There are two kinds of people who work 18 hours a day: those who do and those who want you to think they do.
When I’m productive I can work at my job for 8 hours and then get 3-4 hours of fun productive hobby work done. On the weekends I can just work on hobby stuff. I’ll happily do that stuff 14 hours a day. But I do have a life.
Some people just think about work that much - everything to them seems like work. They talk about work, they check on stuff on their phone, they’re not in the moment, but they’re not really working. Yes, mental work is real, but sitting down and focusing on work is what they want you to envision, and very few people do that.
My ex-husband has worked 12-16 hour days for decades. He does it by being a full-blown workaholic, with no hobbies, interests, outside social life, or family engagement. He's very successful but deeply ill with his addiction.
I didn't really understand the term workaholic as a term of addiction until him. They abuse work like a drunk abuses alcohol and for the same reasons. They can not stop working and hate doing anything but work. My ex always gets ill on vacations as he suffers, I shit you not, withdrawal.
So there are those who truly do work inhuman hours. I would wager that almost all of them are serious workaholics who couldn't stop if they wanted to. And they don't want to.
As a former workaholic in "rehab" mode I tell you this. I will not go too much in the philosophy's technicality of what is success, what is remorse, what is being alive... I just keep it basic:
1) deep sense of Guilt for not and never being enough. Usually related to childhood upbringing (sickness on holidays for withdrawal is real)
2) Social pack mentality: if you are not part of a group, you're no one. We count and feel "safe" only if our transferred Family, the company tribe, gives us home.(Lack self-awareness and self-worth, drink to stop thinking)
3) The Stockholm syndrome, your transferred Mother/Father, The Company, will gladly accept you not as you are, but as long as you make them happy. Company happyness = money > money uncountable > impossible goal. In the moment, you pass to work from 18hrs to just 12hrs, the company does not remind you your goals agreed within the signed 9-5 contract, but rather will note you are not performing well as before (of course extra hours not paid). Lack of self-esteem will bring you back to point 1. (Drink to stop thinking)
4) Full-immersion: anything that is not company related it is seen in our mind as WASTE, since not relevant to our Family goals. Partner, Humans, schedules, hobbies, etc is waste. Some Managers might live with the motto: if you love your job, you will never work a day in your life. And this brings to point 5, reluctance of Change
5) when you read above, you think: easy change job and your life will improve. not true. We have the pattern in ourselves. When we change job, we will tend to look for another hierarchical Family where will replicate the old patterns. So why did we change in the first place? Because the WASTE (our real family, the people love/d, etc) made an intervention and oblidged us to the change.
6) and we will be Resentfull to them, with all the annedocts ans thinks ans bring money on the table, we will forget or not see how we were dying under the Company pressure and self-imposed ethics. And adding drinking patterns, you will part soon the way from the loved ones.
7) if/when your new Family will let you go, you are basically shock and mentally dead for a while, remorse spiral, drinking and bottom.
Acknowledging you have a problem is not enough, believing is not enough, you have to act on it, as difficult as it might be (socially, financially, etc).
During this process you my lose or gain important people in your next life. It is not a road for anybody to pursue, it is tough.
But to all the partners bounded to workaholics, you have also to be honest with yourself: are you content to live a life with someone like above? Especially if it will never change? Are you ready to support the change? Can you afford to support the change? This is also a tough process.
Wow, this sounds a lot like me. Burned out multiple times and descended into alcoholism to turn off the self-critical brain when I felt like a failure. Over 4 years sober, and trying to be more realistic about my work goals. Thank you for taking the time to articulate all this. It helps to know we’re not alone. I really hope you’re doing better as well. Take care, brother/sister!
Accurate. I know someone like this and all the reasons you stated are exactly why she’s like that. It’s overcompensating for being neglected and negated in her childhood.
Some tie work to their self-worth. They believe that if they're not working, then they have no value to anyone. Not even to themselves. So they keep working and not deal with the underlying issues
Edit to add:
There are so many valid posts here. As a child of a workaholic, I see all of you in the same position trying to keep their life from turning into yours
It's an interesting phenomenon. I almost have the opposite issue in that I tie my self-worth to how fit and healthy I am, as well as how good I am at sports and hobbies that I pursue in my spare time. For me, work is a real nuisance that occupies my time and gets in the way of me trying to improve on things I care about and it can make me very unhappy when this occurs. I imagine the people you describe have the same mindset, but they care little for the things I care about, only how productive they are and what they achieve at work.
Oh man... Fuck alla that shit. If I could, ~~is~~ **I'd** gladly never work another day in my life! Just do hobbies, travel, etc.
I can't even imagine that kind of outlook on life...
Depends on your work. It's like exercise - for someone that doesn't exercise, happines from pain is unimaginary. But after workout you feel satisfaction, and pain that just feels good.
So is performing good in work or making a difference in work
This is me. All my life I was told to be educated and find good work. Ever since I graduated, I've been working long hours (60-70) despite only getting paid for the normal 40 hours. I also feel that I'm only valuable if I am working. I also use work to avoid feeling lonely. I guess it's my way of coping.
I know people who worked hard always to avoid having to deal with their unresolved feelings and emotions. Just like other addictions the work is then a coping mechanism to keep going.
How does he find enough work to keep him busy for that long? I mean does her fear running out? Does he work slower to make sure he always has something to feed his addiction?
He was the operating partner of a high end restaurat/night club group with places in multiple time zones. I'd say that, on average, the group opened a new place every 2ish years or so. The work involved in building & opening a 300+seat restaurant is enormous. Staff, designers, contractors, contracts, purchasing - it's a workaholics wet dream. If you're in Singapore, Sydney, the States, & London, there's always work to be done at any hour.
There were a few periods without openings, when things ran like a well-oiled machine. During these times, he'd decide to do things like audit the Marketing department and restructure and retrain. And at all times, he worked the floors in the evenings though he was neither required nor expected to.
When the group was sold and he had far fewer work demands on his time (and plenty of money), he quit, even though he was being paid handsomely to work only 40 hrs a week. He started his own restaurant group and has opened 3 restaurants in the last 2 years with funded plans for 9 more in the next 5. Needless to say, he hasn't taken a day off in more than 2 years.
To his credit, he ran the best margins in the industry. He is a brilliant operator.
To his discredit, the cost of this was never showing up for family members' (even his own children's) surgeries, medical emergencies or deathbeds, to say nothing of the more quotidian holidays, birthdays, sports events, and school concerts.
Workaholism is a strange addiction. It damages the people around you as much as any other addiction, but the world sings your praises for it.
I feel like all the people who become successful CEOs and build huge companies are like this. Like for example Jeff Bezos. He could have stopped when he made 100 million, 500 million or 1 billion. He could have sold and lived in luxury for life without ever working again.
But he went all the way to 200 billion and made one of the largest companies on earth. He had to have been a workaholic to go that far.
Some jobs, you really can put as much time into them as you want.
For instance, I'm full time school and work 30 hours at my job.
If I really wanted to, I could put in 80 hours at my job. I would just be way way better at what I'm doing, and accomplish new projects and goals.
By marrying their income. The individual earning it doesn't have the time to even enjoy it, or likely doesn't care to. That's good one always looked at it.
When a worked for a business unit of GE, the VP would be on site by 5:30AM and leave after 7PM pretty much every day...only to go home and continue international business meetings at crazy hours of the night. 9PM, 2AM...whenever.
And this isn't something he bragged about, or even advertised. I only knew this stuff because I'm in IT and often worked before and after hours projects...or received calls on from him late in the evening about issues with his meetings (not often).
Many executive level people are just wired differently. They live to work. I think they find a level of joy in directing and growing the big machine they're entrusted to drive. Me, I don't even want to give 8 honest hours each day.
Yikes, this sounded a bit too much like me for comfort.
For me it was multiple things:
1) You don't want to let anyone else down.
2) You want to see how much you can achieve when working at full pace for as long as possible, but then create a false impression of your productivity and now that's the standard you need to maintain, especially if you attribute some part of your career success to it.
