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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Move beyond empty "life hacks" to connect with your deepest humanity
In Getting Over Ourselves: Moving Beyond a Culture of Burnout, Loneliness, and Narcissism, human development specialist and leadership coach Christina Congleton delivers an insightful and urgently needed discussion of how people can break out of the tired cliches of the self-help genre, and move toward new levels of connection, engagement, and capacity in navigating an uncertain world.
In the book, you'll explore how modern attitudes of individualism that were once freeing now converge with environmental destruction, inequality, and an alarming uptick in depression, substance abuse, and suicide to significantly damage the potential of people everywhere. You'll also find concrete strategies—rooted in developmental psychology—that show us new ways to approach these challenging times.
Getting Over Ourselves offers:
- Insights into why “life hacks,” productivity seminars, and more "adulting" are not the solutions to the issues faced by people today
- Frameworks that reject the idea that there is a separate, solitary self in need of constant improvement, and connect you with your deepest humanity
- Effective techniques for fending off burnout and ways to move beyond the unsatisfactory status quo
An essential and timely work, Getting Over Ourselves is the antidote to the skin-deep, ineffective "self-help" material that you've been looking for.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Notes
References
Part I: The Urgency to Get Over Our Selves
Chapter 1: A World on Edge
Paradise Burning
Stressed to Death
A Failed Prediction
Keynes Versus Hayek
The Heart and Soul of Neoliberalism
References
Chapter 2: Lost Heroes
Selfie Generation
Lonely Generation
Burnout Generation
Lost Generation
Another Failed Prediction?
Notes
References
Chapter 3: Spirals of Change
What Was Enlightenment?
From Enlightenment to the Dog Whisperer
Tracing the Path of Human Development
Toxic Achieverism
Spiral to Arc
References
Chapter 4: Wandering at an Apex
The Self‐Questioning Transformer
Navigating the Postmodern Terrain
Neoliberal Quicksand
Destroy This Model
Slipping Through the Cracks
Notes
References
Part II: Un‐Self Help
Chapter 5: Selfies and Self‐Realization
Narcissism as Mistaken Identity
Default Mode
Narrative Versus Minimal Self
The True Meaning of Humility
The Richness of Self‐Realization
Anchoring in the Practice of Embodiment
References
Chapter 6: Loneliness and Oneness
Physical Interdependence: Bodies of Multitudes
Psychological Interdependence: The Resonant Brain
Spiritual Interdependence: The Garment of Destiny
Anchoring in the Practice of Connection
References
Chapter 7: Burnout and Wholeheartedness
When Your Heart's Not in It
Heart as Escape Hatch
Mark of the Valkyries
Real Compassion
Vulnerable Confidence
The Heart of Yes and No
Anchoring in the Practice of Courage
References
Chapter 8: Lost and Liberated
Dare to Not Know
Staying with Uncertainty
The Cure in Curiosity
Relaxing into Insight
The Mindful Brain
The Modern Mindfulness Trap
Anchoring in the Practice of Wonder
Notes
References
Part III: Concluding and Beginning
Chapter 9: Friends Between Worlds
Calling All Builders
Power in Diversity, Diversity in Power
Moving Slowly
Listening Deeply
Loving Fiercely
I Don't Want to Move to Mars
Room for Alternatives
Heroes of Belonging
Notes
References
Recommended Reading
About the Author
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 Feedback loop
Figure 1.2 The neoliberal turn
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 Wealth age gap
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 Spiral of human development
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 Development in western meaning‐making
Figure 4.2 Decline in institutional trust
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 Brain default mode network
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 Gut‐brain axis
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1 Emotional body maps
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1 Expanded feedback loop
Guide
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Recommended Reading
About the Author
Index
Wiley End User License Agreement
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GETTING OVER OURSELVES
Moving Beyond a Culture of Burnout, Loneliness, and Narcissism
CHRISTINA CONGLETON
Copyright © 2024 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Congleton, Christina, author.
Title: Getting over ourselves : moving beyond a culture of burnout, loneliness, and narcissism / Christina Congleton.
Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : Wiley, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023027945 (print) | LCCN 2023027946 (ebook) | ISBN 9781394169856 (cloth) | ISBN 9781394169870 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781394169863 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Self‐actualization (Psychology) | Burn out (Psychology)
Classification: LCC BF637.S4 C6553 2024 (print) | LCC BF637.S4 (ebook) | DDC 158.1—dc23/eng/20230707
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023027945
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023027946
Cover Design: PAUL MCCARTHY
Cover Images: GETTY IMAGES: © FRANKRAMSPOTT
This book is dedicated to those who will inherit tomorrow the outcomes of our choices and imaginings today—Ana, George, Lennox, Lola, Olivia, Oscar, Preston, Sebastian, Trey, Tycho, Xavier, and Zuri, to name a few.
Acknowledgments
I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to write this book. While I am the only author on the cover, I know this book's existence is really a confluence of influences and efforts. There are a great number of people I could acknowledge. Here's an attempt.
I would like to thank Sally Baker for impeccable timing and for helping me begin to turn a vision into reality. Big thanks to everyone at Wiley—especially Tom Dinse, Deborah Schindlar, Susan Geraghty, and Victoria Savanh—for reading, editing, answering questions, and helping keep everything on track. Thanks also to Lauren Sharp and Chelsey Heller for early correspondence and help with my book ideas, and to Dave Ratner for helping me understand contracts. All of the images you see inside this book were adapted and drawn by the talented artist and designer Yvonne Blanco, with whom I'm very grateful to partner.
I'd like to thank every scientist who contributed to the information contained in this book. I know a single scientific study often takes years of work by a whole team of people. Thank you for the work you do. Thanks especially to Drs. David Gow, Sara Lazar, and Pilyoung Kim for giving me opportunities to understand science firsthand. Deep bows of gratitude to all the brilliant scholars of human development, particularly Robert Kegan for your inspiring teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I am grateful to Katie Heikkinen, EdD, for reviewing the material on psychological development with her keen expertise. Thank you also Professor Ronald Heifetz for your impactful experiential course at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and for teaching me to use The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo‐European Roots to understand deep meaning in language, a practice that stayed with me and that permeates this book.
I'm fortunate to have been a student of the Diamond Approach (DA) for a number of years—thank you to every teacher I have worked with—particularly Gina Crago, Anne Laney, and Andreas Mouskos for your commitment to teaching. I have benefited greatly from it. Big thanks to my “small group” led by Chris Krueger, as well as the training group that was led by Marilyn Giglio, and really all the DA groups I've been part of—it's a gift to be in the company of real truth‐seekers. And thanks, of course, to Hameed Ali, Karen Johnson, and your fellow early explorers for bringing a pioneering path of realization into the world.
I am indebted to colleagues Janice Muñiz, Heather Andersen, Rebecca Ghanadan, Susan David, and Sandra Ellison for opening important doors in my career. Sandra, I think it was from you that I first heard the term toxic achiever. Deep appreciation to the team at Cascade Leadership Partners—Jack Jefferies, Gisele Garcia Shelley, Mark Smith, and also Liz Lewis, Dana Feehan, and Shannon Pilcher—your belief in me has enabled me to author and reauthor myself in amazing ways. Thanks also to the outstanding organization that is the Center for Creative Leadership and every individual I get to work with there—I am so fortunate to be part of it. And to every client I have the opportunity work with—thank you for allowing me to do what I love—and for teaching me so much and helping me grow.
Thank you to Hope Robertson, Farooq Malik, and Kate Azrak, as well as Julia Dengel and Michael Jaro—heart friends in difficult times. Thanks, Hope, for teaching me about biodiversity and telling me about honeybees and almond trees. Thanks also to the many leadership coaching colleagues who help me learn and enrich my world: Jackie Kindall, Zitty Nxumalo, Minji Wong, Elise Foster, all of Poyee Dorrian's supervision group, and so many more.
