Workaholic

Part One

There is a particular tone of voice that gets used when senior people apply the word workaholic to themselves.

It is not the tone of someone admitting a problem. It is closer to the tone of someone disclosing a credential. Said quickly, with a small shrug, the word indicates membership of a category the culture continues to reward. It looks like a confession. It costs nothing to make.

The reason it costs nothing is that the underlying behaviour is the only addiction that produces visible benefit. The drinker drinks and his life shrinks. The gambler gambles and his money disappears. The workaholic works and her life expands, at least on the dimensions the culture chooses to measure. Money. Title. Reputation. The deference of others. The internal cost is real but private. The external benefit is fictional but public. So the trade looks like a good one for as long as the speaker is paying attention only to the public side of it.

Most people who use the word about themselves are not lying. Something is wrong, and they know it. They feel it on Saturday mornings. They feel it on Sunday evenings. They feel it in the small privacy of an empty hour when the laptop is closed and there is no obvious next thing to do, and the body produces a low-grade restlessness that is closer to fear than to boredom.

The body keeps a more accurate record of this than the mind. Saturday morning tightness across the chest that the first coffee does not resolve. Sunday afternoon tension that arrives uninvited at around four. A quality of restlessness during what is supposed to be a relaxing weekend. And the small relief of Monday morning when the laptop opens and the structure of the working week resumes.

That last one is the diagnostic worth taking seriously. If Monday morning is felt as relief rather than effort, the body is telling you something the mind has been declining to hear.

Part Two

The word workaholic is built to obscure what is actually happening.

The word implies that the problem is the work, in the same way the word alcoholic implies that the problem is the alcohol. In both cases the implication is wrong. In the case of alcohol the culture has done the work to correct it. We do not, in serious conversation, treat the substance as the cause. We treat the substance as what is being used to manage something else.

We have not done the equivalent work for work.

The substance being used in workaholism is the work. The thing being managed is whatever sits in the silence when the work is taken away. Work is the most respectable place in the modern world to hide. It is the only place where you can spend twelve hours a day not engaging with yourself and have your absence praised.

The question the word is keeping at a distance is the one most senior people have not asked themselves seriously since they were in their early twenties.

Who would you be if you stopped?

Not in the sense of leaving the work. In the sense of stopping for an afternoon. An empty Sunday. An hour with no laptop and no input and no obligation. The question is not whether you would survive that. You would. The question is who would be there in the silence, and whether you have any current relationship with him, or with her, or whether the relationship was outsourced two decades ago to a version of yourself who is now running the calendar without anyone home to question it.

Most people who read this will recognise the question and not want to answer it today. That is fine. It is enough, for now, to notice that the word workaholic has been doing the work the question was supposed to do.

Continue reading: When the Shape Goes →

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