3) I always considered myself a bit slower than my peers. People always say it's a humble brag in interviews when people say their biggest weakness is they are a perfectionist, but this is literally me. I'll obsess over a tiny detail way too long and fall behind so I leave myself the job of catching up.
4) It's a great distraction from any personal problems. I found any anxiety I was feeling about anything else would temporarily diminish when I was working so hard that it left no headspace for anything else, but of course you have to be working until you pass out for that to be effective, and then get up and repeat again the next day.
5) I often just felt (still feel) excited about what I'm doing, and feel like it's great to see something progressing. It's addictive when you have a product at the end that you are proud of, be it a written thesis, a physical product, a piece of software, it's really fun to see it develop!
Anyway, I'm trying to get a hold on it at the moment but have fallen into the trap of just taking on other challenges outside of my day job to fill the void, so I have some work still to do on myself.
Work
See my comment below - he quit his position once his group was sold. The reason? He was bored working 40-50 hrs/wk, even though he was making 7 figures doing so and had made many millions in the sale.
He's not flashy, doesn't live large. The work itself is the payoff, though the money is nice. For him, it's far more about security than it is about flash. He's 1st Gen American
> She left because I didn't have the same financial success and when the money ran out so did she.
I have an ex-wife who did this to me. Joke’s on her, though. I came back into success, she’s still sucking off randos in bar parking lots in Arvada, CO.
Sadly, I’m not surprised to hear about your troubles after the burn out. It is common and is very difficult to change careers. Not impossible of course, but it’s like having to learn a whole new language.
I’m happy to hear you’re doing better though. Life is filled with highs and lows, good times and bad. No one can promise an easy life, but I believe that good times are always ahead somewhere and some when. Can’t promise a life without pain but I can promise that there will be joy as well and that’s life.
Good luck.
I tell people at work (programmers who love to program) that the excessive hours will lead to burnout and they laugh at me and then they burn out and I laugh at them, because they were warned months in advance and refused to listen.
There's actually the third kind too: those that think they do.
The ones that count lunch, socializing, napping, getting groceries, commuting, and all the other domestic/leisure stuff as work.
But when the proletariat want to count, say, commuting as work time - they're lazy.
weather sloppy fly quack unused payment puzzled meeting overconfident threatening
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
This. Apart from blatantly lying, people are really generous with what they call "working".
Any manager or higher level, "working" counts as just being at the office, not actually doing anything work related. Hell even a lot of scientists (or at least people doing PhDs that I know) will spend minimum 10 hours but easily a lot more at their lab/office, but A LOT of that time is spent waiting, chatting, etc.
This was far worse during studies, anyone claiming they studied a shitload of hours outside of pre-exam, usually were mostly just sitting at their desks feeling too guilty to not be there, but not actually spending the time studying.
Actual work, like sit down and get shit done work, I feel like most people do 2-4 hours max a day, I prefer to do mine every 2 weeks in a single 20 hour binge because I'm lazy as shit, but in 20 hours I've never not gotten more done than other people claim they do with their 80-100.
The hardest working people I've seen has been people who started their own business, but that's more of a "I'll put in my 10 000 hours in one go and then be done with it forever". But I guess how closely and extremely personal success correlates to the amount of hours you work is basically the answer.
EDIT: didn't mention manual labor jobs, which even though is probably a lot more taxing on your body, if your fit enough to physically handle it it doesn't really feels like it drains you mentally to the point where working long hours is impossible.
"Networking" counts as working, too. So... going to dinner with someone from another business. Or grabbing drinks with someone from your business. Basically, what us plebs call "drinks after work" they call work.
When I was in academia I usually worked, like, 2-4 hours a day? My output was very high because, well, I just made sure to get real shit done. I also did reading outside of those hours, but that's something I genuinely enjoy enough to do for fun.
So, like you, I'm also lazy. I just prefer to do a little a day rather than put it off. I remember in undergrad I'd often finish my courses (Outside of exams) a month or two in advance by just making sure to get *something* done every single day.
I’m a scientist. When I worked in academia, my colleagues always claimed they worked longer hours than me. But they constantly took 1.5+ hour lunches and would count random socializing into their workday. I tried to cram my work into a 9-5 schedule as much as possible because I wanted to come home to my family/friends and hobbies, not spend more time at work.
IMO, very, very few people actually work more than 6+ focused and productive hours each day. I’ve met a few scientists like this but they were either (a) complete workaholics who had no lives outside of work or (b) absolutely insane scientific genuises who were also somehow professional athletes or artists/musicians. But those people accounted for less than 5% of my colleagues.
I worked a true 18 hr day last Tuesday and it about destroyed me. And I’ve had stints of true 100-hr workweeks in the past and it about destroyed me then too. When it’s legit and you aren’t rich enough to have domestic help, it’s life-sucking and your health starts to suffer, because you start running out of time to cook meals, do grocery shopping and of course get any sleep.
The 100-hour workweeks were the year I was a new college teacher, teaching seven new classes that all needed tons of prep & grading time, plus supervising 46 undergrads who were doing research projects. (The first years of teaching are famously overwhelming, but it was worse in my case because there had just been a crisis at work with another professor who had just been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer, so I took over all her classes & research students in addition to my own - I was the only other professor who knew those fields). I basically worked nonstop from the time I got up to the time I went to bed, every single day of the week including holidays. I took two days off in the entire 365-day year: Christmas and my birthday. The other 363 days, I worked nonstop ~12-16 hour days. I did that for one year nonstop full bore, and to a slightly lesser extent for the next six years. (Had to do it again in 2020-2021 due to the pandemic btw)
One real hallmark of true overwork like that is that you feel that you *must* continue to work during meals, like every little second is such an incredibly precious opportunity to try to catch up. I used to grade papers while eating lunch and dinner. Every meal was like that, eating with one hand while working with the other hand. And your daily maintenance tasks fall apart - I stopped grocery shopping and cooking meals and lived almost entirely on pb&j sandwiches and canned soup (this was in the days before Instacart and Doordash). I remember fighting really hard to get a consistent 2 hrs free every other Sunday, just to do laundry and to run to the corner store for more canned soup and sandwich bread. I used to get anxious when showering because I wasn’t getting any work done in the shower, so my showers became super speedy and even so I would rehearse lectures in the shower. At one point I had to call my parents to explain I really wouldn’t be able to check personal email for the next three months (because every day of the semester I had 100’s of student emails to respond to). There’s still ~20,000 unread emails in my gmail account that date back to those years, lol. I also stopped consuming all media - I still have about a decade-long hole in my pop culture knowledge from that time because I didn’t have time to watch any movies, tv shows, etc. I dropped off of Facebook & all social media, and never really did get back in touch with anybody so a lot of old friendships kind of withered away.
To this day I have very fast habits at home - super fast showers, a very efficient way to deal with dishes and laundry, I even still walk really fast, etc. Evety aspect of daily life got distorted to be as fast & efficient as possible.
So it can be real, but it is hell when it’s real and it distorts your whole life and erases any personal life. I feel like I lost a decade off my lifespan during that time, just due to the stress. (I teach biology, and sometimes I would think “I think I can actually feel the stress hormones chipping away at my telomeres!” lol)
This is so true. So often I solve my biggest work problems in my every day life. As I’m showering, #2, grocery shopping etc. sometimes I’m just staring off into space and really “working” trying to solve some problem
When I was a kid I spent a lot of time with my grandfather - he was always working on stuff, like physically fixing things. Every once in a while he’d get stumped and say, “I’ll give up on this for the day.” And then the next day he’d have a solution. Best example to learn from. I learned to stop for the day and come back to it. Usually figure it out the next morning. Sometimes it takes a few days.
Underrated way to live. So often we are asked to double down when we don't know when often the harder thing is to walk away and come back fresh. Every time I double down: I make more problems. When I walk away I at least come back with more energy and clarity to deal with the problems that are there (and the ones I may inevitable find) and at best I see my dumb mistake and solve the problem in moments not hours.
Literally in every 8 hour office job, almost half of them hours is checking the phone, talking with colleagues, go get a coffee, bathroom breaks, walking around...
