeat, as a mantra, that hymn that tells us of the infinite value of work and blind ourselves to the often unfortunate reality of those legends; we repeat that hymn and continue to sow our tears into that barren field of labor.

Other times, the impulse to work beyond one’s capabilities is not fueled by those echoic memories aforementioned, not driven by any consumerist desire to spend or to be admired in legend. Work itself has become an ideal of sorts, a virtue; someone who works as hard as possible is seen as exemplary, as a paragon of spirit and discipline; they are seen as, in some ways, more honorable people. They are envied for their work ethic, regardless of whether they achieve the sky-scraper heights of a realized American Dream. Here too Lyttleton informs how an able-bodied person impossibly ought both not to injure their health nor turn down work:

Work cannot be refused, though the limits of energy have been reached... However formidable the increase of burden may be, the worker should say to himself “I can do it: it will not tire me—not a bit.”2

Youth as an ideal collides with work, as if one of the core and incorrigible qualities of youth is the production of labor, as if it were a rite of passage. Young, spry, and able-bodied all imply one’s readiness to produce to that maximum capacity; a young person doing exactly that is seen as taking full advantage of their youth, of seizing their days of good health, and is further exalted as “one of the good ones”

by peers and elders alike. These two concepts of labor and youth coincide in such a way that, regardless of one’s socioeconomic aspirations, they are hurled headfirst just as quickly and in the same direction as some money-crazed Bezos wannabe. Work, by any means necessary.

To succumb to these practices in an extreme sense is to succumb to their dire effects. We see those once bright lights totally submerged in the pursuit of the American Dream, or perhaps in pursuit of work as an ideal, or most likely both—mudded down with boots in black water, eyes darkened and sleep-deprived, tone low. Of course, any positively hard-working laborer will dip a toe in that mud, occasionally; even a healthy schedule can be overwhelming sometimes. But these people, they have convinced themselves of the never-diminishing returns of present-day sorrow. They do not have bad days; they are bad days, in a way they believe is commendable. The unsustainable becomes sustainable clenched in the fist of unshakeable will.

To them it may come as a surprise, or an expense, that this behavior has not only emotional consequences—like those of depression and anxiety—but physical ones too. In many ways, the road paved with intense suffering leads not out of it but only deeper into its gaping maw. Evidence strongly suggests that one can even die from overwork; and if one can die from the most severe overwork, surely the more common, milder practice of it results in physical health complications. Michie et. al. write how, “A Danish study, which followed up 2,465 bus drivers over seven years, found that objective workload was the factor most strongly associated with death...”3 Another study on 500 retired Swedish men also concluded that “high demand and low control”, combined with a lack of social contact resulted in increased mortality. One can see how an overworked lifestyle precludes engagement in other important aspects of life, casting the overworked deeper into their struggles.

As is now evident, the person condemned to even a more moderate case of being overworked can experience not only serious mental and emotional strain but physical decline as well. As the amount of non-laborious time in their day is already so miniscule, and what time they do have is under the duress of such bad health, for many the concept of getting professional help is inconceivable. Still many companies fail to provide resources for a stressed employee to seek counsel and respite, at least not until it’s too far gone. Professional care, like therapy, can also be very expensive, making it further unavailable for those who may need it. In these scenarios, the only possible medium through which to search for aid is the internet. There are countless online personalities with innumerable pieces of advice, inescapable and most apparent to the overworked in the little time they can spare.

These resources can be greatly beneficial, of course. It would be false to assume that any advice one finds on the internet is incoherent or misleading by mere virtue of its domain. However, for this particular demographic of help-seekers, the kind of guidance they will gravitate towards often fails to be satisfying and will only serve to entrench deeper the premises that caused their predicament in the first place. People naturally are attracted to spaces in which their values are shared—for this reason, the overworked are likely to find themselves in a place where work as an ideal and the American Dream are preserved.

Hearing counsel of this nature perpetuates a feedback loop, where the worker’s problematic beliefs are confirmed and they work even harder, causing even more dissatisfaction and a further sink into the negative online hustlepromoting environment. Built into these spaces are refrains essentially the same as the hymn Lyttleton mentioned, meant to condone and even encourage extreme suffering on the cross of labor. We must investigate—if not out of curiosity, then for the sake of the souls in this tragic riptide—and interrogate the

assumptions implicit in these spaces and understand what an alternative must provide to help free them.

To understand the nature of these social spaces in which the overworked find themselves, we must first understand the axes on which self-help is oriented. Foucault in his History of Sexuality Volume 3: The Care of the Self provides an excellent outline for how the notion of self-care came to be in the Hellenic and Roman periods of Europe.4 These traditions and ideals have proliferated over the eons to be fundamental to our contemporary image of self-help, and have only become more stated in the advice provided over the Internet.

