These days, so much of life seems to revolve around at least some version of so-called "Grind Culture." The more you work, the more you're allegedly "Living the Dream."

Somewhere along the way we actually normalized the idea of endlessly grinding towards some societally defined standard for "success" and happiness. And so, instead of calling such folks workaholics and sending them on vacation, we admire their "drive" while they gradually wear themselves down and burn out.

This morning I came across a tweet by a fairly prominent social psychologist suggesting that our admiration for — and idealization of — workaholics is really misplaced and we'd all be better off if we chose a different ideal...

And that perhaps touches on part of the problem: We tend to measure "better off" in terms of more money and material stuff, while blithely ignoring such things as contentment and emotional/psychological well-being.

It makes me think a bit of my native Denmark, and how the Scandinavian countries in general tend to rank very highly on those periodic international surveys designed to measure which nations are are home to the happiest people.

Ultimately, these surveys don't really measure happiness in terms of actual joy and cheerfulness, but happiness in terms of satisfaction with your overall life. And one of the things all the Scandinavian countries do have in common is a much better balance between living life and enjoying it and work. Similarly, material wealth ranks much lower on the criteria used to measure life contentment.

Working harder and longer doesn't make us "happy" if the net result is that we don't actually have time and energy left over to enjoy those benefits we worked so hard to obtain, in the first place!

I have nothing against hard work, but making it the defining backbone of your existence is just not healthy! And when we do make it so, I can't help but think our priorities are messed up!

Thanks for stopping by and have a great remainder of your weekend!

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Created at 2024-06-28 00:20 PDT
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