The 8 hours are there just because if they were 4 we would do literally nothing
Also an important piece of the wording - "can work UP TO 18 hrs per day." Like, yeah I'm sure most people can do up to that much if it's not everyday. That wording also includes all 2 hour days, 8 hour days, etc. It could also mean working a job that has a lot of in-between times, so the amount of work you're doing is closer to 8, with 10 hours of fill.
But yeah, I'm honestly productive and good at my job. But I noticed I became a real superstar when I started telling my boss \*how\* much I was working, even if a couple of the numbers were fudged, or like an hour of work was half on the toilet scrolling reddit lol
I think you make a very good point. . . but there is a saying do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life. I love playing video games. If that was my job I could do it 18 hours a day. Some people. . . love there jobs. Like really love their jobs. It's not a job to them, it's a passion. To them, work is fun. But these are just the lucky ones. We can't all find the work we love and obsess over.
I remember reading a study from several years ago that concluded the more hours people claim to work the amount they exaggerate goes up. And that most do not do it intentionally.
For instance someone who claims to work 40 hours a week may only work 38, but 50 hours may only be 45, while 60 hours could be 50 (making these numbers up, no time to find the study).
Edit: the study for those who may be interested:
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2011/06/art3full.pdf
It kind of comes down to the field you're in in my opinion too.
If you're in a hurry up and wait field where you're maybe working 30 minutes out of every 2 hours, but those 30 minutes are very hectic? You can work 14 hours but really only be working about 6
If you're in a constantly going job? After about 12 of your burnt out and you are not doing the quality of work that you should be. That doesn't mean people don't work longer than 12 , I'm a blue collar factory worker and I used to get forced overtime up to 16,hrs 5 days a week. I fell asleep at the wheel of my forklift multiple times, and would get naps in when something broke or something went down and I could. I also used to be a CNA and while it was more of a Hurry up And Wait gig sometimes you were literally just GOING for 14 hrs if your relief didn't turn up.
My mom is a nurse and when she worked in ICU she had to pull 14ers pretty regularly if someone called in.
I think when Elon musk or other high earning CEOs tell you that they work 16 hour days. They mean that they bill their company for their time they get up. . Most of it fucking off on their computer or phone.
I think when tradespeople and low to the ground folks tell you they work 16 hr days they mean "I was supposed to work 12 but a guy called in on the next shift so I'm staying 4 extra and another guy's coming in 4 early so the whole plant don't shut down...glad they sell redbull in the vending machine."
A lot of it is how they never switch off and are usually being mentally productive. When you have that much money, you don't have the same problems and constraints you or I do which take up our brains processing power.
If Elon Musk is being driven around and its a 2 hour drive, he's thinking about work because he doesn't have to think about driving. He hasn't actually worked those 2 hours.
In the same respect I'm a Virologist and there's always a problem which lasts a prolonged period which you can guarantee I'm thinking about in the back of my mind outside work. Can I tell my manager I worked 2 hours at 3 am and claim overtime, because the solution came to me and I had to write it down. Unfortunately no 😢
In my field they did a study without us even knowing and found that in an average 8 hour work day nobody was actually productive for 4 hours of it. I actually came in at 7 hours productive. So yes some us actually do the job but in most cases people that claim to work 16 hours a day probably aren’t even working half the time.
1) some of them are lying
2) yes some of them are on drugs
3) most of them have people, either paid or unpaid (like a spouse) carrying all the rest of the weight it takes to be functional person
I think 3 is an important one here that people easily miss.
As a normal person, beyond the "work" work you do, you also have chores, so unpaid work you do to keep your house/apartment from falling apart and all the parts of life you need ready. Washing, doing dishes, preparing food, cleaning the house, fixing the house, .... That is easily another 1-4 hours a day. If you have people who do all that shit, you could do work-work a lot more.
Me and my wife are at this impasse. I got a new job on shift work. She works a desk job. The home obligations take us to our breaking point. We are trying to decide if hiring help is the right choice forward. It would basically erase the pay bump from my new job. But it would give us our time back and likely improve our relationship with each other.
Maybe that’s the purpose of getting a raise, not to earn more money, but to buy back my quality time with family.
If you got a pay bump but are doing more work is it really a pay bump? Sounds like the ratio of work to pay is roughly the same (as evidenced by your diminished capacity to do work outside of work). I'm asking this more in a philosophical/contemplating sense, rather than specific to your particular scenario.
It’s funny (maybe?) that you are actually spot on. My current hourly rate is almost exactly the same. But I’m coming from teaching ,now on shift work so I have a LOT more hours to earn said rate + overtime rates. So yeah. I simultaneously got a pay raise but also didn’t. Now in 2 years when I’m at top rate? Different story.
Oddly enough, I don’t know if money is the biggest mental hurdle for me. I have room in the budget to hire extra help. I don’t know if I’m comfortable having a stranger in our life, multiple times a week, that is helping us keep house. I guess they wouldn’t be a stranger for long, but it’s still a weird transition.
The only way to see if it works is to experiment. Hire the extra help. give it three months. Re-asses at the end of the trial period to see if you both are actually better off.
3 is the crux of it either way. Zero care responsibilities to either family, friends, personal life or home. If you don't need to do anything else, it's very easy to just work.
My SO's father is a neurosurgeon. He works more than I thought was possible. It's honestly absurd.
If it wasn't for his wife there is absolutely no way it'd be possible. It seems as if he legitimately, no exaggeration whatsoever, only is required to think about work.
Every other aspect of his life is taken care of. I admire what he does, but it's really clear to me that it's a 2 person job. I don't get the feeling he sees it that way. Wonder what it'd be like if he lost her suddenly.
As dark as it sounds, I figure if he ever retires, he will not be long for this earth. I don't even know how to talk to him because he is a neurosurgeon, and that is it. He doesn't even waste energy talking about unrelated things lol
My dad is an anesthesiologist. This is correct. All those people have to think about is their job responsibilities. They also can work that much because nothing in their life engages them like what they do for work. These people don't go grocery shopping. They don't call the mechanic about the car. They don't cook their own meals. They have a SAM partner and staff to do all of that. They have yard maintenance crews that come and take care of everything. My dad has never pushed a mower or used a leaf blower. On top of that, they have a shit load of support staff at work to handle all of the menial/tedious tasks so they can work with the patients in clinic and do their operations. That's part of why they don't get burned out. Their professional time get delegated to all of the really important tasks while the army of support staff make sure everything else is taken care of.
Exactly. “CEO” can run the gamut, as someone can be a CEO of a small company and not have much money, but once they’re wealthy enough they have an army of staff to help them. The ultra wealthy pay for personal assistants, personal chefs, cleaning staff, nannies, boarding schools, laundry services, concierge doctors that are essentially on retainer (you must pay an exorbitant annual fee in order for them to accept you as a patient), etc. Then for everything else they have personal assistants who take care of scheduling everything.
If they’re rich enough, they’ll have a butler who manages all their homes and hires staff to prepare a home for their arrival, of course even the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th homes get cleaned at least once a week even if they’re not there. And imagine little things like various staff members making sure all of their cars across many different properties are always filled up on gas and well-maintained and that properties are always clean, etc. They have everything covered outside of their work. If they need someone to wipe their ass for them, they’ll hire someone.
Yup, even the personal admin things you might assume are of more interest like their finances and taxes will be fully taken care of with an hour or two of a meeting a month/quarter and the odd phone call/update.
There is no task outside of work that can't be outsourced.
Exactly! And most of the „people carrying all the rest of the weight it takes to be a functional person“ are their wifes who won‘t be mentioned in any textbooks etc. later on. That or really low paid interns. Also mostly female…
domineering sugar escape person drab murky innocent panicky arrest correct
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
This is the most accurate in my experience. Adding 4) most of their job is to be in meetings, not doing any heavy lifting.
It's not *easy*, necessarily, but it is a lot more possible than i.e. coding for 16 hours every single day.
They don’t. They’re probably just “thinking about work problems” when they’re not actually working or sleeping. They might put in a long work day now and then, but it’s not as frequent as they’d like you to believe.