Thank you to Rania Khan for being an incredible person and friend. Thanks Johanna Congleton, for being my sister and looking over some of the information in the book that falls within your expertise, and to our late parents for their love and commitment to us. Thank you to my mother‐in‐law, Lori Artiomow, for helping out while I was writing. Thank you Ms. Ashley and Ms. Ash, and everyone at school, for creating a loving and magical holding environment for my son during the year I was working on this book. Finally, thank you to my son for being the light of my life, and my husband, Alex, for bringing his own brilliance to the ideas in this book and also doing some of the grunt work; for being my first sounding board, reader, editor, and supporter; for all the large and small ways you made the creation of this book possible—belonging to our family means the world to me.
Introduction
Welcome.
Let me begin with some strange invitations to our journey: I hope this book makes you uncomfortable. I hope it disappoints you at times. I hope this book helps you give up.
But more than this, I hope this book helps you fully remember, or maybe experience for the first time, the “you” that can be with that discomfort and disappointment; a “you” who gives up on what you know isn't needed; a “you” with wide, generous arms who knows how to embrace what is before you, including your failures to embrace. Not a new you. Not an improved you. An available you—available to the beauty life is offering and the difficulty it is presenting, available to exuberant play, and laughter, and disagreement, and heated debate, and relaxation, and celebration, and perhaps quite a bit of hard work.
Most of all, I hope this book helps you be available to friendship. I think that's what is most needed at this time. I don't know whether we need friends for the end of the world or for the beginning, or both at the same time. There is so much uncertainty and complexity right now, it's impossible to tell how things will go. But whatever happens, wouldn't it be nice to have a friend, or many, at your side? Or, if you are more inclined toward solitude, to know there is a friend somewhere, holding you close at heart?
In that spirit, my intention in writing this book is not to be an expert or authority, but rather a companion. It's called Getting Over Ourselves and not Getting Over Yourself, for a reason. I am in this with you. I wrote this book because I wanted to get over my self, and I knew that putting it in my own words would help me find the pathways I was looking for. Now I invite you along with me.
This book is presented in three parts and nine chapters. Part I considers the urgency of our times, and presents the idea that human beings may be on the edge of new psychological and cultural potentials. Chapter 1 looks at connections between environmental precariousness and human stress in Western culture, and describes how shifts toward hyper‐individualization that began in the late 1970s and early 1980s are dominating the state of our world today. Chapter 2 takes the millennial generation as a case study in how these shifts have shaped the experience of self, and specifically looks at millennial stereotypes including selfie generation, lonely, burnout, and lost. Chapter 3 goes into the deeper history of our hyper‐individualized Western society, and connects this history to established models of psychological development. Chapter 4 takes us to the cutting edge of Western psychological development, and considers what it means in the context of a postmodern, “post‐truth” world.
Part II explores how the challenges we face might also contain the medicine we need, cracking open millennial stereotypes and understanding these pain points as doorways to deeper truths. We explore selfies and self‐realization, loneliness and oneness, burnout and wholeheartedness, and being lost and liberated, in Chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8, respectively. I present practices you can try for yourself, and potentially anchor into, to help navigate novel forms of meaning‐making and unfamiliar ways of relating.
Finally, in a brief Part III, I consider how we can be good friends between worlds—the world we know today and a world we might live into. We look not at the what but the how of reimagining our world, by coming together with slowness, deep listening, and fierce love.
Overall, this book looks at the ways we Westerners are often constrained by our small, isolated, stressed, “neoliberal” selves. Getting over our selves does not entail losing our selves, but rather expanding into a more relaxed, connected sense of who we are. In fact, getting over our selves doesn't mean losing much of anything. And we have so much to gain—including finding ways to preserve our sensitive, highly interconnected planet for the generations to come.
One of the things this journey invites us into is being with paradox. When our mind needs room for contradiction, poetry is often a better entryway than prose. Rainer Maria Rilke was a poet who handled paradox well, probably because he himself lived through strong polarities. Born in Prague in 1875 to a mother who was grief‐stricken by the prior loss of a baby daughter, Rilke was initially raised as a girl. Then at age 10 he was sent by his emotionally distant father to military school. After finding his calling as a poet, Rilke composed The Book of Hours as arguably improper love letters to an older married woman and transcendent “Love Poems to God.”
