Work hard, play hard: Aye Aye sir

Alas, all the complaints about the fast life! Is it really the most pressing issue of our time? Many want to make us believe so. Countless books and articles are being written on the subject – about exhaustion, fatigue, burnouts and the unbearable pressures of the performance-oriented society. Miriam Meckel, the corporate communications professor-turned-burnout martyr, is touting the “happiness of unavailability”, which turned her into a bestselling author touring the speaking circuit and living the busy life she denounces in her writing. Celebrity philosopher Byung-Chul Han is diagnosing a “society of fatigue”. The Slow Food movement wants us to get our vegetables from the farmer’s market and spend three hours in the kitchen each day preparing them. The French enjoy the shortest work week of any industrialized nation, a puny 35 hours, and are still complaining. Kids can’t deal with the pressures of school anymore and are prescribed anti-anxiety drugs from age 12. Even my mother has written a book reminding us to take it “slower”. There’s an elaborate, broad-based conspiracy to dissuade us from a dynamic, fast-paced, hard-charging lifestyle. As if time could be slowed down by the sheer force of will. As if time could be manipulated at all!

Frankly, I think the problem is grotesquely overrated. If occupational therapists can make a living from advising organizations and managers on how to cope with excessive E-mail traffic, then something’s seriously amiss. Not because E-mail traffic is harmful, but because evidently we’ve become so hypersensitive and lazy that it’s too much to ask from a person with a higher education to make a decision about whether to read, respond to or delete a given message in her inbox. Three choices. Even with 300 E-mails a day, that’s not so hard. Learn to prioritize and focus on the time-critical stuff. Skimming through a bunch of messages to assess their relevance takes no more than a few minutes. If you can’t manage that, you’re probably in the wrong job anyway.

Given that the majority of people in Switzerland work the legally required 42.5 hours a week, period, it is hard to see why they would require support from masterminds of the no-stress movement. They should be concerned about what to do with the remaining 75% of the week instead. If anything, we don’t work too much, we work too little. Work has been marginalized and vilified in favor of an obsession with leisure, recreation and weekend planning. It’s fair to say that the use of that free time is rather unproductive in most cases. I know from experience that the imperative of fun creates far more stress and ties up more energy than work itself.

What we should be focusing on is uncertainty. Free time is a double-edged sword in that it adds uncertainty to our lives by giving us plenty of options for what to do with it – the result being that we chase leisure and try to escape the treadmill of the daily grind just to spend it on mind-numbing activities. In the absence of a plan regarding the good use of free time, which seems to be the norm, the second best alternative to avoiding the horror vacui is living the fast life and filling every minute of every hour with frenzied activity and purpose. In that sense, it’s a self-preserving, self-protective mechanism. Sure, it’s a brute force approach to overcome a self-inflicted inadequacy. But it ultimately leads to more conscious decisions about what really deserves our attention and a better use of the time we can spend for ourselves.

The debate about going fast vs. taking it slow is pure shadow boxing. It’s a non-issue blown out of proportion by savvy publishers, social workers and life coaches. The fact that some people can cope with pressure perfectly well shows that it’s about will and stamina, rather than a cruel byproduct of society. It’s also a lifestyle decision. If you don’t like it, you can always avoid pressure by adjusting to it or by doing something else. Pretending that the fast life is some kind of evil, destructive force corrupting humanity is hypocritical hyperbole. If you have nothing else to complain about, you should consider yourself lucky. I would still recommend you take a hard look at yourself and think again.