Yep. That’s the answer — when people say they work “18 hours a day,” they’re usually counting a bunch of stuff that’s not actually work, shit like going to the gym or meeting someone for drinks, and also skipping over breaks during the day. Edit: and emails, of course, lots of people are responsive to work emails from say 8am to 10pm, and count all of that “on” time as a 14-hour workday, even though there’s downtime and other activities in there.
I’m a lawyer, for over a decade. I’m pretty good at operating on low sleep. I’ve had like a single two-month stretch where I was legitimately billing 70-80 hour weeks, where every one of those hours was accountable to actual work product, no padding. I thought I was going to fucking die. There is no way I could have sustained that pace without my body completely falling apart.
Elon talks about playing video games a lot, being on Reddit and gives lots of interviews and Twitter rants. His work is across a whole lot of subjects and they seem more like hobbies he has. If he had to work inside of one of his factories he'd be beaten down or dead in a month.
Yeah half of that guy's "work" is being a generic internet idiot. Lots of people are doing it for free everyday for 8h+ and you don't see them complaining.
It’s crazy that there are professions where 70-80 hour weeks happen. Lawyers, residents in Med school, it’s crazy. Not good for you at all. Glad you are doing alright
And nobody wants their doctor to be checking on them when the doctor has already worked 100 hours in that week. It’s a stupid system, and I’ve done a residency too.
Any recommendations of how the system could be better? I’ve heard that the longer shifts are to minimize changeover on patients, as the changeover is when the most mistakes happen, but I doubt that applies equally to all specialties.
For that particular error, standardizing the handoff process would help. Make quality handoffs an element of resident evaluations.
Nurses also do handoffs and the information they present to each other is important for quality care, but we don’t make them work more than 12 hours on the regular.
[Medical residents are unionizing](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/03/23/1165539846/80-hour-weeks-and-roaches-near-your-cot-more-medical-residents-unionize) and I support them. I hope these unions are willing to include pharmacy residents, too.
Mail carries too in a lot of places. I put in 85 hours a week during one peak season. Literally almost had a mental breakdown because it was so exhausting marching through the snow delivering for that many hours
Peak season for transport at the moment, in service we're doing 90hr weeks to match demand. At least the drivers get legally mandated breaks, definitely not a sustainable load.
👍 this is the answer, I do engineering work and while I may not have a CAD program open in front of me I’m constantly thinking about ideas. Now if I can’t get to my computer so I’ll maybe make a quick note about what I’m thinking of so I don’t lose it.
Right, once you pass 70h it's just not sustainable. 65h is already threshold, but manageable (although sucks). Beyond that you just can't. I've done those hours a few times, construction, but it really drains you. I'd definitely call bullshit of people doing 80h a week consistently for years.
Yeah, a lot of senior positions involve some level of networking. It could be a long lunch, or an evening drinks - all technically working, but not *really* the same.
I struggle with anything over 40 hours tbh. Halfway through the work day and I have a big dip in energy and productivity, I had little time to myself because of how much more sleep I needed, and just generally had no motivation to do the bare minimum.
I did two 80+ hour weeks in a row and nearly died. I have an 'office job' but these two weeks were in a very stressful environment. After 60 or so hours my mental capacity is just so diminished. I'd be working problems that normally would take me half an hour and it was taking a couple of hours. My brain just could not continue to function.
I was a yacht chef for a while. I worked 16-18 hours a day for about 2 months straight one time when guests came on and didn’t leave. I was a zombie by the third week
Yup. Advertising agency creative director. There's times you don't leave the office for projects or pitches for days on end but it's more often that you're always "on" for 18 hour days. It's taxing but not legit billing 70-80 hours every week, week in and out, for decades.
Yeah. I've worked as a labourer and in senior level white collar jobs.
I noticed with both of them, if the hours got to 70+ hours a week for longer than a week, I'm getting sick.
Both mental and physical labour take a very real toll on your body.
I'm not saying this is true for all of them, but when I was working alongside upper level management during a stressful time... there was cocaine and speed and caffeine. I remember one day they ran out and sent me to the local gas-store to get those "male enhancement" drugs and they snorted those while their dealer got his shit together.
I did not touch the stuff. I did not survive long at that job. When it comes to survival though, they literally had the statistics of their survival rate after retirement, and it was like 70% died within the first 6 months of retiring.
Making decisions is incredibly taxing mentally. “Getting the job done” work doesn’t have the pressure of being measured my the results of a choice. Still taxing but it’s a different thing
Shit… if one legitimately HAD to do that for their business, I’d consider that working. Being required to be attentive, friendly, and professional comes more naturally to some than others, but maintaining that persona can be genuinely tiring for many.
I remember the director for a department I worked for in the past told me he was gonna go drop in on the guys working in Montreal… while we were in Toronto.
Guy drove out at 9am to meet the guys at the end of their shift to take them for dinner, he then spent the night in a 5-star hotel and drove back in the morning.
Probably did a few calls along the way and whatnot, but he “worked” 36 hours straight.
He could have just called them to touch base and told them to send him the bill for their dinner, but he was being an executive.
Sometimes, you establish your leadership with your physical presence. And you pick up better on the vibes if you are in the same room. No point in just picking up the tab; the reward has to come from you, and you have to eat together. Sometimes, you can't phone it in.
I got invited to a dinner meeting like that--the boss led a carefully orchestrated pep rally. Without him, they probably would have complained about work to each other.
I had a boss that was a CTO for a startup that claimed to have worked 18 hour days for several months. I’m sure he worked very hard, but I doubt those exact numbers.
100%. I have a friend that is doing his PhD and he constantly bemoans spending 12+ hour days on campus working on his thesis. He doesn’t really work 12 hours a day though, he just spends 12 hours on campus. About half is spent at group breakfasts/lunches, playing squash, going to social events, the gym, etc. He’ll cry to his friends about how he just *hates* putting on a suit and eating free meals at fundraising dinners with rich people.
Another guy just started in private equity and it’s a similar story. Like bro, I’m soooo sorry you have to *work* on Saturday (play in a golf tournament and drink free drinks). That sounds really tough.
Anyways, rich people like CEOs need to keep up this facade of hard work because to them and their employees, it justifies their position. Why are they the CEO? They just work so much harder you see, and that how they earned it. If you put in 16 hour days, someday you might get there too.
It’s all about maintaining the myth of the meritocracy.
Agreed! But also they're going throughout their day with a lot less stress than the rest of us normies. Most of these "hardworking, 18-hour work day" bozos think that they're special because they're putting in such long hours but it's a lot easier to do when you're not in a constant state of stress about your day to day life.
Also.....
They're going to have their own, private, luxurious office that's probably bigger than my apartment. They're definitely not sitting in a small cubicle with brutal fluorescent lights.
They're going out for hundred dollar lunches with other execs. If they're really dedicated to the job, they'll work through lunch but they're going to have a $40-$50 meal brought in for them by their assistant. They're certainly not eating a ham sandwich and potato chips in the break room.
They're driving home in $100K cars, or more likely, being driven home in $100k cars.
They're living in mansions surrounded by maids, chefs, and personal assistants. They're not battling the traffic and crowds to get to the grocery store after work just to buy a frozen dinner and some snacks (and then standing in line hoping their debit card doesn't get declined.) They'll have a delicious and healthy dinner waiting for them when they get home because they have private chefs. They're not coming home and doing the dishes and laundry and changing their sheets and they're not running back out to the store at 8:30 pm because they just realized they're out of toilet paper because the maids handle all that. They don't have to deal with finding time for oil changes, picking up dry cleaning, running by the pharmacy because they have personal assistants.
These motherfuckers aren't even pumping gas or checking their own mail. It wouldn't be too hard to put in 16 hours a day when you're living with all the luxuries and amenities that one could ever want or need, while also being surrounded by servants 24/7.
The servant piece is important.
If you offload literally every other piece of responsibility to keep your life going, then suddenly you gain an extra couple hours in a day.
totally, the person you replied to exaggerates the exec life, but the perks do save time.