“You, sent out beyond your recall, / go to the limits of your longing. / Embody me,” Rilke wrote in poem I 59. “Flare up like a flame / and make big shadows I can move in. / Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. / Just keep going. No feeling is final.”1
These times on earth seem to be calling us to venture beyond our recall—to the limits of our knowing and our longing. It's a time when we must be willing to flare like flames and make big shadows; and we need to keep going.
Rilke died almost exactly 100 years ago, in 1926 at the age of 51. He completed The Book of Hours before he was 28 years old. Thus, in keeping with the theme of paradox, this poem simultaneously invokes the wisdom of an ancestor offering some guidance, and the energy of a young adult raising the sails as we set out.
Rilke ended I 59 with the words, “Nearby is the country they call life. / You will know it by its seriousness. / Give me your hand.” (See the Notes section at the end of the book for the original German.) Here, I extend my hand to you. Let's see what we find out together.
Notes
Original lines from Rilke's poem in Das Stunden‐Buch, I59:
Von deinen Sinnen hinausgesandt, / geh bis an deiner Sehnsucht Rand; / gib mir Gewand. / Hinter den Dingen wachse als Brand, / daß ihre Schatten ausgespannt / immer mich ganz bedecken. / Laß dir alles geschehn: Schönheit und Schrecken. / Man muß nur gehn: Kein Gefühl ist das fernste.
Nah ist das Land, / das sie das Leben nennen. / Du wirst es erkennen / an seinem Ernste. / Gib mir die Hand.
References
1. Rilke, Rainer Maria.
Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
. Riverhead Books, 1996.
Part IThe Urgency to Get Over Our Selves
“The real problem is in the minds and hearts of men. We will not change the hearts of other men by mechanisms, but by changing our hearts and speaking bravely.”
Albert Einstein, New York Times, 1946, on the threat of nuclear war
“Let us stand up. Let us be a concerned generation. Let us remain awake through a great revolution.”
Martin Luther King Jr., Oberlin College, June 1965, on racial injustice and social change
“The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy … and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation.”
James Gustave Speth on the environmental crisis
Chapter 1A World on Edge
We know it is time to wake up. The planet is growing feverish, with scientists predicting disastrous consequences if we cannot curb the increase in global temperature. Poisoned air kills millions of people every year. Extinction rates are accelerating. Our oceans are rising, acidifying and swirling with garbage, their fish so overrun with plastic it ends up on our dinner tables and in our bloodstreams.
In 2019 Greta Thunberg addressed world leaders at the UN Climate Action Summit. There were amused murmurings from the crowd as the petite 16‐year‐old began to speak, but the tone in the room quickly grew sober. “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” Thunberg accused. “You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency … How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just ‘business as usual’ and some technical solutions? … The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.”1
Yet change is slow to arrive. People are increasingly conscious of the existential threats Thunberg described, but we can't seem to get a handle on it. For example, roughly 70% of those surveyed by Yale and George Mason Universities in 2019 agreed that global warming was happening, were worried about it, and described it as personally important, with the youngest respondents reporting the greatest concern. A far smaller number of people, however, were willing to donate money, volunteer, or contact government officials about the issue. Only about 10% said they had taken action.2
From time to time the world's attention is captured by a clarion call to “wake up,” as in Thunberg's address, and we're shaken from the trance of the status quo. But the sense of urgency always dissipates. There is a familiar wave of alarm and excitement that crests into entertainment, meme‐making, then dips toward banality and boredom. The wake‐up call recedes from consciousness. It's like the alarm goes off, we rouse a little, and hit snooze once again.
I use the term we broadly, for all of human beings—but especially Western human beings from industrialized areas—because I believe the environmental crisis is demanding a widespread, more fundamental examination of our human condition. It's clear that some groups of people are profiting from environmental destruction while others are exploited, and we need to face this and make corrections. Still, I don't think it helps for some of us to claim we are “awake” and point at others as “asleep.” The story of “us” and “them” is a story of separation and competition, driven by the same kind of thinking that contributes to the destruction we must reduce. Our task now is to tell a story of mutual awakening and togetherness. If there's one thing that has become clear to me through my years of research and work with people, it's that we need each other.
