Are you making things harder to prove your worth?
I have felt busy and tired lately, and I suspect you’ve felt busy and tired, too.
I hate to speak in sweeping generalisations, but I suspect most of us feel busy and tired right now.
Maybe it’s the stage we’re in.
And by stage, please interpret that however best fits you: personal (getting older), environmental (hello, end of the year), or capitalism (doesn’t water move faster as it’s going down the drain??)
Whenever I catch myself thinking about how busy or exhausted I feel, I can’t help but think; is this how it’s supposed to be? John Maynard Keynes thought that we’d only work 15 hours a week by now.
(Also, Back to the Future promised hoverboards. Where do I sign up for one, please?)
Over the last few weeks I’ve been in conversations with founders and changemakers, those who prioritise a profit and those who champion the social good, and they all say the same thing: there’s less money around.
And I use the word “around” intentionally.
It’s just not in circulation.
Their clients or funders are waiting for budget announcements, special offers, or simply “when things might pick up”.
While it feels acute at the moment, it’s part of a bigger trend. The Big Issue reports that “since 2000, the richest 1% of the world's population has taken 41% of all new wealth generated, while the poorest half of the world has received only 1%”.
The gap between the haves and have-nots grows ever wider, which increases right-wing sentiment from the ground up.
And what might have been justified anger at the state of the world soon turns into blistering rage (see above), or a collapse into defeat.
As David Foster Wallace famously pointed out, this is the water we now swim in.
Fun times all round, people.
No wonder so many of us feel the push to work harder in a world where it’s seen as a sign of being a good person, especially if it leads to a profit.
But why?
While I was aware of the term a “Protestant work ethic”, I didn’t realise just how central religion - Calvinism, in particular - was to modern capitalism gripping the west.
Not until I read this fascinating and illuminating article by Chris Fleming, Associate Professor at Western Sydney University: Why do we think hard work is virtuous? Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic gives a sharp answer. In it, he explores how
“ ..today, overwork is one of the few politically neutral ways to show virtue. We don’t just work to live; we work to prove we deserve to.
These values aren’t written in the stars, or in our DNA, or in the logic of history. So why do they carry such moral weight? Why is work treated, strangely enough, as if it were next to godliness?”
.. What was new, Weber thought, was the moral stance: that working hard, living frugally and accumulating wealth weren’t just practical skills for succeeding, but inherently virtuous forms of behaviour.
Profit, for some, was more than a merely desirable personal outcome; it was a duty.”
(With the original Calvinistic approach, frugality was a key component. Now? Well, I suppose that when you have more ‘money than god’, it makes perfect sense to touch the stars rather than feed the poor.)
One of the major side effects of living during late-stage capitalism/multi-systemic collapse is the amount of clinical anxiety that’s become the norm. Frankly, it’s hard not to feel a sense of unease or dread when the basics of life - money, housing, food, health, belonging - feel increasingly precarious.
And anxiety is baked into capitalism.
As Fleming explains,
“Calvinists believed in predestination. This is the idea that God has already decided who is saved and who isn’t, long before any merely human act could modify this outcome.
Some historians – and Calvin himself – thought that the purpose of the doctrine was to underline human helplessness. In practice, it bred deep anxiety. For if salvation could not be earned here on earth, how could anyone be sure of their fate?
The result was a kind of compensatory behaviour.
Believers began looking for signs of God’s favour. Success in one’s calling – or “Beruf”, a word that means both “job” and “vocation” – became such a sign.
Working hard, avoiding luxury, reinvesting profits: these weren’t just sound habits.
They might be clues that one was among the elect.”
And given that we’re a loss-averse and social species, with members who inevitably compare themselves to others to see if they’re safe within the group .. well, you can see where this is going, right?
It also makes me think of two things.
One is the growth in ‘personal optimisation’ and the rigorous schedules some people push themselves to adopt - the whole “5am” thing. The religious fervour is often palpable. As Fleming shares,
“Weber called this “inner-worldly asceticism”: religious energy channelled not into monasteries or seclusion, but into ordinary life.