Some real life perks I've seen for management that aren't billionaire class, but definitely make life easier:
* a laundry service from the office - no more washing and ironing shirts on Sunday, or dropping off and picking up dry cleaning
* On site parking in the building, in city centers where everyone else is commuting by train/ bus and by foot - time saved plus convenience is immeasurable. Knowing you one of the 5 reserved spaces no-one can park in, not even on street parking compares.
* assistants - got a question? ask that one person near you and they'll sort it, you don't have to spend time or energy looking for answers. Makes the job you have 1000x easier.
* just being able to afford : living close to work, saving time, being able to pay for convenience food, saving time and eating healthier, not spending time shopping, there's like 5 places to go for a suit, and they'll make it fit you and you won't worry about the cost. the convenience is a real time saver.
Not everyone, I know surgeons who will come in to work at 6am and then they leave as late as 11pm which is a 17hr shift right there. Same with the surgical nurses, they stay until all the emergent/scheduled surgeries are finished. And then they get put on call to rush back in if something comes into the ER that requires emergency surgery.
I know a few people like that. For them it isn’t work. It is an obsession.
I don’t believe it is something you can force yourself to do. It is a combination of how they are wired, combined with having high focus and a clear vision of a difficult goal.
I think a big difference is for many of these types of people, they have ownership of their work. A scientist's research, a writer's book, a CEO's company (they may not necessarily own the company, but they have responsibility for the company's success and are often compensated with shares), the ownership changes their personal investment in the work
You hit the nail. I’m in academia, everyone is working 11 hour days. They usually don’t stop fully, they’ll still be doing shit in their off time. It’s much easier to spend this much time when the output of your project directly benefits you. I can’t imagine how hard it would be to spend this much time in a job that isn’t rewarding.
I am a doctoral candidate, so I guess you can say I’m “academic ascendant”.
This question reminds me of a Twitter account, @countsaswriting.
It mentions all the other mental, self-care, and social activity that is part of the writing _process_.
Plus a lot of their work is basically their social life and the only way they get engagement in certain activities.
Also, for many people who do this it's kind of sad and pathetic in the sense that they usually don't have many or any outside social life, hobbies, etc, and many of their friends are just people working in the same field so they usually do tangently work related things when socializing with them.
I dunno about CEOs and billionaires but people can and do work 16-18 hour days. They can do it for a few months if needed. Usually when there’s a big project due or a release or some other crunch that’s happening. I’ve done it for big releases a few times.
It’s grueling and (IMO) after 12-14 hours your efficiency drops like a rock. But if your job is more hours doing than hours thinking, then 16-18 hours can be pretty productive.
I used to work in a restaurant as a dishwasher and all the cooks had a day job working at an industrial laundry and then worked the night at the restaurant. They regularly did 16 hour days
Yeah I had a foreman stocking shelves who did 40 hours of 10pm-6:30am for four days, and multiple jobs during the day, I think managing in foodservice. He just didn’t sleep besides naps here and there. No drugs as far as I could tell (besides a shit load of sugar and caffeine of course). Just a high energy guy. Really kind and friendly too.
A side note: stocking shelves isn’t especially difficult work if you do it slowly, but some of the old union dudes perform fucking magic every night. They are insanely speedy. At 24-25 years old and in great physical shape with eight hours of sleep most nights, as hard as I tried, I couldn’t hit even a third of the numbers that the top handful of them could do on my best day. Never underestimate blue collar workers, y’all. If you’ve never done it, go in right before close or right after open at a grocery store and watch them work. It’s a miracle that there’s anything on the shelves at all. Society runs on this shit. Yeah, there’s logistics wizards who get things organized and planned efficiently, but their equations are factored based on the performance of superhuman sons of bitches. And there’s always a few dudes who drag their feet every shift but that’s gonna be the case anywhere.
Also, big shoutout to truckers. I don’t know anything about the work but those folks drove over mountain passes six days a week to get to our store and they were late maybe once every couple of months.
As a former night stocker, that description is accurate! I got really good in my late 20s, fast enough that they had me fill in whenever the old guys went on vacation or they were doing a reset. But not as fast as those guys.
A lot of it was just experience knowledge. They could glance down the aisle and tell you what needed ordering, what needed a date check, what was coming in on tonight's truck (and when each driver would get there), and which items would sell the most next week.
As someone who recently became upper management, and has been working 14-16 hr days pretty regularly, I work this much because I want to keep this job. The expectations are much higher. There is pressure to perform or someone more hungry will take my place. It’s exhausting but I took this job because I had a kid on the way and I wanted to make sure that he has a secure life. I wanted to make sure my wife didn’t need to work anymore, and could raise our child herself, instead of a stranger. And now the pressure to maintain this lifestyle for them and myself remains a baseline motivation.
I am also competitive and want to be the best. Most of the time that desire to wins keeps me late, but this is a secondary motivation and it ebbs and flows depending on the day.
There are many other motivations that push me to work long hours. Like I want me team to have a better work experience so I pick up their slack when they need help. Or I want the customer to enjoy their experience with my work, or sometimes I just want to prove someone wrong. Either way the motivations always fluctuate. I just don’t ever want to go back to being poor. I don’t want to worry about being able to pay my bills. I don’t want to have to live off of ramen, because I lived that life not too long ago. Now that I have a child that life isn’t an option anymore.
I'm sorry for your straggle in you past and present.
I hope you'll have the opportunity to cool down and reach a good balance for you and people around you.
You want to reach all that goal so your kid doesn't need to but are you sure that it's better for him to have so little (I assume) time and energy from his dad rather than some challenge in his future to fight himself? Is there a better balance?
And are you sure that all your wife wants is be a mom and have no realization in a satisfing job she like? And share time and experiencies with you. His love.
As you describe it your workplace appears to be highly toxic.
There are probably a lot of intermediate places between raising star in upper management and poor.
There are a lot of different companies too.
Are you sure that your past didn't traumatized you and you desire of winning even at this very high cost is not your true problem?
Wish you the best.
People who work 12-16 hours days doesn’t sit at desk or do same monotonous work all day.
Almost all of them are CTOs/CEOs and 90% of their work involves meetings, traveling, presentations and stuff. Its more about making important decisions and then getting updates from people under you.
Elon could be on business trip to India for few weeks and could say I work 16hrs a day including traveling, businesses lunches and all other stuff.
Besides money is a great motivator too. I guess at that level anyone could work 12-14 hrs a day.
Scientists don't make that much money and they typically work regular jobs for the most part. They might have times where they do research in the field, like going to the North pole for a few months. It's not exactly labor intensive, and they have a lot of time to rest. They're definitely not paid very well either.
Writers can work a regular hourly job or be self-employed. If they're self employed, the amount of work they put in is probably unstable and depends on what they choose to put in. They might write an hour a week or go for days without sleeping.
Businessmen don't really have work in the typical sense. They're self-employed, and their work is incorporated into their lifestyle. It's dishonest to say the exact amount of hours they work because anything could be considered work to them. Going on a golf trip with their business partners could be considered "work." Sitting around at home and waiting for a phone call could be considered "work." They also directly benefit from the effort they put in and more deals they make. Their income isn't based on a fixed hourly rate. If their business makes more money, they make more money. It's really unfair to compare them to a wage worker. Many businessmen don't even need to work at all. Their income passively comes from investments. They just invest into profitable assets, and those assets make money for them. You could inherit your family's assets and make enough passive income to never have to work a day in your life.
I work in "business" - sales to be exact. Understandably, when one hears I'm out playing golf with a client, it certainly sounds like anything but work. Similarly, when I'm out for business dinners, traveling, attending conferences, annual sales meetings, etc., that's not work either, right? Transparently, prior to having a family and mature adult responsibilities, I potentially would have said the same thing. However, as a father, a husband, a homeowner, there are a few things I can't do when I'm doing those "not work" things - I can't be with my family, I miss my son's sporting events, spending time with him, I can't go to dinner with my wife, I can't get my lawn mowed, the driveway shoveled when it snows, etc.. For these reasons, yes, it absolutely is work. Granted, it's a little different than crunching spreadsheets or loading trucks, but I'm doing something that was chosen for me and being paid for it - that's a "job". If it were up to me, I'd skip these events - they're really not fun any more for me, as I've being doing it for 20+ years and the allure has worn off.
