Ask a five-year-old what they want to be when they grow up, and watch how their eyes light up when they answer.
Then watch how the adults react. Nods of approval greet the future doctor, lawyer, teacher, or astronaut. Narrowed eyes greet the artist, influencer, or gardener – careers that apparently require a backup plan. “There’s no money in that.”
We mean well. We hope to prepare our children for the “real world” and ensure they have a safe, stable life.
But children have a narrow worldview limited to whatever jobs happen to surround them. Asking that question teaches a lesson long before kids understand what a job is: who you are is what you do, and what you do is worth what it pays.
Twenty years later, the question becomes, “So, what do you do for work?” to calculate how much social respect you deserve based on your paycheck.
I chose suffering on purpose
The earliest answer I remember to “What do you want to be when you grow up?” was in eighth grade. On the heels of my mom’s remission from brain cancer, I wrote in my yearbook that I wanted to be a therapist—my impulse was to be a helper.
But at 18, I declared a major in mathematics to become an actuary. Talk about a pivot.
My high school AP Calculus teacher promised it was a safe, prestigious six-figure field. Insurance companies hire actuaries, for instance, to estimate the probability and cost of events like accidents, natural disasters, or death. Fun, right?
I grew up in a blue-collar house where money was tight, so stability sounded great. It also made me look smart, which I cared about more than I’d admit.
Despite excelling in my prior math classes, calculus was brutally difficult for me. I joined study groups to truly understand the material and fought to maintain my A+ average. I felt like I had something to prove.
When I look back, I picked the path that would hurt the most, as if suffering were proof I was on the right one…As if suffering was a prerequisite for success and happiness.
It wasn’t until therapy many years later that I unraveled why. Achievement was the fastest way to get noticed as a kid. So I learned to be noticed working.
Belonging is a fundamental human need. When adults only notice us when we achieve, we learn to equate our usefulness with our right to be loved. We don’t just overwork for a paycheck; we overwork because, deep down, we’re terrified that if we stop, we will be cast out.
Looking busy is a learned skill
On Sundays, I heard that an idle mind is the devil’s workshop. On weekdays, I’d jump off the couch the second my dad’s car pulled into the driveway so I’d look busy when he walked in. I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I’d just learned that visible effort kept me out of trouble.
Plenty of us bring that reflex to work. We answer fast so we look responsive. We accept every meeting or project so we look engaged. We stay green on Teams so nobody wonders.
It adds up. In a 2023 Visier survey of 1,000 full-time U.S. employees, 43% said they spend more than 10 hours a week on what Visier calls productivity theater: time spent trying to look productive instead of doing valuable work.
None of this started with us.
In 1905, Max Weber wrote an entire book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, about how the moral weight of hard work moved from the pulpit to the paycheck.
Historian Caitlin Rosenthal studied hundreds of plantation account books from 1750 to 1860. In Harvard Business Review, she concluded that slaveholding plantations “used scientific management techniques—and some applied them more extensively than the factories thought to be their originators.”
By the early 1900s, Frederick Winslow Taylor stood on the factory floor and used stopwatches to time every motion a worker made. His premise as published in The Principles of Scientific Management was that workers shouldn’t need to think, because managers would do it for them. Though it was good for business, workers felt dehumanized and like interchangeable parts on the assembly line.
Even the fight for free time ran into it. In 1933, the Senate passed a 30-hour workweek bill, 53 to 30. Business leaders fought it hard. As historian Benjamin Hunnicutt wrote, they feared “that if workers got a taste of a 30-hour week, they would never want to go back.”
Today, that looks like timesheets, keystroke monitoring, meeting daily quotas, and promotion paths that reward productivity. A personal supervisor has been installed directly inside our own heads so we question our own right to free time. We’ve all heard that voice and sudden wave of guilt that whispers you should be doing something productive right now whenever you sit on the couch for twenty minutes.
The Productivity Paradox
We optimize every area of our lives, desperate to recover a few free minutes where we feel like we can breathe. We ingest audiobooks and podcasts at 2x speed, use AI to write and summarize emails, step over the Roomba as it vacuums, and wear smart rings and watches to track our steps and our sleep, ensuring we can produce maximum output again tomorrow. Rinse and repeat.