Paradise Burning
Poet Robert Frost pondered whether the world would end in fire or ice. From what we know of melting glaciers and recent observations of earth's hottest years on record, the odds are clearly in fire's favor.
A 2022 UN report shows changing patterns in wildfire activity, including record‐breaking fire seasons in previously low‐risk areas like the Arctic and the Amazon rainforest. The report predicts a 30% to almost 60% increase in wildfire events by the end of the century due to climate, land‐use, and population change. Disastrously, scientists anticipate that as wildfires destroy critical carbon sinks such as peatlands and rainforests, they will “accelerate the positive feedback loop in the carbon cycle, making it more difficult to halt rising temperatures.”3 Each fire tilts us further toward a steep hill, while simultaneously rendering our brakes less and less effective.
The reality of increasing fire activity hit home in the United States in recent years with particularly brutal wildfire seasons in the West and Southwest. In late 2018 the deadly Camp Fire burned through Butte County in Northern California, violently erasing the towns of Concow and Paradise.
Three years later, between Christmas and New Year's day of 2021, my husband and I watched the orange glow of the Marshall Fire out on the horizon, burning 30 miles north of our home. The fire consumed over 1,000 structures in Boulder County in a matter of hours, making it the most disastrous in Colorado history in terms of lost property. It ravaged houses and business centers in its suburban path of destruction. It burned the spiritual center we frequented to the ground. It killed two people. Although the links between this winter grassland fire and climate change are less clear than California's Camp Fire or even Colorado's 2020 Cameron Peak Fire that burned a record 208,663 acres, Colorado's climate‐related drought conditions likely played a factor in the blaze.4
Symbolically, fire has many positive connotations. It can represent the beauty of purification and transformation, a sense of eternity, hope, or spiritual passion. But it can also point to destructive desire (as in Frost's “Fire and Ice”), obsession, madness, and the infernos of hell.
In recent years, intellectuals and activists have increasingly pointed to connections between the warming climate and the flames of human desire that sustain today's capitalist systems. Harvard Business School professor Rebecca Henderson begins her 2020 book Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by personalizing the decline of the world's forests for which she has a “deep and abiding love.” Referring to her early career as a consultant who helped businesses profit, Henderson states, “my comfortable life was one of the reasons the forests were in danger… . I came to believe that our singular focus on profit at any price was putting the future of the planet and everyone on it at risk.”5
In Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet—and How We Fight Back, Kate Aronoff takes a different approach, guiding our gaze to the top of the trickle‐down economy and squarely on the fossil fuel industry. She writes:
Capitalism hasn't tended to be a popular protagonist in stories about the climate crisis … it's tempting to turn inward … seeking personal absolution by lowering your carbon footprint: have fewer kids, take fewer flights, and turn off the lights when you leave the room. Yet, not long after Watt first fine‐tuned his steam engine, just ninety corporations—almost all of them fossil fuel producers—have been responsible for two‐thirds of all greenhouse gas emissions. Since 1965, just twenty shareholder and state‐owned fossil fuel producers have spewed out 35 percent of the world's energy‐related carbon dioxide and methane emissions. The richest 5 percent of the world's population, by and large those most insulated from the effects of the climate crisis, consume more energy than the poorest 50 percent.6
In reading Henderson and Aronoff, we might see two competing approaches to our current crisis: individual responsibility versus systemic change. I propose it's most helpful to see this as a both‐and scenario, where these views are equally important and completely intertwined. Henderson starts with the personal and goes on to examine the systemic, reimagining approaches to finance, industry self‐regulation, and governance. Aronoff maintains a systemic focus but inevitably includes the personal, noting connections between climate change and individual overwork in capitalist systems.