Importantly, Foucalt tracks the development of self-care as it became akin to doctrine, rather than disparate advice. It became something one was, not just an aspect of what one did; it became an all-encompassing worldview, totalizing, and not a mere opinion or perspective one had among many others. It became an imperative. Socrates particularly incorporated this into his very influential methodology; selfcare in his view was an “art of existence.”5 Foucault writes how “It also took the form of an attitude, a mode of behavior; it became instilled in ways of living; it evolved into procedures, practices, and formulas…”6

This more complete and unifying view of self-care is far more compelling, and encourages one to structure the entirety of one’s life around a typically narrow set of principles. When applied correctly, this more focused basis for maintaining oneself can be quite effective; it makes requisite that one highlights exactly what they find important to do and to value, and emphasizes that they live in accordance with those ideals. However, when we observe the spaces in which the overworked tend to congregate, we find that work itself is the end-all be-all of value, honor, and practice. This is to say that work as an ideal and the American Dream have substituted for the ordinarily well-rounded prescriptions of quality self-help. A well-known influencer named Gary Vaynerchuk, or Gary Vee, serves as an excellent case-study for this kind of behavior.

The very first thing one noticesabout what Vee advocates for is that work itself is the absolute virtue. While wealth and luxury goods are romanticized to some degree, the work it takes to achieve that lifestyle is romanticized to a far greater extent. As is common in these social spaces, the self-help doctrine’s imperative becomes overwhelmed with the command to work. To care for oneself is to not only earn money but to implement as the primary motivation in one’s life the search for monetary success. Vee says how, “If you want bling bling, if you wanna buy the jets, if you wanna do shit—work! That’s how you get it,”7 and that “If you are actually happy it’s the weekend, or are pumped to go on vacation, your shit is broken.”8 In this view, if you are not working tirelessly, you are doing something critically wrong.

More practically, self-help is not just a general attitude but is a labor of constant examination of one’s representations and values; one must scrutinize how they see the world and what they give importance to. In the Roman and Hellenic periods, an art of self-knowledge developed: to know oneself implies understanding oneself along certain lines. An “ethics of control” is implied in traditional care for the self. Foucault writes how “It is to assess the relationship between oneself and that which is represented, so as to accept in the relation to the self only that which can depend on the subject’s free and rational choice.”9 To care for oneself well, one must consistently examine what it is they believe and their relationships with rigor—additionally, they must eliminate those relationships and beliefs that are not extensions of their “free and rational choice.” In the rhetoric of Vee and his followers, it seems as though all that one can count on to be free and rational in one’s life is one’s own work ethic. For this reason it is overwhelmingly magnified.

This self-examination takes some strange forms in online “overwork spaces”; because the ultimate virtue of their philosophy is work, the only real self-examination one can do is concentrated around that. Vee tells his followers: “Look yourself in the mirror of your hotel room and ask yourself, is your work ethic mapping the bullcrap that’s coming out of your mouth?”10 To want to do something and to work tirelessly for it are, to him, indistinguishable, and anything less than that tireless work is a sign of weakness. Failure itself is, in a way, glamorized for that reason—it allows one to work even harder and immortalize their struggle even more in achieving what they desire. The following dialogue between Vee and a follower of his shows very well how he thinks of failure. She asks him how to deal with business failure, and he responds:

“Who do you love most in the world?” “My family.” “Every day, literally once a day, genuinely sit there for five minutes and make pretend that one of them got shot in the face. I’m being dead serious with you.”11

He asserts that, after doing this kind of practice, one’s business failures will seem insignificant in comparison to what horrific events they have imagined. It should be clearer now just how extreme this doctrine can be, and how business failure and work are contextualized: let nothing, including failure, prevent you from working at all costs.

Naturally, then, leisure is made tobe a kind of enemy of the state. Work ethic is so bulbous in Vee and his contemporaries’ thought that it precludes almost any form of entertainment or relaxation. He preaches, “If you are listening and are fucking complaining, you gotta audit yourself. You can’t watch House of Cards, you can’t go to ballet shows… you gotta work!”12 and “If you are actually happy it’s the weekend, or are pumped to go on vacation, your shit is broken.”13 It is no secret that actual productivity suffers from the lack of any kind of leisure, so these statements are very interesting. They demonstrate that actual productivity is far less important than the appearance, or sign, of productivity. The act of working is in itself valuable, while the importance of the product and efficiency of the work is diminished.

