First define success in a way that isn't just "happy" (because then you're defining anti-work, as the OP was). Then take the set of all successful people, based on that criteria, and the set of all hard working people, and tell me how big the overlap is.
I suspect that many successful people are hard-working. But the other direction that hard work is the foundation of success will be transparently nonsense.
You're using the classic fallacy of affirming the consequent here.
This is exactly the point made in this article and others. We've uncritically accepted the myth that hard work leads to success.
The prime beneficiaries of this are the successful people who control masses of capital and are thus able to anti-work (i.e. they do what they enjoy, building their business, creating new products, competing). The prime losers are those who do hard work for them for squeezed wages.
So, it is a good thing to enjoy one's "anti-work". Which is to say, it's a personal and societal good to enjoy what you do for a living. Um, is this some new existentialism thing? Yes, attention attention: it would be best for everyone to like what they do, especially when what they do is hard. If you can't dazzle them with data, baffle them with bullsh*t, am I right?
Here's a fun what-if. What if in the next 10-20 years, robots and software begin automating away huge swaths of the non-creative drudgery jobs, doing the work safer and better than humans ever could. And, right around the same time, we develop life extending vitamins to give humans 500+ year lifespans at the physical age of 30. The vitamins soon become cheap to make, anyone can get them. Millions of people, suddenly vigorous and youthful, who used to have [bad/fake] labor jobs will now be priced out of the market. Grumble, grumble, they say. Life was better when I at least HAD a crummy job, grumble! Thank God, the anti-work problem is solved: the crappy jobs have been purged. Except now we've got a huge new powderkeg of a problem to deal with.
My question is, will we plan our future society ahead of time and peacefully enter this new era of plenty and health? Or, will we have wars and endless class strife between the have-jobs and not-have-jobs? Can we have a public debate about this before it actually happens?
When I read the OP and your message, I hear a negative view. Both of you posit negative thoughts about the current work scene that could lead a reader to doubt and resent their own job and position/status. You're simply stirring up trouble and unhappiness when you fail to also bring solutions to the table.
> If you can't dazzle them with data, baffle them with bullsh*t, am I right?
Given that your reply contained no data, you tell me.
> Life was better when I at least HAD a crummy job, grumble!
That very much depends on what they do instead.
Plenty of people enjoy gardening who don't get paid to do it now. Plenty of people enjoy making things, craft, art, writing, furniture making, these are largely leisure activities now. Forms of education for themselves and others going to the library, or the park, reading. Working on yourself physically. Cooking. Consumption of media. Volunteering.
The idea that someone would rather do busywork than those things is silly, I think. But if, in that future, we still base our judgement of people's moral worth, by whether they have a crummy job, then I think the lack of crummy jobs becomes an issue.
The future you outline is coming, in some form or another (at least the work part, the 500yr lifespan less certainly). The question is, in that world, do we want to keep tying people's worth to their ability to find drudgery work? Do we want to keep going with a society that would concentrate even more wealth in the hands of those who control the capital, with no meaningful ability for anyone else to raise themselves out of their 'lower-class' status. It is hard to see how a plutocratic capitalism is going to work then. So I think we need more of this debate now, not less.
The solution being brought to the table, a small step in the grand scheme, but a necessary one, is to stop the rhetoric that work of any kind is inherently virtuous, and to stop the rhetoric that work is the way to gain one's success.
v. late reply. Was busy working:-) There is a lot of empirical research that attribute grit, perseverance, practice to success. The best and most "successful" creatives, are also the ones that started the earliest, are the most productive (worked the hardest),.. http://pmarchive.com/age_and_the_entrepreneur.html
More anecdotal research like the 10000 hour "rule" for mastering a skill,... also state the same thing.
Sure you can be born rich and this doesn't apply to you.
But most people aren't born rich, so, what is available to them is hard work.
Ok, I'm going back to work now. Thanks for listening
The examples and research you provided relate to people basically doing what they like/want, not working somewhere only because they need to earn their bread. Those are two different kinds of "work" and this article was against the second, and for the first kind.
Sheer luck is the foundation of success. I had the luck to be born in one of the richest country in the world, in one of the richest period in history, in one of the 10% richest families of the country, and everything else flowed naturally from there.