On the one hand, most all of us who live in industrialized countries are party to a capitalist system. We support and participate in capitalism with our money, time, and attention, thus collectively generating the system we inhabit.
At the same time the system shapes, limits, and propels us, giving rise to our behaviors, our feelings, our thoughts, and our very identities. Therefore, although we create the system, it also creates us. We might even say it traps us in an endless feedback loop, a feedback loop that has become the fuel, the fire, and the wreckage of our current situation (see Figure 1.1).
That's what this book is about—how the system creates us while we create the system. This closed cycle will continue until something changes, until we step back to see the whole dynamic for what it is, until we face head‐on the fires that burn in our environment and in our own psyches, that grow increasingly hot and devilish. Until we wake up and together create something new.
Figure 1.1 Feedback loop
Stressed to Death
For many of us, our current capitalist system brings material comforts and health‐related luxuries that were unimaginable in ages past. It's so easy to take for granted the small and large wonders of modernity—the space heater in my office, the digital thermometer that has been helping me monitor my ill toddler's temperature, the child‐palatable bubble‐gum flavored amoxicillin we use to treat his ear infection, the computer that allows me to connect with clients and colleagues from the comfort of my home and that allows me to type these words. If I stop and reflect, the list of gratitudes goes on and on. In his 2018 book Enlightenment Now,7 Steven Pinker presents one graph after another of improvements in the human condition we have observed over the past centuries that have occurred in tandem with the rise of science and capitalism: increased life expectancy and global wealth; decreased famine, improved nutrition; declines in battle deaths and homicides. In so many ways, our modern world is looking bright.
Still, capitalism as we know it today brings unique forms of human suffering that, similar to the climate crisis, seem to be reaching a toxic crescendo. Some types of suffering are borne by those with less material wealth and access to formal power, a truth that often goes unacknowledged by the people the system favors. Yet even those of us who enjoy some of capitalism's excesses are essentially unsettled. In the United States and other industrialized countries, it is as if the turbulence in our natural world is mirrored by an epidemic of busyness, the average person's day a frantic hurry from one activity to the next.
When the 2020 pandemic first hit, many of the millions of Americans sheltering at home felt compelled to take on additional projects and activities in their supposed extra time. Aspirational bread making caused General Mills’ flour sales to surge by 75%.8 Celebrities tweeted to remind us that Shakespeare wrote one of his masterpieces during a quarantine. Even as commuting was suspended and all‐day pajamas became a reality for those who had the ability to telecommute, people struggled to sink in and relax. In fact, many professionals felt pressure in the face of a more spacious schedule. “Stop trying to be productive,” urged Taylor Lorenz in the July 2020 New York Times, her article illustrated with a tense, wide‐eyed shut‐in, surrounded on his bed by books, art projects, and dumbbells. “The urge to overachieve,” Lorenz wrote, “even in times of global crisis, is reflective of America's always‐on work culture.”9
Rates of anxiety nearly tripled during the COVID‐19 pandemic,10 but American stress was not a new phenomenon. Journalist and think tank director Brigid Schulte described in her 2014 book Overwhelmed, “[T]his is how it feels to live my life: scattered, fragmented, and exhausting. I am always doing more than one thing at a time and feel I never do any one particularly well. I am always behind and always late, with one more thing and one more thing and one more thing to do before rushing out the door.”11 Many of us can relate. Modern busyness keeps us at the edge of our seat, with no time to look up from the next task on the to‐do list and no time to consider the bigger picture of our lives.
