Be honest. You’re a control freak. You’re in a rat race. You’re trapped on the hedonic treadmill, you’re surfing the info tsunami and you’re mainlining off your Crackberry. Gonna have to face it, you’re addicted to work.
And that’s exactly the way it should be.
Consider the Dickens Paradox. In George Orwell’s essay on Charles Dickens, he wonders what the Victorian novelist’s heroes get up to after the books end: “The answer evidently is that they did nothing . . . That is the spirit in which most of Dickens’ books end — a sort of radiant idleness. His heroes, once they had come into money and ‘settled down,’ would not only do no work; they would not even ride, hunt, shoot, fight duels, elope with actresses or lose money at the races. They would simply live at home in feather-bed respectability, and preferably next door to a blood-relation living exactly the same life.”
That was how Dickens wrote. Now consider how he lived.
He was famous by age 24, when his first novel was published, and quickly became rich. He could have retired long before he plucked his first gray hair.
Yet in the 35 years before his death at 58, he produced 13 novels, most of them massive. His short stories, plays, essays and poetry filled more than a dozen volumes. He was a prodigious writer of letters and a control-freak editor of two very prominent magazines, often rewriting their contents. He traveled widely, frequently performed in speaking engagements, dabbled in theater productions, worked tirelessly on charitable causes, obsessively rebuilt his various houses. And he did all this while walking 20 miles a day.
Why so busy? Because work is life.
That’s the takeaway from “Rush: Why You Need and Love the Rat Race,” by Todd Buchholz, former managing director of the Tiger hedge fund and a director of White House economic policy under the senior President Bush.
In his amusingly overcaffeinated book, Buchholz sprints back and forth from Socrates to Sudoku, Chris Rock to Rousseau. He assembles anecdotes and psychological case studies to back his point that what we really need and want is to keep our neurons firing.
If you can handle the bad jokes and the Speedy Gonzalez attention span, Buchholz can be a rip-roaring companion — picture a brilliant gym teacher.
Happiness experts these days are like Dickens’ heroes. They tell us we need to log off, power down, unplug. The reason we don’t, supposedly, is that we feel we’re prisoners of our mortgages and our kids’ college funds. We buy every new luxury-turned-necessity so we won’t feel left out of the cool club, not because they make us happy.
Buchholz says that’s completely wrong.
“Much of the common happiness advice is feckless, and sometimes dangerous,” he says. You’d be miserable in fantasyland, so just accept the real world: “packed with stress, hatred, love, affection, traffic, caffeine and cotton candy.”
Gurus think that because our jobs bring in money, we work exclusively for that reason. “Extra income has done so little to produce a happier society,” said Baron Richard Layard, a British economist and author of “Happiness: Lessons from a New Science,” adding that “there must be something quite wasteful about much of it.” Back in fashion is the concept of “enoughness” popularized by E.F. Schumacher’s 1970s tome “Small Is Beautiful.” Jimmy Carter was a Schumacher fan who invited him to the White House.
Yet it isn’t really so odd that, despite the wealth of our society, Americans choose to work more. This is especially true of higher-paid and more-educated Americans. Big earners are twice as likely to work long hours as the bottom 20%, Buchholz notes. We spend so much time on the treadmill because it makes us feel better about ourselves.
Few would accept the deal offered by philosopher Robert Nozick in a thought experiment: You can spend the rest of your life in a state of utter bliss — but you also have to be asleep at all times.
A book that in some ways complements “Rush” is Daniel H. Pink’s “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us,” which is just out in paperback. Pink uses the phrase “the third drive” to explain why monkeys given a puzzle — but no rewards for attempting to solve it — put so much effort into it. “The joy of the task was its own reward,” Pink writes.
Citing self-determination theory, Pink notes that when our needs for competence, autonomy and relatedness are satisfied, we’re motivated, productive and happy. This ties into the buzzword “flow,” psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s term (a k a “in the groove,” “in the zone”) for the enjoyment of being engaged and absorbed in our work.
Simply making an effort puts us halfway there. When we take on a challenge, our brains flood with dopamine — “the molecule of urge,” Buchholz says, adding, “Dopamine is not the reward for winning, for conquering, for finishing the race, the task, or the job. Dopamine is the reward for trying.”
And trying keeps us sharp. In the US and Denmark, men in their 60s are a third less likely to work than men in their 50s. In France and Austria, though, 80% to 90% of men in their 60s are retired — and there is a corresponding acceleration in loss of cognitive function.
If conventional wisdom were correct, the happiest among us would be those who didn’t have to work but still received pay. But social scientist Arthur C. Brooks notes that if you take two people with the same education, age and employment characteristics, and one of them is collecting welfare, there is a 16% greater chance that that person will have felt “inconsolably sad” at some point in the previous month.
Not all work is rewarding. But provided that we have a satisfactory level of control over what we’re doing, along with a feeling of competence and being networked in with others, work doesn’t just result in cash. There’s a lot of psychic take-home pay as well.