Ditch the Grindset
American workers aren’t just widgets
By Fred Bauer
A performatively long workweek is one of the major status signals in the contemporary American meritocracy—whether it’s crushing hours as a medical resident, BigLaw associate, McKinsey consultant, or Silicon Valley coder. This class prejudice appeared in the debate that erupted in December over H-1B visas. Many of the tech defenders of the H-1B program reduced economic flourishing to the grind, and their arguments revealed the dangers of a viewpoint that sees human beings as mere economic outputs. Instead, a more full-spectrum understanding of human flourishing is required.
The controversy over H-1Bs touched on deeper issues about how hard—and for how many hours—Americans ought to work. Proponents of expansive guest-worker programs denounced American culture as degenerate and slothful. It’s not just that American kids are too busy having sleepover parties or admiring the wrong characters from 1990s sitcoms, they said. American workers more broadly just aren’t willing to compete in the great Darwinian struggle. According to these tech elites, American workers who can’t put in 80-hour weeks against a limitless supply of guest workers who will maybe should be replaced. For the ideological fantasy that people are widgets to be optimized, perhaps the goal of politics should be to maximize the amount of labor done, and remove lazy American workers from the equation.
But this account of economic aims is far too narrow and discounts some of the deepest sources of value in our lives. Economic growth needs to be seen in the context of the greater ends that it serves. The ultimate goal of economic policy should be to contribute to human flourishing, not maximize the number of hours worked. The full nurturing of our potential as human beings requires seeing beyond the cubicle and Slack channel. Raising a family, engaging in local governance, and participating in civil society are crucial personal and public goods—and are in tension with the imperatives of the grindset.
These non-work activities are an essential part of maintaining a robust civic culture. It’s hard to serve on your local school committee if you’re putting in a 12-hour day in the office seven days a week. All-consuming careers can delay or even depress family formation. For instance, a 2021 study in JAMA Internal Medicine (published by the American Medical Association) found that female physicians had significantly delayed fertility compared to non-physicians—and medical specialists had an even bigger delay compared to family doctors.
Time outside work allows us to direct our own lives and to nurture other sides of ourselves, two of the central promises of freedom. In Great Expectations, Charles Dickens uses the character of John Wemmick to allude to the narrowness of our professional identities. A legal clerk, Wemmick is cold and even cruel in the office, but his character inverts at home. There, he is compassionate (caring for his elderly father), warm, and joyous. Wemmick at home is a better man and a better citizen. Many Americans find themselves in Wemmick’s shoes. According to federal data, close to 40 million Americans spend, on average, an hour per day engaged in unpaid eldercare for parents, grandparents, and even neighbors.
And breaking from the grind pays additional democratic dividends. Our non-work hours can help us develop the organic habits of give-and-take among equals that are essential for self-governance. The local board-game club doesn’t really have a boss who can fire players. Someone might help manage the local church soup kitchen, but that manager cannot afford to rule volunteers with an iron fist (at least if she wants them to keep coming back). As Alexis de Tocqueville observed long ago in Democracy in America, those forms of cooperative association have long been an important glue for American democracy. They pull us outside of ourselves and help us develop a sense of social agency. The decline of and changes to these localized mediating institutions in recent years has hurt society broadly.
In terms of worker productivity, the endless grind eventually hits diminishing returns and might even be harmful. Numerous studies have indicated that super-extended working hours may actually hurt worker efficiency. In that respect, marathon hours could be more a signal in the battle for status within a corporation rather than something that contributes to a company’s bottom line. But the valorization of endless hours in the workplace also underestimates some of the most important virtues.
American conservatives have long recognized the importance of life beyond the job. The 1924 Republican Party platform pledged to “eliminate the seven-day, twelve-hour day industry” and affirmed “the principle of the eight-hour day.” Running for reelection that year, Calvin Coolidge specifically rebuked the idea that American workers should have to compete for their jobs against a global marketplace. Instead, he praised his restrictive immigration and tariff policies for boosting domestic wages and celebrated the reduction in working hours in many industries.
In order to fulfill its highest ends, our political economy has to attend to the full-spectrum flourishing of the person. Work is obviously part of that. The welfare model of the Great Society era arguably hurt the project of flourishing by encouraging some people to drop out of the workforce entirely. It’s important for policymakers today to ensure that people of a range of backgrounds can find dignity in the workplace (rather than shunt Americans into some stay-at-home “universal basic income” scheme). But this flourishing cannot be grounded in endless hours at the job, either. Without dismissing the value of work, policymakers can also take steps to ensure that workers can enjoy a rising economic tide—for instance, by tightening the labor market and ensuring that guest workers cannot undercut American workers.
Silicon Valley itself reveals the costs of reducing human value to the commitment to a job. Whizzing past the political dysfunction of San Francisco, private shuttle busses bring the programming elite to elaborate corporate campuses, which offer a fun-park imitation of community. In a weird way, the addictive quality of social media is the consumerist obverse of the grindset. Social-media algorithms are designed to keep us endlessly engaged—tapping, swiping, streaming—and bewildered. Like a marathon coding session, the constant stimulation leaves us numb, isolated, and less capable of exercising deliberative judgement. That’s pretty much the opposite of the habits required by self-governance.
While Benjamin Franklin never did anything as important as optimizing an algorithm to promote eating disorders in 13-year-old girls, he nevertheless accomplished a few things in his life. In his autobiography, Franklin laid out the ambitious schedule he undertook for self-improvement. Yet this schedule only allotted eight hours a day for “work”: between 8 AM and noon, and then, after a two-hour lunch break, between 2 PM and 6 PM. He gave himself plenty of time for study and blocked out hours every evening for “Supper. Music or diversion, or conversation. Examination of the day.” Franklin admitted that he did not keep to this schedule rigorously, so it’s unclear how he really did spend every waking hour—though, during the American Revolution, John Adams complained that his fellow American emissary slept late and spent most nights partying with French high society.
Maybe it was Franklin’s own industriousness that drew him to see the value of life beyond “work” narrowly conceived. He wouldn’t have become such a historic figure if he had viewed 80 hours a week in his printer’s shop as the summum bonum. He needed time for scientific experiments and socialization and politics. He needed time to be Ben Franklin.
The example of that most industrious American has lessons for thinking about the aims of political economy overall. Franklin believed in working hard but also living well, and he saw that one could not be reduced to the other. All work and no play is the dogma of drones, not the credo of citizens.