Critics point out that this busyness is often self‐imposed. Overscheduling and workaholism are now worn as badges of honor among those with relative privilege. In his 2012 New York Times article “The ‘Busy’ Trap,” Tim Kreider alleged, “Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day… . I can't help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn't a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn't matter.”12 Further explorations led to coinage of the term busy‐bragging, an idea that was scientifically validated by a team of business school researchers whose experiments supported the conclusion, “The busy person is perceived as high status.”13 As Inc. Magazine put it,”’ I'm busy’ really means ‘I'm important.’”14
However, status signaling does not entirely explain the busyness epidemic. In 2021 the Brookings Institute described a “middle class time squeeze,” with average workers struggling to balance the demands of paid work and family care in a culture where work has become central. The researchers state:
While many participants expressed anger and resentment about their workplaces controlling and demanding more and more of their time, their solutions to the time squeeze they experienced centered on personal strategies such as self‐discipline, making endless to‐do lists, and emphasizing “time management.” Although our participants framed time management as an individual responsibility, they also shared the perception that living their lives at a frantic pace, rigidly scheduled down to the minute, did not allow them to authentically connect with their families, learn and grow as people, fulfill their own physical and emotional needs, or contribute to their communities. These themes suggest that middle‐class Americans may be mistakenly blaming themselves for struggles that are pervasive and systematic, and that women tend to bear a disproportionate burden of stress and self‐blame when policies are not developed to address the time squeeze.15
In other words, individuals tend to pin the busyness epidemic squarely on themselves, and that's a mistake. Writing about busy‐bragging in The Guardian, Oliver Burkeman says, “The real culprit is a socioeconomic system that relentlessly instrumentalizes everyone, forcing us to become productivity machines, valued by our output alone. (We're complicit, obviously, since we are that system.)”16 He points to the same cycle I illustrated in the previous section: a closed loop where we find ourselves running in circles.
It's a cycle that is killing us. Karoshi, a Japanese term for “death by overwork” that was once reserved for that culture, is now recognized as a global phenomenon. The World Health Organization and International Labour Organization found that in 2016, nearly 500 million people worldwide had been exposed to overwork, resulting in close to 750,000 deaths and millions of additional years of life lost due to heart disease and stroke.17
The United States is relatively low on the list of countries where overwork leads to death, yet statistics show we are an incredibly frazzled population. Gallup's 2022 State of the Workplace Report identified US and Canadian workers as among the most stressed in the world, with half of respondents experiencing stress for much of the day.18 In 2020 The American Psychological Association (APA) declared a “National Mental Health Crisis,”19 and in 2022 it found that more than a quarter of US adults are so stressed they can't function, with the highest rates of incapacitating stress reported by the youngest respondents. Eighty‐three percent of professionals report work‐related stress each year, often to a level that is “paralyzing.”20 This stress is estimated to cost almost $200 billion in health care costs each year and to cause 120,000 deaths via intertwining health‐related routes including smoking, excessive drinking, depression, and cardiovascular disease.21
All things considered, it makes sense that most people are not actively combatting climate change, even if they can see the existential threat looming on the horizon. Stress is going to kill them first.
A Failed Prediction
It wasn't supposed to be this way. Today's portrait of stress and overwork stands in stark contrast to where some imagined we would be, including one of the world's most famous economists, John Maynard Keynes. In 1930 Keynes wrote the essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” predicting that within 100 years the “struggle for subsistence” would be a thing of the past. Keynes envisioned a world of advanced technology and economic growth, where the average person would not wrestle with work‐life balance, but rather with questions of how to best use their leisure time; how to live, as he put it, “wisely and agreeably well.” Keynes foresaw a work week of just 15 hours.22
As we near 2030, the endpoint of Keynes's prediction, his vision seems a bit ridiculous. Keynes was not entirely wrong. Working hours have declined significantly in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Available data shows that annual average working hours in the US have dropped from 2,316 in 1929 to 1,757 in 2017, for a reduction of about 25%, although the decline has leveled off in recent decades.23
Yet these numbers contradict the way many Americans experience their working hours. Leisure time seems to have dwindled with economic growth and technological development. Innovations such as the smart phone as well as tele‐working arrangements have blurred the boundaries of work, bringing the office to our dinner tables and night stands. According to a 2019 LinkedIn study, the majority of US employees—almost 60%—check in with their boss or coworkers daily during vacation,24 and a third report feeling guilty for taking off any time at all.25 In 2018, US professionals forfeited 768 million vacation days, essentially leaving billions of dollars in benefits on the table.26
The average person does not enjoy abundant free time, nor has Keynes's vision of widespread financial security materialized in the United States. In 2021, 38 million people—11% of the population—were living in poverty.27 More than 10% of households were food insecure.28 In 2022 the number of Americans without health insurance hit an all‐time low, yet 26 million people still lacked that safety net.29
Even the time‐strapped US middle class is now struggling to afford the three Hs: housing, health care, and higher education. In April 2022 Time Magazine wrote, “The costs of all three H's have soared over the past few decades,” and many who identify as middle class have been left “reaching” for these basic elements of the American dream.30
We'll never know whether Keynes's world of material security and abundant leisure would have materialized. A sharp pivot in the 1980s launched us into a different type of economic experiment, toward a set of policies and practices most often associated with scholars and politicians like Friedrich Hayek, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan. The pivot was toward what some call neoliberalism, and although its impacts have in many ways remained under the radar, it continues to have profound implications for the way we live today.