Perhaps the most ironic thing about productivity is that the reward for efficiency is only ever more work. If you save two hours by working faster or automating some area of your life, you rarely use it to slow down and stare at the clouds; you fill the void with yet another task on a seemingly endless to-do list.
Why is productivity the goal? And what are we rushing toward?
When organizations evaluate performance on speed, volume, and visibility, workers compete on the exact productivity metrics where technology will always win.
For a century, looking busy was a decent career strategy. It’s about to become a terrible one. AI is faster than any of us at responding, drafting, summarizing, and producing volume. If that’s what we reward, we’re training people to lose every time.
In Do Nothing, Celeste Headlee asks,
“Why are we so efficient and yet so overwhelmed? Why are we so productive with so little to show for it?”
My guess? Because modern-day knowledge work still operates under industrial-era rules. We haven’t redesigned work for all of these new stimuli.
We need to redesign work around what only humans can do.
Solving the Right Problem
I learned this the hard way. In 2021, I was laid off from a tech job a month after moving 1,000 miles from home. Being told, “it’s not personal, it’s just business” forced me to confront the reality: you can check all the boxes, work hard through a pandemic, and still not win the race.
I had a full-on identity crisis because I didn’t know who I was without my work. But I was burnt out and couldn’t ‘work harder’ my way out of it. That’s what I had been doing – white knuckling it through life – and it never worked. I started asking myself different questions, because I had been working on solving the wrong problem.
The real problem was the expectation itself: Demanding infinite, linear growth from a human being is both a biological and cosmic absurdity.
Companies are expected to post record growth every quarter, and we project the same demands of our brains and bodies, often without considering the cost.
As I shared on the TEDx stage, decay occurs when we treat ourselves as separate from the ecosystem around us. When autumn leaves fall, they aren’t failing the tree, nor are they trying to optimize how long they can cling to the branch. They decompose to create the nutrient-rich soil required for new growth later.
Soil requires unhurried time to replenish its minerals before anything new can take root. A “fallow phase” is a farming practice where agricultural land is left unsown and uncultivated for one or more growing seasons to rest and recover.
In human life, a fallow phase is the same need for intentional breaks. It’s the radical belief that stillness is not wasted time but the essential ground beneath all living things.
As Oliver Burkeman states in Four Thousand Weeks, our time on Earth is insultingly brief.
“The real measure of any time management technique,” he writes, “is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.”
We’ve already talked about time poverty, but it’s also a crisis of identity poverty. Perhaps the real challenge isn’t that we have too little time but that we spend too much of it on things that disconnect us from who we are.
As one of my LinkedIn connections recently commented: “The greatest productivity loss is not wasted time—it is a life spent working hard in the wrong direction and building a life that isn’t truly ours.”
We seem convinced that it feels good to work hard. But is that true? Or are we simply afraid that we don’t know who we are, individually and collectively, without working as hard as we do, for as many hours as we do? Are we afraid to confront the uncomfortable truth that we feel worthless when we aren’t being useful? That we wouldn’t even know where to begin if the world stopped expecting us to produce and consume?
Changing What We’re Optimizing Toward
I spent my young adulthood studying mathematics to become an actuary, learning how to calculate risk, probability, and the likelihood of death. Though I (thankfully) changed majors eventually, the statistical truth that matters most is this:
You are going to die one day. The probability of you existing on this floating rock in space is virtually zero. We are an impossible cosmic accident. Why spend that fleeting, miraculous existence measuring our value against some arbitrary metric and a finish line that doesn’t exist?
Instead of asking “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, let’s start asking who someone wants to become; how they want to feel; and why that matters to them. Let’s condition children to view their future selves as complex human beings with rich emotional lives and curiosities.
At work, the equivalent is changing what we praise. What gets rewarded? Do we prioritize outputs or outcomes?
The only things we should ever be optimizing toward are joy and ease. How much of what we do builds a world where we feel more joyous and life feels easier? How can we drop more nutrients into the soil for future generations, long after we are all gone?
One Response
This was wonderful and inspiring to read. It always grates me to hear someone talk about working hard as a precursor to success.
Why does work have to be hard? It’s already work!
Those of us from blue collar families have to end the generation curse of working ourselves until our bodies give up and we line up for all the knee replacements and physical therapy. I sometimes feel guilty resting on a day off… In my own home. That I did work hard to achieve!
If we can’t rest in our own sanctuaries, then where? When?