Excess and Judgmentalism

A recent article in The Atlantic led with the headline Too Many Elite American Men Are Obsessed With Work and Wealth, and followed with the sub-headline “And it’s making the pay gap worse.” The article opens with the reported wage gap between women and men, which it cites as somewhere between 79 and 92 cents on the dollar, depending on methodology, and goes on to discuss how part of that wage gap, especially at the top, is rooted in disparate attitudes towards work and career. In short, men tend to prioritize making money more than women do, and are willing to work longer and harder to do so. This won’t sit well with some social justice warriors, who cannot fathom that men and women are actually different, because it points to a cause other than discrimination to explain the wage gap.

This conclusion isn’t a new one. There has been plenty of analysis of the wage gap that has reached the same conclusion, i.e. that much of what there actually is (as opposed to what’s parroted by people like actress Patricia Arquette) can be explained by different career choices and life priorities.

The thing that raised my eyebrow in this case was the use of the word “obsessed” and the phrase “too many,” both of which carry strong negative connotations. What if the headline read, “Many of the Most Successful Elite American Men Demonstrate the Strongest Work Ethics?” It’s essentially the same pronouncement, but portrayed in a positive rather than a negative light. This poses the question: when does work ethic cross over into obsession?

Kobe Bryant, the LA Lakers legend, is famous for his work ethic. Awake at 3 or 4 in the morning, practicing by 5 AM, practicing until 7 PM. Wayne Gretzky, possibly the greatest hockey player in history, from childhood would use pencil and paper to track the movement of the puck during the games he watched on television. For hours, never taking his eyes off the screen, he studied. Hafthor Bjornsson, the Icelandic strongman who played The Mountain in Game of Thrones, switched from basketball (he’s 6′ 9″) to strongman competitions after a knee injury cut his basketball ambitions down. At age 19, he weighed 154 lbs. In two years of training, he bulked up to 440 lbs, and by age 24 had placed second in the World Strongman Title. Baseball player David Wright, diagnosed last year with spinal stenosis, spends three extra hours every day preparing so that he can play through his condition rather than retire, despite having already earned more money at age 33 than most will in a lifetime.

Those are just the athletes. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz puts in 13 hour days at the office, but continues to work from home in the evenings, works from home on Saturdays, and goes to work on Sundays. Mark Cuban didn’t take a vacation for 7 years when starting his business. GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt worked 100 hours a week for 24 years. Tony Iommi, guitarist of the band Black Sabbath, lost two of his fingertips in an industrial accident at age 17, the day before he was to go out on a tour with a band. Instead of giving up on his musical dreams, he fashioned “thimbles” for those fingers, taught himself how to play a style that would fit his new condition, and became a legend. Jimi Hendrix famously carried a guitar everywhere, putting it on before even getting his morning coffee. As a child, before he got his first guitar, he carried a broom around as a pretend-guitar for a year. Actor Christian Bale dropped from 180 lbs to 120 lbs for the movie The Machinist by eating an apple and a can of tuna fish every day – and nothing else. He then bulked himself back up to 220 lbs in order to portray Batman, in just a few months.

Are any of these people “obsessed” with pursuing success? Is their work ethic too strong? Have they crossed some sort of line into excess? It depends on whether you judge their actions based on your own values or accept that they have different goals and values than you might. Some of these people are generally admired, some are not (especially by the equality-focused social justice types) and some are considered a bit nutty. In some cases, we might wish we had their level of dedication and drive. In others, we might conclude that the sacrifices they’ve chosen to make aren’t something we’d want to make. To these extents, we’re not doing anything wrong. However, many take it a step too far, by publicly judging (and condemning) others’ choices. In doing so, they declare that their own values are more “correct” than those of the people they judge, and dismiss the possibility that different people can legitimately have different values and goals.

Thomas Edison observed:

Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Michelangelo said:

If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.

Abraham Lincoln noted:

Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.

LA Dodgers manager Tommy LaSorda quipped:

The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a person’s determination.

Meanwhile, people like Derek Thompson, the author of the referenced article in The Atlantic, cite studies that show that men who work less and people in countries where they work less are happier, in order to try and discourage men in this country from working “excessively.” Who do we admire and remember, Edison, Michelangelo, Lincoln and all the athletes that embraced LaSorda’s view, or the people who try and tell us they and those who work as hard as they do aren’t as happy as people who work less and have lower ambitions?

A year and a half ago, I wrote an essay on greed, in which I observed that it is often used in place of “ambition” to cast ambition in a negative and excessive light. We witness here the same substitution. Particular desires (i.e. the pursuit of wealth and success) have a shadow cast upon them by association with the word “obsessed.” The roots of this desire to denigrate particular motivations lie at least to some degree in personal envy, but they are also a reflection of the increasingly prevalent societal obsession with equality of outcome. Instead of lauding hard work, instead of looking at the “elite” and recognizing that the vast majority of them are elite because they have an “elite” work ethic, instead of saying “if I work as hard as some of these people, I might achieve similar levels of success,” many judge those work ethics negatively, call those elite “obsessed” rather than “ambitious” or “motivated,” complain that they’re ruining things for everyone else, and demand that someone (i.e. the government) undo the injustice that some are more successful than others.

In the movie “Big,” Tom Hanks is a 12 year old boy who wishes himself into adulthood. He takes a job as a data entry clerk while he and his friend try to track down the magic machine that made him big. During his first day on the job, a co-worker played by Jon Lovitz quietly tells Hanks’s character to slow down, lest he make every one else look bad. This is not only a bad lesson to teach a child, it’s a form of theft from the company that pays all their wages. Most of us recognize the former, but how many would consider the latter? Someone with a proper work ethic should. It’s too easy, unfortunately, to look at a company as big and faceless and at its elite with the attitude that “they make more money than they need.” Such rationalizations serve to excuse laziness, not because working less is itself inherently bad (if someone can prioritize hard work in pursuit of certain goals, someone else can prioritize minimizing work in pursuit of other goals) but because of a dissonance between methods and goals. If someone wants the wealth that others achieve through hard work and long hours, but isn’t willing to invest those long hours and work hard, he needs to find some excuse for his failure to achieve his goals.

Judgmentalism serves this purpose. If I look at someone else’s success and decide he’s “obsessed” or “greedy” or that he’s acting in an excessive fashion, I diminish his success in my own mind and excuse my relative lack of success. I mask my own failure to achieve that which I want by knocking down the other guy. Comedian Dan Soder once joked, “If you don’t know about hipsters, what they are is…the human version of bed bugs. If you see one, there’s probably 40 more under your bed judging your music.” It’s fun to make fun of hipsters, but they reflect current cultural attitudes that include an entitlement to judge others. Meanwhile, the great lessons of this country’s history – that America is the land of opportunity where hard work gives one a greater chance of success than in any other culture in history, and that the “Protestant work ethic” is the best pathway to success – are being buried by those who envy and resent others’ success and believe that they can demand the successful curb their excess.

Thus, we have the answer to when does work ethic cross over into obsession? It’s when someone who doesn’t have a work ethic decide that someone else’s is making him look bad.