The Atlantic recently had a great piece on a culture of “workism” among America’s educated, white-collar elite is ruining family life. The passive aggressive pressure to keep working, working for the company first emerged in management consulting firms in the 1970s and 1980s. But it has spread as growth expectations have ratcheted up and most white-collar firms are now young, not established ones.
The relentless pursuit of growth in the American economy, the religion of never-ending growth, has taken the lifestyle of the 1% management consultant of yesteryear and turned it into an upper-middle-class standard. If you throw in the ‘need’ for personal branding to grow your corporate career, the implied burden of today’s white-collar professional is approaching absurdity.
What gets harmed is quality time spent with one’s extended family, not just one’s children or partner. Since many of us grew up with somewhat distant white-collar fathers and bonded primarily with Mom, this may seem like an overblown cultural critique.
But, from a sociological perspective on human bonding, it really isn’t. Bonding requires proximity and either a)interaction or b)touch. Now, many human cultures favor the latter by encouraging loved ones to sit right next to each other. Others, like Anglo-influenced America, do not encourage touch at all. The problem with “workism” is that it has created an upper-middle-class culture, empowered by smartphones, where adult workers are simply not present even though they are proximate to their loved ones. Add in to this mix, the tendency to give everyone their own private bedroom and/or office in elite homes and you have a recipe for non-interactive proximity.
Non-interactive proximity does not permit human bonding and encourages anxiety, I would imagine. We need to get people in the same room, first of all. And then we need to bring back weekly rituals of interaction in the home.