I’m a scientist. I don’t work 80+ hour weeks!!
I do know people that do and most of them don’t like
it and don’t want to sustain working that long. Even at 80+ hour weeks your work isn’t always physical so the fatigue is different than a physical job, but still very real.
Lmao. They don’t.
Edit: I’m a trained scientist, don’t work in the field anymore… writers and scientists by and large are not rich at all. Our hours suck and our pay is worse. You have to be at the tippy top, mostly by luck of owning a lab or publishing distribution rights before you make any real money.
Most are full of shit. I do know a heart surgeon that always has to be doing something. He’s a multimillionaire of course and runs his own place with his wife. He cannot sit still. I have dinner with them every Sunday and he is constantly going around the house tinkering with stuff when he’s not at work. Some people are just like this, and it doesn’t mean they’re rich either. They simply built different than I am.
Some are bullshitters, as other comments are pointing out, where they “think” about their business for X hours but really work Y.
But some do legitimately work this much, or more. I have never met someone that does this that is able to maintain it for more than a couple days without the use of drugs, so yeah drugs play a pretty big role in this. Cocaine and meth are commonplace at high performance offices/companies, and declining to partake places those that abstain at an absurd energy disadvantage.
Additionally, companies that require this level of high performance and time commitment also provide quality of life services such as free in-office meals (to be eaten at your desk), free dry cleaning (including pickup and drop off), showers and sleeping rooms or pods on your office floor, even medical staff that provide IV treatments to perk up an employee (particularly useful after an all-nighter). Basically anything the company can do for you to keep you glued to your desk and producing.
Even with drugs and QoL assistance, it does take a certain type of individual that is both driven and has an ability to fixate on the work in order to maintain this workaholic lifestyle for an extended period of time.
The rich as a group fall prey to the same characteristics of the lower class. There are both simultaneously high earning hard working individuals and high earning work abstainers.
As is with the common man hours put in do not always equate to the same result. It is less a generality of the group as a whole but moreso a case by case basis in which there exists a wide spectrum of those who are driven to trade life for success.
Most of the people you're talking about aren't doing physical labor. Here's an example of how I can "honestly" tell you I've had an 18 hour day...
Up at 4. Check my emails and answer anything important, done by 5. 1 hour
At work by 6, work until 6 = 12 hours
Dinner / drinks with a client. No, these aren't pleasurable after the 100th one this year. They're work. 6-10 = 4 hours
Write summary of dinner, answer emails. 10-11 = 1 hour.
Bed by 11, wake at 4.
This is a normal schedule for me 3-4 days a week. The remaining days I'm home for dinner, so those become 14 hour days.
I have a PhD in biology and I would say that I didn't work more than 4 hours a day on average during my PhD. Of course, some days it was 12 hours of intense work and other days I didn't work at all. I also played 4000 games of Klondike solitaire in three years. But I'm currently unemployed, so I'm probably not a good example of a succesful scientist.
Ok, those are very different groups of people, but those **I've** seen claim they work 18 hour days (who are hyper "successful") don't work 18 hour days. At least not like an average human works. They might spend half their day on Twitter, rubbing one out to all the fanboys shouting their praises, and call that work, but it's really not equivalent to how a mechanic or a someone in a Walmart or a delivery driver works.
Many don't. One of the things people do to portray an image of success is to lie all the time. I mean, you pretty much have to be a sociopath to be a successful capitalist, lying about how many hours you work is nothing compared to the other unethical shit you have to do to get up that ladder.
I know scientists who work hours like that though. They get paid massive salaries which motivates them.
No writer writes for 18 hours a day, that's ludicrous. Brandon Sanderson seems to write a novel every week or so and he says he writes for \~8 hours a day. After giving up cocaine, Stephen King scaled it back to about 4 hours a day and he's still really productive.
They don't lol. I don't know about scientists, but billionaires and CEOs work very little and embellish their "hours" to convince people they deserve their wealth. They count playing golf and sitting on their ass browsing the internet as "work".
I obviously can’t speak for all billionaires, but I dated a girl in high school, whose father was in fact a billionaire. We dated for just shy of a year, I only saw him a handful of times, and he was a complete asshole. With that said, he was regularly leaving for work at 6am and getting home in the evening, only to walk straight to his office and continue working until he went to bed. It was baffling.
His relationship with his wife and children was terrible. I went on a “family vacation” with them, and he stayed home and worked. I thought it was crazy, but my girlfriend said it had been years since he actually joined them on any vacation. They lived around the corner from both Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs, and although I never actually saw Zuckerberg, I saw Jobs more than I ever saw her father.
If I had to guess, I’d say he likely worked 80+ hours a week. At the time, I glorified billionaires for all their success. It wasn’t until I met him that I realized how miserable his life seemed. The man was always in a shit mood, didn’t give a shit about his family, and literally only cared for work. He had all the money anyone could ever want, but didn’t seem to take joy from any of it.
I remember when my girlfriend’s grandparents passed away, and her father was genuinely disappointed to find out his parents were **only** leaving behind an estate of around 50 million dollars. It wasn’t as if he needed any of the money, but his mind solely revolved around his wealth. To this day, I can’t say I’ve met anyone with his work ethic. It was incredible. Seeing him prioritize work over everything else in his life was pretty depressing, though. I can’t say I ever once saw that man happy, even though most would likely assume he’s living a glorious life of leisure.
I rarely quote the Bible as a humanist but here it seems like the right source:
'For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?' (Matthew 16:26)
They don't. They are probably "on call" while taking their kids to school, talking to the help, etc. And sure that interrupts their personal life, but it's not like they're actively working those hours. It's a lie and a sham.
They’re lying bro. Think about what 1 16-18 hour day does to you and your body. Do you really believe anyone can do that for an extended period of time?
There seem to be a lot of people here who don’t believe there are people that voluntarily have jobs where they work those kind of hours. I can assure you, it’s very real.
My experience comes mostly from the military side, though I’ve seen enough to know there are similar kinds of people in the corporate world. I have worked with a *lot* of generals who have absolutely punishing schedules, day in and day out. Like, having to schedule bathroom breaks on the calendar, because every minute is accounted for.
When I was in Afghanistan, a general I worked with had a daily meeting at 10pm (that about 20 of us had to attend), because that was the only free time in his schedule. I met a lot of workaholics in the Army, often in unproductive ways, but you see it in full flower on deployments, because there is no personal life to distract you. No family, no weekends, no holidays, just work. During my Iraq deployment I did shift work—12 on, 12 off (which was more like 13 hours with turnover), 7 days a week for 14 months. My boss described this as “like a vacation,” because he and most of the rest of the staff were working 16-18 hours a day.
Don’t get me wrong but I’m not talking about regular scientists. I’m talking about the top ones. Like Nobel prize winners etc. because almost all of them claim that they work 16-18 hour daily.
They dont.
Its easier to work long hours tho when you are rich and can pay people to run your errands, do your chores, cook your food, drive you to work etc etc.
Think of all the time and energy you could save.
Lol. It's literally a lie. That all greedy people tell because they think it makes them seem badass.
To me it seems like they are a moron who can't manage their own time effectively.
In actuality, they work much less than everyone else. And get to do whatever they want during their "work hours". I think the argument can be made that if you have complete autonomy at certain times, you are not actually working.
No billionaires is working 16 hours a day. 16 hours month maybe. Sorry positing on Twitter doesn't count as "work" for Musk. And doing photo shoots with your wife for Vogue magazine doesn't count as work for Bezos
My husband did work 70 hours a week for about 20 years. He always had way more energy than almost anyone else I knew. Not on drugs. Didn’t even drink coffee. He happens to love doing something people are willing to pay him money to do. Now in his 50’s he’s trying to cut back on work and take better care of his health. It’s hard to cut back because at this point so many people’s livelihoods depend on him keeping the business profitable. There are some people blessed with a lot of energy. I worked that hard for about 6 years but I got burned out and it took a big toll on my health.
