At the end of my first year working as a reporter my aunt sent me a certificate for being the “busiest and most important” member of our extended family. I had indeed spent the year telling everyone about working 10 days in a row, most weekends, and the insane hours of a cadet journo in a city with a rich crime scene to mine.
I revelled in telling people how much I worked and the certificate was a long running family in-joke about people thinking they are important for putting in long hours at work and missing significant occasions because of it. I laughed when I opened the certificate and still have it as a gentle reminder of the time when I truly believed I was working at the centre of the universe, when in fact I was in a Queensland newsroom.
The 10 years since I received that certificate have coincided with the rise of the smart phone and social media so there are now almost endless ways for people to keep busy – and to tell you how busy they are, to brag about how little sleep they are having and doing it all with pride. Exhaustion has become a yardstick of measuring a meaningful life.
Figures from the latest Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey show almost 20% of Australians get too little sleep. Not sleeping enough is most common in the 25 to 64 age bracket – most working people, in other words. Sleep quality is also poor, with 21.9% of men and 26.5% of women rating their sleep fairly bad to very bad.
We’re all tired, damn it! But there has sprung a desperation to make meaning from it. It’s not the working class who are striving for this, those in tough, manual, menial jobs of long hours and awkwardly timed shifts seem the least likely to complain, at least in public or with a measure of pride. Parents of fresh babies with no outside help and a list of tasks that stretches into the ether don’t have the time to tell you how much they are doing. Their work is a means to an end. It’s the professionals, the middle class, the adequately compensated who seem so intent on telling us how hard they’ve got it.
In the US, the New Yorker noted that “Overwork has become a credential of prosperity”. A 2008 Harvard Business School survey of a 1,000 professionals found that 94% worked 50 hours or more a week, and almost half worked in excess of 65 hours a week. The 38 hour work week has become a rarity among full-time workers but does this mean we have to find virtue in being overstimulated and overworked?
I can’t bear to have another person tell me how tired they are. How many hours they work. How many hours that have (or haven’t) slept. The high priestess of exhaustion, Marissa Mayer, recently explained why the 130-hour work week matters:
[You can work 130 hours a week] if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom. The nap rooms at Google were there because it was safer to stay in the office than walk to your car at 3am. For my first five years, I did at least one all-nighter a week, except when I was on vacation – and the vacations were few and far between.
Her explanation for why it mattered seemed to amount to that it helped make a very successful company, and therefore a lot of money.
Mayer was met with admiration and praise for her “work ethic”. It is a neat illustration of the driving force behind the cult of exhaustion – the ravaging nature of unchecked capitalism. When the greater good is productivity, it is no wonder we are too comatose in the little time off to actually enjoy our lives.
The middle class lament of “I’m so exhausted” also commits one of the worst sins of all – it is boring. It is boring to talk about how much you work and how tired you are. It is boring to think your job actually matters that much. It is boring to think you have found your self worth in what almost all of us (a privileged few excepted) have to do to survive: work.
Show photos of your holidays, a phone video of your child rolling over for the first time, talk about the supposedly endearing home habits of your partner or what you dreamed about last night. Break every rule when it comes to universally tedious conversation, but please, don’t talk about how exhausted you are.