Keynes Versus Hayek
The turbulent years of the Great Depression and World War II were marked not only by physical battlegrounds but also intellectual wars over how the world should operate. When it came to economic policy the main figures in capitalism were Keynes, a Brit who was born, educated, and spent his career in Cambridge, England; and Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian educated in Vienna, who would go on to teach and influence at schools of economics in London, Chicago, and Freiburg.
The differences between Keynes's and Hayek's approaches are nuanced, and I leave it to economists to describe them in detail. But the heart of their disagreement was over government intervention in capitalist markets. Keynes advocated for more intervention, particularly during recessions and depressions, and Hayek advocated for less. Keynes believed in a kind hand of government, and Hayek put his faith in the invisible hand of the market.
After World War II, Keynes's ideas won over much of the world. Although Keynes himself died in 1946, Keynesianism was already shaping economic policy in his home country of Great Britain, in Australia, and in the United States, where it would reign triumphant for decades. In Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics,31 Nicholas Wapshott calls the years of 1946 to 1980 “the Age of Keynes.” The United States’ 1946 Employment Act followed Keynesian logic in naming the federal government as responsible for full employment, and Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter all employed Keynesian messaging and strategies to the approval of the public.
Meanwhile, Hayek and his supporters waited in the wings. A year before the end of World War II, Hayek had published an oblique challenge to Keynesianism called The Road to Serfdom,32 in which he rejected government intervention as a cure for unemployment and other economic ills. As Wapshott describes, “The principal targets of The Road to Serfdom are what Hayek deemed the twin evils of socialism and fascism… . He reiterated his belief that as economic planners cannot know the will of others, they end up acting like despots.” Hayek was convinced that free markets, not governmental planning, most reliably represented individual needs and desires, and therefore best translated into individual freedoms. His approach was also called liberalism.
The Road to Serfdom was controversial but successful, and although the ideas it laid out were not in vogue at the time, Hayek attracted ardent fans and collaborators, among them young economist Milton Friedman. Starting with the first meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1947, these like‐minded scholars quietly strengthened their network and influence. They bided their time, anticipating chinks in the Keynesian armor.
As Hayek predicted, it took decades for these vulnerabilities to appear, but when they did liberal economists and politicians were ready. In the 1970s Britain struggled with a weak economy, eventually entering a “Winter of Discontent” characterized by widespread worker strikes. Following the 1973 oil crisis, the US entered a period of “stagflation,” meaning rising prices (a.k.a inflation) accompanied by high unemployment. This was a nightmare scenario that Keynesian economists had hardly believed possible. With the dominant economic paradigm unable to offer good answers, stagflation as Friedman says “discredited essentially the Keynesian vision.”33
Margaret Thatcher, an avowed Hayekian, was elected British prime minister in 1979. She was famous for pulling one of Hayek's books from her purse, slamming it on a table and declaring, “This is what we believe!” A year later, Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in the US presidential election, having campaigned on lower taxes and smaller government. “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” he declared at his 1981 inaugural address.34 With Milton Friedman as his economic advisor, he would put into action many of the ideas that had been cultivated over the decades since that first meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society. With Thatcher and Reagan's ideals and policies taking over both sides of the Atlantic, Hayek's time had come.