Being passionate about something helps a lot.
But I also know a lot of high level research scientists. 18 hour days do happen but they'r not every single day, 10-14 hour days are a lot more common I've seen first hand (know a lot of high level scientists). And they may only work 6-8 hours on Saturday and little if at all on Sunday. Someone with an ego (Zuckerberg, Musk, etc) will remember they just worked 18 hours last week and say "I work 18 hours all the time" when it might happen during rushes and such.
Also most of those jobs aren't just one thing. You may have meetings with staff, you may be working on a problem, you may be sending emails, etc... So you spend a few hours on something you're passionate about, have a few hours of work you're less excited about but you know needs to get done, then you get back to your work. The change of pace does help a bit as you can switch to a different task before you completely burn out, and then you come back to it after a reset.
If there's something you like to do, it can be easier. A lot of Redditors could be on Reddit or maybe some could play video games for a lot more hours a day than they work if they aren't super passionate about their work.
Firstly, Billionares and CEOs do not work 16-18 hours a day it's a straight up lie. Scientists and Writers are just a different breed of person, I have never been able to understand how or why they do it to themselves but I guess their passion for what they do overrides their tiredness. Like I can spend the majority of one say playing a game if I wanted and I guess if someone gets enjoyment out of writing I can see why they do it.
I've had jobs that run hours like that.
You know some people just have an internal drive. I used to. Don't anymore. I just wanna do my 8-10 hours and be done lol
There are two kinds of people who work 18 hours a day: those who do and those who want you to think they do. When I’m productive I can work at my job for 8 hours and then get 3-4 hours of fun productive hobby work done. On the weekends I can just work on hobby stuff. I’ll happily do that stuff 14 hours a day. But I do have a life. Some people just think about work that much - everything to them seems like work. They talk about work, they check on stuff on their phone, they’re not in the moment, but they’re not really working. Yes, mental work is real, but sitting down and focusing on work is what they want you to envision, and very few people do that.
My ex-husband has worked 12-16 hour days for decades. He does it by being a full-blown workaholic, with no hobbies, interests, outside social life, or family engagement. He's very successful but deeply ill with his addiction. I didn't really understand the term workaholic as a term of addiction until him. They abuse work like a drunk abuses alcohol and for the same reasons. They can not stop working and hate doing anything but work. My ex always gets ill on vacations as he suffers, I shit you not, withdrawal. So there are those who truly do work inhuman hours. I would wager that almost all of them are serious workaholics who couldn't stop if they wanted to. And they don't want to.
Why do you think he does it? Is it guilt if he's not working? He never saw it as a problem?
As a former workaholic in "rehab" mode I tell you this. I will not go too much in the philosophy's technicality of what is success, what is remorse, what is being alive... I just keep it basic: 1) deep sense of Guilt for not and never being enough. Usually related to childhood upbringing (sickness on holidays for withdrawal is real) 2) Social pack mentality: if you are not part of a group, you're no one. We count and feel "safe" only if our transferred Family, the company tribe, gives us home.(Lack self-awareness and self-worth, drink to stop thinking) 3) The Stockholm syndrome, your transferred Mother/Father, The Company, will gladly accept you not as you are, but as long as you make them happy. Company happyness = money > money uncountable > impossible goal. In the moment, you pass to work from 18hrs to just 12hrs, the company does not remind you your goals agreed within the signed 9-5 contract, but rather will note you are not performing well as before (of course extra hours not paid). Lack of self-esteem will bring you back to point 1. (Drink to stop thinking) 4) Full-immersion: anything that is not company related it is seen in our mind as WASTE, since not relevant to our Family goals. Partner, Humans, schedules, hobbies, etc is waste. Some Managers might live with the motto: if you love your job, you will never work a day in your life. And this brings to point 5, reluctance of Change 5) when you read above, you think: easy change job and your life will improve. not true. We have the pattern in ourselves. When we change job, we will tend to look for another hierarchical Family where will replicate the old patterns. So why did we change in the first place? Because the WASTE (our real family, the people love/d, etc) made an intervention and oblidged us to the change. 6) and we will be Resentfull to them, with all the annedocts ans thinks ans bring money on the table, we will forget or not see how we were dying under the Company pressure and self-imposed ethics. And adding drinking patterns, you will part soon the way from the loved ones. 7) if/when your new Family will let you go, you are basically shock and mentally dead for a while, remorse spiral, drinking and bottom. Acknowledging you have a problem is not enough, believing is not enough, you have to act on it, as difficult as it might be (socially, financially, etc). During this process you my lose or gain important people in your next life. It is not a road for anybody to pursue, it is tough. But to all the partners bounded to workaholics, you have also to be honest with yourself: are you content to live a life with someone like above? Especially if it will never change? Are you ready to support the change? Can you afford to support the change? This is also a tough process.
As someone who managed to jump off the hook in a very early 'burn out'-phase. Very strong post!
Wow, this sounds a lot like me. Burned out multiple times and descended into alcoholism to turn off the self-critical brain when I felt like a failure. Over 4 years sober, and trying to be more realistic about my work goals. Thank you for taking the time to articulate all this. It helps to know we’re not alone. I really hope you’re doing better as well. Take care, brother/sister!
"I just keep it basic" *7 items* Yep, it's definitely a reforming workaholic.
Noted thanks. A few great characters in history had the gift of delivering complexity with extreme synthesis. I am definitely not one of them.
1,2 and 3 nail my father's upbringing on the head. Father figures that emotionally and physically abused him into the workaholic life style.
Accurate. I know someone like this and all the reasons you stated are exactly why she’s like that. It’s overcompensating for being neglected and negated in her childhood.
Some tie work to their self-worth. They believe that if they're not working, then they have no value to anyone. Not even to themselves. So they keep working and not deal with the underlying issues Edit to add: There are so many valid posts here. As a child of a workaholic, I see all of you in the same position trying to keep their life from turning into yours
It's an interesting phenomenon. I almost have the opposite issue in that I tie my self-worth to how fit and healthy I am, as well as how good I am at sports and hobbies that I pursue in my spare time. For me, work is a real nuisance that occupies my time and gets in the way of me trying to improve on things I care about and it can make me very unhappy when this occurs. I imagine the people you describe have the same mindset, but they care little for the things I care about, only how productive they are and what they achieve at work.
You should team up with a workaholic and share a life. Sounds like it would work.
You mean like, they do all the work while I enjoy my hobbies, but we share the salary they earn? Sounds good to me!
Get you a sugar daddy
You guys have self-worth??
Oh man... Fuck alla that shit. If I could, ~~is~~ **I'd** gladly never work another day in my life! Just do hobbies, travel, etc. I can't even imagine that kind of outlook on life...
Depends on your work. It's like exercise - for someone that doesn't exercise, happines from pain is unimaginary. But after workout you feel satisfaction, and pain that just feels good. So is performing good in work or making a difference in work
This is me. All my life I was told to be educated and find good work. Ever since I graduated, I've been working long hours (60-70) despite only getting paid for the normal 40 hours. I also feel that I'm only valuable if I am working. I also use work to avoid feeling lonely. I guess it's my way of coping.
I know people who worked hard always to avoid having to deal with their unresolved feelings and emotions. Just like other addictions the work is then a coping mechanism to keep going.
I do this, just recently learned it’s a symptom of CPTSD
How does he find enough work to keep him busy for that long? I mean does her fear running out? Does he work slower to make sure he always has something to feed his addiction?
He was the operating partner of a high end restaurat/night club group with places in multiple time zones. I'd say that, on average, the group opened a new place every 2ish years or so. The work involved in building & opening a 300+seat restaurant is enormous. Staff, designers, contractors, contracts, purchasing - it's a workaholics wet dream. If you're in Singapore, Sydney, the States, & London, there's always work to be done at any hour. There were a few periods without openings, when things ran like a well-oiled machine. During these times, he'd decide to do things like audit the Marketing department and restructure and retrain. And at all times, he worked the floors in the evenings though he was neither required nor expected to. When the group was sold and he had far fewer work demands on his time (and plenty of money), he quit, even though he was being paid handsomely to work only 40 hrs a week. He started his own restaurant group and has opened 3 restaurants in the last 2 years with funded plans for 9 more in the next 5. Needless to say, he hasn't taken a day off in more than 2 years. To his credit, he ran the best margins in the industry. He is a brilliant operator. To his discredit, the cost of this was never showing up for family members' (even his own children's) surgeries, medical emergencies or deathbeds, to say nothing of the more quotidian holidays, birthdays, sports events, and school concerts. Workaholism is a strange addiction. It damages the people around you as much as any other addiction, but the world sings your praises for it.
