"I regret not working enough"- said no one ever on their deathbed.

“You work three jobs? Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that." George W Bush, to a divorced mother of three, Omaha, Nebraska, Feb. 4, 2005”

“Entrepreneurs must be extremely tenacious and then just work like hell. You just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. If other people are putting in 40 hour workweeks and you’re putting in 100 hour workweeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing … you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve.” Elon Musk

"If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire." - George Monbiot

Hospice nurse Bronnie Ware wrote a fascinating book about her experiences with those near death titled The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Near the top of that list were "I wish I hadn't worked so hard" and "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me." Hard work has been glamorized and romanticized in America since the days of the Puritans, but is it producing the results that were expected? Are long hours away from family and friends, hobbies and spiritual pursuits, travel time and down time, worth it?

Hard work can be admirable, but expecting work-life balance isn't laziness. And a life devoted solely to ones' workplace identity is a wasted one. Most of us are sadly aware that we can be replaced on the job quickly, which gives us motivation to keep working while giving employers the right to expect more and more from their employees. Especially in salaried positions like tech, law, and medicine, people who work long hours are role models, even though study after study shows that performance goes down after a certain number of hours at work.

Over half of employees with paid time off don't use it all. They stay at work out of fear or workaholism, and they're the lucky ones. A quarter of all workers get no paid time off at all, and America is one of the few developed countries that lack that guarantee. (In France, for instance, full-time employees are guaranteed roughly a month of vacation nationwide.) What is it about work that's so addictive?

There are two drivers of this phenomenon. One is that low-wage workers can't survive anymore on just one wage. They are forced to work 2 or 3 jobs, often with conflicting schedules, while also taking care of children or a household. Those jobs may include gig work, which is a bit more flexible, but they make it almost impossible to rest when bills are unpaid and surprise expenses can crop up at any time. Gig work is 24/7 and hard to resist.

The second driver is that high-wage workers have bought into the "work=identity" myth, and they use peer pressure to both spend more and work more on a never-ending treadmill of emails and meetings. Many white-collar workers, worried about being replaced by AI, take their work home with them and answer emails well into the night and first thing in the morning. The ethos expressed by Elon Musk above is common in Silicon Valley and around the corporate world. Sleep is for sissies.

But does hard work pay off? Sometimes it can- especially in a time of transition when a new goal is being pursued like a college degree or big project. This temporary diversion into hard work is sometimes the only way to get the desired results, but should be entered into carefully with a goal and endpoint clearly in mind.

For day-to-day work life, meritocracy has never been a thing. More likely, the promotions and awards go to the people with connections, family relationships, or people skills good enough to know whose butt to kiss and when. Timing and luck are more important than how many hours one puts in or who comes up with the best ideas first. Mind you, extreme laziness is rarely rewarded either, but some lazier people have figured out how to utilize others' hard work in their own path to the top.

Working more than the usual 40 hour workweek can cause many more problems than it solves. Long hours mean worse health because of increased stress, poorer diet with more fast food, and less exercise with more desk time sitting down. Mental health takes a hit too with the pressures of work and the lack of strong relationships and home life. And no matter how much people can claim they can function on 3 or 4 hours of sleep, they're kidding themselves- most humans need 7-8 hours of quality sleep to regenerate, and anything less than that over a long period can do serious damage.

The rewards of hard work- a feeling of accomplishment, a bigger paycheck, and a happy boss may seem worth it, but all will fade over time, while poor health and loneliness only get worse the more they're ignored. As with anything else, balance is essential. There are plenty of books out there about working smarter, utilizing teamwork, and living more simply that can help restore the balance. I wish lower income Americans had more options to create balance in their lives besides drugs and booze.

What's the goal? To die with the most toys? To get the corner office on the top floor? To pay the bills? Why not make it a goal to die without regrets that you worked too hard and too much? Why not try to live a balanced life of productivity and fun? It's funny how at the end of life it's rarely about all the bs that we filled our days with. It's about who we were, and how much we loved and were loved. No regrets!

If you want to watch a funny movie about the futility of work culture- check out Office Space- below.