You did not retreat from the world to find God. You showed your worth through worldly discipline.”
The other is why soft living and a softer approach to productivity is a vulnerable but often necessary act of gentle resistance.
Saying no to hustle culture (which is ostensibly about earning more money but, in reality, more about hustling for your self-worth), prioritising self-care, and putting in place boundaries to protect the things you love and care about, all runs counter to the prevailing narrative. One that, frankly, if it’s connected to anything other than blankets and pillows, uses the term “soft” pretty pejoratively.
In fact, I recently had a wonderful conversation with my friend, the neurodiversity and innovation speaker Matthew Bellringer that touched on this.
They had just delivered a workshop at a branch of the civil service about neurodivergence which pointed out how society often equates “hard” with “valuable”.
If something is difficult to do, it’s assumed to be valuable.
If you find something easy (and a sign of neurodivergence is a “spiky profile” where you find some things far easier than others do, and other things far harder), then it has less value, if any.
Am I advocating that we should never do hard things, or that hard work is bad? Of course not.
But I do think, to quote another dear friend, the rest activist and creative Caro Turlings, that the words we choose have an impact. Caro suggests that we catch ourselves when we say we ‘need to work hard’ and suggests the alternative of “putting the hours in”.
I admit it: I forget to do this at times.
Given the water we’re all swimming in, one that implies hard work and being wealthy are virtues (or, at least, that being poor or unable to work forfeits your right to dignity), it can be hard even for me to remember that rest isn’t a reward.
Despite a chronic illness which limits my capacity, I can still wrestle with that restless, unrooted feeling that I should be doing something instead of listening to my body and resting.
Which takes me to the final thing I’d love to share from Professor Fleming’s wonderful article (honestly, I should have said at the top of this post, “Just go and read this”); the hollowing-out of the spiritual aspect that leaves us being busy without knowing why, and its result.
Again, back to Fleming:
“Over time, these behaviours detached from their religious roots.
You didn’t need to believe in predestination to feel the drive to work endlessly, or to prove your value through success.
The idea of a “calling” lingered on, but hollowed out. We no longer justify our work in relation to God’s glory, but we still work as if something eternal depends on it.
Weber’s point was that the moral energy that once drove the Protestant ethic has drained away. What remains are mere behavioural patterns, which have become reflexes.
People still work obsessively; they still chase success as if it had ultimate meaning.
The difference is that now they’re unsure why.”
Perhaps this is why some people have a midlife crisis; the completely understandable response when the endless anxiety and self-abandonment they’ve endured ultimately has no meaning.
And it is merely the tip of a bigger iceberg:
“Australian philosopher Michael Symonds has argued that this tragic logic, where the terror of predestination drives believers into a compulsive ethic of work, produces a world where meaning itself becomes hard to grasp.
The result is not just what sociologists – also following Weber – call “disenchantment”, but a deeper void.
It is a world where suffering no longer automatically invites compassion and where love begins to look like inefficiency.
Labour becomes the only reliable reassurance available to us. “Waste of time,” Weber wrote, “is the first and in principle the deadliest of sins.”
In this world, leisure is guilty until proven innocent.”
Eesh.
In the face of all of this, it takes courage to stop, pause, and reflect.
To offer kindness to oneself and others.
To connect within and without, invite softness into one’s life, and “let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”.
But these are the actions that expand our life beyond the confines we’ve been living in.
The next time you’re exhausted but feel too guilty to stop and rest, take a moment. Rest your hand over your heart, take a breath, and listen beyond the chivvying words of your inner critic.
Meet your suffering with compassion and ask, “What’s the kindest thing I can do for myself right now?”
Because, whatever stage you’re in, the way to meet the hard things is to offer yourself softness first.
Especially when it makes you feel guilty for doing so.
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-leaning-on-table-3767411/
