Workaholic Nation

My Dad is awesome in many, many ways. He’s kind, caring, smart and funny (even with his bad corny jokes). He’s always willing to offer advice, and help when needed. He’s also a workaholic. I have come to know a growing number of workaholics as I’ve gotten older. You know the type: almost always working, thinking about work, checking work email at home at night, working way more than 40 hours a week, etc. I’ve come to realize, to my horror, that I’m doing that too - and not even realizing it.

In a moment of somewhat silent reflection last week (out by my pond), I got to thinking about that in more depth and detail. I spend a lot of time working - both in the office and at home - and even more time thinking about work and/or work related things when i’m not actively working. As a consequence, I feel run down, burned out and constantly tired. I’m sure it hasn’t helped my mood any, either, as a side effect is increased stress levels and less time to de-stress. That’s part of the reason I was sitting out by the pond.

As a nation, we seem to put an unhealthy emphasis on work. We con ourselves into believing that, in order to have a successful and worthwhile life, we have to make a lot of money and spend it on ridiculously expensive gadgets. I admit, I have bought into this myself (as I write this on my Macbook Pro…). Because of this emphasis, people sacrafice things that shouldn’t be sacraficed in order to “get ahead” in the world - things like family, friendships, and personal relaxation/ enjoyment time. We spend so much of our lives devoted to a job that in the end benefits only a few at the top of the organization, and for what? A paycheck and boatloads of stress. While we’re at it, we can only take vacations when they say it’s OK, we have to work overtime when they say we need to work overtime, and we have to miss our kids school plays because we just couldn’t get away from work. The whole time all that’s going on we’re also battling to not have a mental breakdown because of all the stress and no time for a proper outlet.

That’s what the working world is like for young adults. That’s not how life should be.

Now it seems that the same thing is becoming the status quo for school children, as well. When I was in school, homework was a fact of life. I was told, depending on the school, that I should have anywhere from 1 to 3 hours of homework a night. Usually I had more than what they said we SHOULD have, as each teacher seemed to take it upon his/her self to make SURE i had at least the minimum. I can’t complain, though, as I didn’t do the homework anyways - but that’s another story.

It’s only gotten worse for kids, though, as more pressure has come down onto teachers to raise test scores (and as a result get more funding) they have taken to drilling children on reading and math - asigning reams of homework every night, and on weekends and school breaks. Kids spend many hours a day at school, then are expected to spend many hours at home on “their time” doing homework. It’s absurd to do that to children - it’s as though as a society we’re trying to indoctrinate our children into becoming workaholics whose sole purpose in life is to do the bidding of others while sacraficing themselves and their own wellbeing in the process.

Children need to play, need to relax and need time to be kids. Assigning a mountain of homework every night eliminates any possibility of them being able to do that. Assigning homework over the weekend also reduces their ability to unwind. It’s just NOT HEALTHY. The no child left behind act has only made this worse, as schools with low performance on standardized tests have their funding CUT. Let’s look at that again for a second so you can see the absurdity: legislation called NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND advocates CUTTING FUNDING from poorly performing schools. So, by definition it would leave children behind. It seems to me that it should be “some children left behind”.

Back to my point, though: We all need to take a step back from our jobs, realize our jobs are not what define us (if you think your job defines you let me be the first to tell you that you’re very very wrong about that and I hope you wake up to that realization soon), and start enjoying our lives. Life is too short to spend every waking minute of it engrossed in work. That holds true for children and adults alike. Let’s stop being a slave to capitalism and corporate masters and start living full healthy lives.

If you already DO live a full and healthy and happy life - good for you. If you have taken pause and are thinking “well, I *have* been working a lot lately…” and believe you may be a workaholic - there’s no better time to change than now.

BoingBoing has an interesting post talking about a book that makes a case about how we need to back off on the homework for school kids.   I suggest you check it out.

[tags] Workaholic, homework, life , boingboing [/tags]