One of the larger differences between overwork spaces online and ancient self-help is the former’s disproportionate focus on practice. In ancient Rome and Greece, examination of practice existed in an intrinsically dual state with examination of theory. A healthy person studied their representations and their practices in tandem, each given a significant amount of importance. Vee, however, virtually always advocates for an examination of theory for the end of practice. In other words, in these overwork spaces, the practice is the benchmark for the efficacy of the theory. To evaluate the quality of the doctrine, one must simply observe how hard it causes one to work; if it inspires them to work exceptionally hard, the theory is exceptional, and if not, the theory is lackluster. Because work is the ultimate virtue and ideal, it is the only metric one can use in determining the strength of the theory that is supposed to underpin it. Vee encourages his listeners to, “Enjoy eating shit, and dirt, and bleeding, and the grind… have four jobs: fuckin’ Wendy’s, Walmart, your side-hustle— work!”14 and that, “by the way, you can work at night! This is when you put in the 18 hours a day to make the life that you want happen.”15 It is clear that any concept that comes between a worker and their work is a concept that must be done away with.

Now that we’ve both outlined the ancient origins of self-help and how they relate to online overwork spaces, we are still left with a question: why is any of this appealing to anyone? It seems awful from the outside looking in. But upon closer study, the answer becomes clear. This doctrine of work is so captivating because it inverts the suffering of the overworked into self-flagellation, a betterment of oneself through intense torment. This is

furthered by the charismatic and bold nature of the purveyors of this knowledge, or the philosophers in the ancient model. Foucault writes of the “extreme eagerness of adults to look after their souls, the zeal with which, like schoolboys grown old, they sought out philosophers so they might be shown the way to happiness…”16 The overworked reach out to the Gary Vees of overwork spaces with similar zeal, hoping to find some way to turn their agony into something redeeming.

Additionally, the achievement of the end goal of all this work is seen to be more gratifying the more that was sacrificed. Inherent to the ancient model of self-help is the pleasure that one achieves after having adopted all of its practices and notions. Foucault mentions how this pleasure is “defined by the fact of not being caused by anything that is independent of ourselves and therefore escapes our control.”17 It is appealing because it is not fleeting like many bodily pleasures, and is engendered by things entirely within our sphere of influence. With Vee, however, because intensity of work is the only variable one is able to change freely, the pleasure one gets as a result of the doctrine must only be a function of the intensity of that work. In other words, the harder one works at something, the more pleasure they will receive from the doctrine that these overwork spaces provide; inversely, if something was achieved without much work, its associated pleasure and value decreases proportionally. Vee comments frequently how the sweetness of achieving the goal that one has shed blood, sweat, and tears for makes everything worthwhile.

What can be done, then, after having been sucked into the never-ending, self-flagellationadvocating online overwork spaces? Interestingly, in order to begin freeing oneself from their grip, no immediate action must be taken. Rather, one must de-emphasize the act of working and reincorporate other values into the premises of their self-help methodology. Having done this, one realizes that they must balance productivity—which itself is more useful of a metric than mere work—with other things, like day-to-day pleasures and leisure. Naturally the ramblings of the Gary Vees of these online spaces will begin to feel myopic (because they are), and if the proper steps are taken in accordance with this newfound, balanced idea of self-help, the barriers to actually ceasing the overwork are lessened.

Obviously, the complexity of overwork is far greater than what a simple methodological explanation could account for. There are innumerable influences, ranging from socioeconomic to cultural to biological, all weaving together and manifesting in the behavior of the overworked. Undoubtedly, however, a confused or unhealthy ideal of self-care can contribute to the severity of unhealthy work habits; therefore, it is very important to not only understand what kind of self-help the overworked consume, but how that self-help came to be. For only through a thorough understanding of online overwork spaces can remedies be prescribed—remedies that some may be in desperate need of in the twilight of their lives.

Endnotes 1 Edward Lyttleton, “The Present-Day Problem of

Overwork,” International Journal of Ethics 38, no. 3 (1928): 336, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2378158. 2 Lyttleton, 337-338. 3 Susan Michie and Anne Cockcroft, “Overwork

Can Kill: Especially If Combined With High Demand, Low Control, And Poor Social Support,”

British Medical Journal 312, no. 7036 (1996): 921, http://www.jstor.org/stable/29731290. 4 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 3:

The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New

York, NY: Random House, Inc., 1986). 5 Foucault, 44. 6 Foucault, 45. 7 The Hustle Lyfe, “HARD WORK ALWAYS

PAYS OFF - Motivational Video For Success | Gary Vaynerchuk Motivation,” Youtube Video, 4:24, May 3, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhxcgMbX1 44. 8 The Hustle Lyfe, 6:55.

9 Foucault, Care of the Self, 64. 10 The Hustle Lyfe, “HARD WORK ALWAYS

PAYS OFF,” 4:05. 11 Gary Vaynerchuk, “Imagine The Most Important

Person to You Was Gone Tomorrow | DailyVee 577,” Youtube video, 0:12, September 14, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0P8tlc2Xe4. 12 The Hustle Lyfe, “HARD WORK ALWAYS

PAYS OFF,” 4:00. 13 The Hustle Lyfe, 6:55. 14 The Hustle Lyfe, 1:35. 15 The Hustle Lyfe, 3:28. 16 Foucault, Care of the Self, 49. 17 Foucault, 66.