The smug pretense, the self-entitlement of people who pretend to be "hard working" and "deserving it" is the root of most injustice in the world.
For such broad claims, I think you need to define some terms. What is work? What is success? What do you hold to be best? These are slippery abstract concepts, and it's therefore dangerous to hold strong opinions about them without being very clear about what you're saying.
So for example if you define work as activities you are paid for and which society values, Einstein was not paid for the work he did on general relativity at first. If you define success as becoming rich, Abraham Lincoln, Rembrandt, Mozart, Einstein in his early days, Wittgenstein etc were all abject failures. If you define it as recognition from your peers, many people we now value were ridiculed and rejected in their lifetime - Darwin, Newton, Van Gogh etc. Of course you can find fault with some of these examples, but it only takes one to undermine your first sentence, which is a remarkably broad claim without qualification.
So when you make sweeping statements about hard work consider what you mean by best. Are they best simply because your implicit value system values hard work above all else? Are they best because they earn the most money? Are they best because they are esteemed by their peers today, even if in 100 years they will be forgotten?
From the article:
Immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous – Bertrand Russell
I think what he is driving at here is that leisure, or at least the avoidance of work for pay, is required for some of the greatest advances in our civilisation, we require leisure in order to speculate, create and explore. I'm not entirely sure I agree with him completely, but it is an interesting counterpoint to the martial beat of the calvinist work ethic we now march to.
Hard work is one foundation of success that most successful people exhibit. However, I think we can agree that it's possible to be successful without working hard (let's stick to one definition of success: monetary) and it's possible to unsuccessful while working hard. The fact that the "best" people you know are all hard workers is selection bias at work: the people you're classifying as "best" are people who are already "successful" enough to be in your group of people.
I have a definition of success that is a bit different. To me, being successful is when you take a series of actions with the intent of reaching a goal, and you achieve that goal or a positive outcome. The measure of success is how well you achieve your goal, and how important that goal is to you.
Sure. People who (e.g.) pick crops by hand almost certainly work much harder than the people the OP was talking about, but they're never going to get rich.
People with that background have gotten rich, of course, but almost always by leaving that line of work and doing something else.
>People who (e.g.) pick crops by hand almost certainly work much harder than the people the OP was talking about
The way you phrased this, it sounds like you find this fact to be obvious. The question, then, is why does American culture look down on poor people like they are lazy? Everyone here seems to have respect for the people who work menial jobs, but the policies we have made constantly punish lower income, working adults. Where is the disconnect? What are the people who disagree with you 'missing'?
Yes, like you say, only allowing that one definition of success is exactly the moral framing that the author is talking about! I would say that any person is successful if they feel like they have been successful. Additionally, they should not need any external validation of their success, and somebody else's diminution of their standard of success is oppressive.
And yet I have met, and I suspect that you also have probably met, people that have worked their proverbial behind off their whole lives and have wound up with not much. There is more to success that hard work. In the converse I have met some people who haven't and still don't work hard and have been very very successful.
The true key to success is to work smarter not necessarily harder (working harder can sometimes help in a relative sense), and also a some luck.
But all those who work hard and are also successful, I have found, tend to diminish the input of luck and information advantage (i.e. it's not what you know but who you know etc).
Those best people are not best because they work hard.
They're the best because they have the privilege to work in that environment.
If success is a privilege, I would not call it success. If they're privileged, you can't call them competitive. They're competitive with their own selves, which is not how competition works.
First define success in a way that isn't just "happy" (because then you're defining anti-work, as the OP was). Then take the set of all successful people, based on that criteria, and the set of all hard working people, and tell me how big the overlap is.
I suspect that many successful people are hard-working. But the other direction that hard work is the foundation of success will be transparently nonsense.
You're using the classic fallacy of affirming the consequent here.
This is exactly the point made in this article and others. We've uncritically accepted the myth that hard work leads to success.
The prime beneficiaries of this are the successful people who control masses of capital and are thus able to anti-work (i.e. they do what they enjoy, building their business, creating new products, competing). The prime losers are those who do hard work for them for squeezed wages.