Optimised to Death: Why We Can’t Stop Working

Whether you just completed a Hyrox event or spent the afternoon fusing your ass to the sofa, you probably feel like it wasn’t enough. We live in a time obsessed with productivity. From ten-minute book summaries to apps that track every waking second, the pressure to hustle is everywhere.

But the odd thing is, workers are already wildly efficient. We’re producing more than ever, yet we still feel like failures if we aren’t optimising our morning routines. Back in 1982, physician Larry Dossey coined the term “time sickness” to describe our weird fixation on the clock. It turns out that obsessing over how long a task takes boosts our stress hormone, cortisol, by a massive 25%.

Yet, the push for maximum output continues. Corporate surveillance now tracks office workers by the minute. Some financial executives are only paid for the exact moments a computer deems them productive. So, why isn’t our current output enough?

Sociologist Carolyn Chen argues that our drive to achieve is actually a symptom of a much larger shift: work has become our secular religion. People aren’t just selling their labour anymore; they are trying to find their souls at the office.

If work is our new faith, productivity is how we prove we are devout. Companies actively encourage this, swapping out traditional management for spiritual care. Offices now offer life coaching, mindfulness apps, and self-fulfilment workshops. They use the trappings of spiritual life purely to boost the bottom line (even if they claim otherwise).

But treating the office like a place of worship wasn’t inevitable. To understand why we’re like this, we have to look back.

Ancient thinkers like Plato and Aristotle valued hard work, but they also thought a good life required loads of leisure time. They spent hours just sitting around thinking. Today, we’d probably call that lazy navel-gazing.

Things shifted drastically with early Christianity. Labour was suddenly framed as a punishment for original sin: a physical way to pay off your spiritual debts. By the late Middle Ages, relaxing was practically illegal. If you were caught being idle, you could face public flogging followed by forced labour. In the 1800s, Europe and the US enforced “Tramp Acts” to control cheap workforces. If you were caught jobless and wandering, authorities might forcibly tattoo intricate horizontal lines across your lower back (just to be clear, the tattoo part is a joke).

The Protestant Reformation made it worse. Calvinists decided that earthly success was a massive hint that you were chosen by God for salvation. Working yourself to the bone was the best way to prove to your neighbours that you were heading to heaven.

Then came the clock. For most of human history, time was a vague, flowing concept. But when clocks got minute and second hands in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, time became something you could slice up, measure, and sell.

By the Enlightenment, the idea of the industrious worker was highly respected. Benjamin Franklin, a man famous for this to-do lists (and for contracting syphilis, which was probably absent from those lists), famously declared that “time is money.” The elite classes absolutely loved this new work ethic. They wanted the poorer classes busy. Napoleon even wrote that if his people worked more, they’d engage in fewer vices. Keep them sweating, the logic went, and they won’t have time to drink or riot.

When the Industrial Revolution hit, people moved form making goods at their own pace at home to grinding away in grim factories. Early factory workers hated this. They regularly showed up late, worked slowly on purpose, and were frequently drunk on the job.

To stop the rebellion, mechanical engineer Frederick W. Taylor stepped in with “scientific management.” He realised workers knew more about the actual crafts than the managers did, which gave them too much power. So, Taylor broke every job down into tiny, mindless, repetitive tasks. You no longer built a whole show; you just hammered one nail, over and over, as fast as possible.

Efficiency experts Frank and Lillian Gilbreth took this further. They filmed workers to analyse their exact physical movements, trying to eliminate any wasted motion, which they bizarrely named “therbligs” (their own surname spelled backwards). They even applied this factory logic to housewives, teaching women the most efficient posture for canning baby food. The Gilbreths also noticed that miserable people worked slower, which led to the first hints of modern human resources: give workers magazines and suggestion boxes so they feel just happy enough to work faster.

Thanks to these rigid systems, productivity skyrocketed. In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes looked at the booming output and predicted his grandchildren would only need to work 15 hours a week.

It made perfect sense. If we can make things twice as fast, we should get to go home early, right?

Wrong. Business owners realised that instead of letting workers rest, they could just make twice as much stuff and get incredibly rich. Plus, wealthy elites were genuinely terrified of what working-class people would do with free time. Sigmund Freud seriously worried that if people worked less, they would devolved into an orgiastic state of nature, indulging in incest, cannibalism, and murder.

But if factories were pumping out double the goods, who was going to buy them all? Henry Ford solved this by paying his workers five dollars a day (twice the normal rate). Suddenly, his employees could afford to buy the cars they were building.

To keep people buying things they didn’t actually need, advertising had to evolve. Edward Bernays, who happened to be Freud’s nephew, started using psychology to sell products. Instead of saying a toothpaste cleaned teeth well, adverts promised it would make you wildly attractive. A cycle was born: work hard, earn money, and buy things to feel better about working so hard.

For a long time, bosses forced productivity onto workers from the top down. But in the 1950s, the rise of “knowledge work” (jobs where you think for a living) changed the game. You can’t easily measure a person’s output when their job is sitting at a desk coming up with ideas.

Management guru Peter Drucker argued that knowledge workers had to direct themselves. Suddenly, the burden of tracking productivity fell on the individual. This sparked a massive boom in self-help books. By the 1980s and 90s, corporate layoffs were common, and being busy became a survival tactic, and later, an aspirational status symbol.

Today, we live under a system that demands we constantly optimise ourselves. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that instead of a boss yelling at us, we now exploit our own minds. We willingly subject ourselves to 5:00AM wake-up routine, strict schedules, and productivity hacks. We’re the guards in our own mental prison.

Because we are completely focused on personal output, we blame ourselves when things go wrong. If you struggle to answer hundreds of emails a day because of ADHD, or find spreadsheets mind-numbing, society tells you it’s a personal failure. We view people who simply don’t want to work themselves to death as bad, lazy people unworthy of care.

Is doing absolutely nothing the cure?

Productivity has largely become a goal with no actual meaning. We hustle just for the sake of hustling. Anthropologist David Graeber pointed out that millions of people are toiling away in pointless jobs, clinging to time-management tricks just to feel a sense of control in an insecure world. We can’t stop the next round of layoffs, but we can milk every single second out of our workday to feel a brief sense of power.

So, how do we escape?

Writers like Jenny Odell suggest that doing absolutely nothing is a radical act of rebellion. Spending a few hours just watching birds or sitting in a park pushes back against a world that demands constant output. Taking time to be completely idle gives us the mental space to question whether work should be the centre of our lives in the first place.

Others look to the “degrowth” movement, which argues that endless economic expansion is destroying the planet. If we slow down the furious pace of extraction, production, and waste, we might actually save our environment (and our sanity).

If our toxic hustle culture isn’t making us happier, and non-stop production is melting the planet, maybe it’s time we stop trying to get so many things done. Instead, we could just focus on getting a few things right.