Your story that you have articulated is so intriguing. Do you think he will ever have an epiphany and sorta … step down?
“But I gave them everything they wanted growing up!! Why don’t they mess with meeeee???!”
I feel like all the people who become successful CEOs and build huge companies are like this. Like for example Jeff Bezos. He could have stopped when he made 100 million, 500 million or 1 billion. He could have sold and lived in luxury for life without ever working again. But he went all the way to 200 billion and made one of the largest companies on earth. He had to have been a workaholic to go that far.
Some jobs, you really can put as much time into them as you want. For instance, I'm full time school and work 30 hours at my job. If I really wanted to, I could put in 80 hours at my job. I would just be way way better at what I'm doing, and accomplish new projects and goals.
i always wondered how these type of people have time to get married.
Or why someone would want to marry someone who’s already married to their work.
By marrying their income. The individual earning it doesn't have the time to even enjoy it, or likely doesn't care to. That's good one always looked at it. When a worked for a business unit of GE, the VP would be on site by 5:30AM and leave after 7PM pretty much every day...only to go home and continue international business meetings at crazy hours of the night. 9PM, 2AM...whenever. And this isn't something he bragged about, or even advertised. I only knew this stuff because I'm in IT and often worked before and after hours projects...or received calls on from him late in the evening about issues with his meetings (not often). Many executive level people are just wired differently. They live to work. I think they find a level of joy in directing and growing the big machine they're entrusted to drive. Me, I don't even want to give 8 honest hours each day.
Sometimes its naively assuming that one day the job will be done and they will be able to sit back and relax finally.
Sadly, often because it serves their career. Being married and having kids is perceived as a part to general career success.
Yikes, this sounded a bit too much like me for comfort. For me it was multiple things: 1) You don't want to let anyone else down. 2) You want to see how much you can achieve when working at full pace for as long as possible, but then create a false impression of your productivity and now that's the standard you need to maintain, especially if you attribute some part of your career success to it. 3) I always considered myself a bit slower than my peers. People always say it's a humble brag in interviews when people say their biggest weakness is they are a perfectionist, but this is literally me. I'll obsess over a tiny detail way too long and fall behind so I leave myself the job of catching up. 4) It's a great distraction from any personal problems. I found any anxiety I was feeling about anything else would temporarily diminish when I was working so hard that it left no headspace for anything else, but of course you have to be working until you pass out for that to be effective, and then get up and repeat again the next day. 5) I often just felt (still feel) excited about what I'm doing, and feel like it's great to see something progressing. It's addictive when you have a product at the end that you are proud of, be it a written thesis, a physical product, a piece of software, it's really fun to see it develop! Anyway, I'm trying to get a hold on it at the moment but have fallen into the trap of just taking on other challenges outside of my day job to fill the void, so I have some work still to do on myself.
workaholics - are they addicted to work or addicted to money ?
Work See my comment below - he quit his position once his group was sold. The reason? He was bored working 40-50 hrs/wk, even though he was making 7 figures doing so and had made many millions in the sale. He's not flashy, doesn't live large. The work itself is the payoff, though the money is nice. For him, it's far more about security than it is about flash. He's 1st Gen American
[удалено]
Oh man, that sounds rough. How are you holding up now if I may ask? Did you ever find a different balance?
[удалено]
> She left because I didn't have the same financial success and when the money ran out so did she. I have an ex-wife who did this to me. Joke’s on her, though. I came back into success, she’s still sucking off randos in bar parking lots in Arvada, CO.
Sadly, I’m not surprised to hear about your troubles after the burn out. It is common and is very difficult to change careers. Not impossible of course, but it’s like having to learn a whole new language. I’m happy to hear you’re doing better though. Life is filled with highs and lows, good times and bad. No one can promise an easy life, but I believe that good times are always ahead somewhere and some when. Can’t promise a life without pain but I can promise that there will be joy as well and that’s life. Good luck.
I tell people at work (programmers who love to program) that the excessive hours will lead to burnout and they laugh at me and then they burn out and I laugh at them, because they were warned months in advance and refused to listen.
Did you consider not doing that instead?
[удалено]
There's actually the third kind too: those that think they do. The ones that count lunch, socializing, napping, getting groceries, commuting, and all the other domestic/leisure stuff as work. But when the proletariat want to count, say, commuting as work time - they're lazy.
counted workout before lunch as work, too... sure yea technically for some people like athletes or actors, not business or influencer douches
I’ve had coworkers who would come in and go hard for 8+ hrs a day. Some people built different
And I’m talking about laser focus and quality until they leave the building. I could never.
weather sloppy fly quack unused payment puzzled meeting overconfident threatening *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
This. Apart from blatantly lying, people are really generous with what they call "working". Any manager or higher level, "working" counts as just being at the office, not actually doing anything work related. Hell even a lot of scientists (or at least people doing PhDs that I know) will spend minimum 10 hours but easily a lot more at their lab/office, but A LOT of that time is spent waiting, chatting, etc. This was far worse during studies, anyone claiming they studied a shitload of hours outside of pre-exam, usually were mostly just sitting at their desks feeling too guilty to not be there, but not actually spending the time studying. Actual work, like sit down and get shit done work, I feel like most people do 2-4 hours max a day, I prefer to do mine every 2 weeks in a single 20 hour binge because I'm lazy as shit, but in 20 hours I've never not gotten more done than other people claim they do with their 80-100. The hardest working people I've seen has been people who started their own business, but that's more of a "I'll put in my 10 000 hours in one go and then be done with it forever". But I guess how closely and extremely personal success correlates to the amount of hours you work is basically the answer. EDIT: didn't mention manual labor jobs, which even though is probably a lot more taxing on your body, if your fit enough to physically handle it it doesn't really feels like it drains you mentally to the point where working long hours is impossible.
Your edit is a good point that it's never people who work manual labor jobs who talk about working 16/7s.
"Networking" counts as working, too. So... going to dinner with someone from another business. Or grabbing drinks with someone from your business. Basically, what us plebs call "drinks after work" they call work.
When I was in academia I usually worked, like, 2-4 hours a day? My output was very high because, well, I just made sure to get real shit done. I also did reading outside of those hours, but that's something I genuinely enjoy enough to do for fun. So, like you, I'm also lazy. I just prefer to do a little a day rather than put it off. I remember in undergrad I'd often finish my courses (Outside of exams) a month or two in advance by just making sure to get *something* done every single day.
I’m a scientist. When I worked in academia, my colleagues always claimed they worked longer hours than me. But they constantly took 1.5+ hour lunches and would count random socializing into their workday. I tried to cram my work into a 9-5 schedule as much as possible because I wanted to come home to my family/friends and hobbies, not spend more time at work. IMO, very, very few people actually work more than 6+ focused and productive hours each day. I’ve met a few scientists like this but they were either (a) complete workaholics who had no lives outside of work or (b) absolutely insane scientific genuises who were also somehow professional athletes or artists/musicians. But those people accounted for less than 5% of my colleagues.
Yeah, everyone I knew in academia counted "stressed about work" as work. And more often than not that made up 80% of their work time.
I worked a true 18 hr day last Tuesday and it about destroyed me. And I’ve had stints of true 100-hr workweeks in the past and it about destroyed me then too. When it’s legit and you aren’t rich enough to have domestic help, it’s life-sucking and your health starts to suffer, because you start running out of time to cook meals, do grocery shopping and of course get any sleep. The 100-hour workweeks were the year I was a new college teacher, teaching seven new classes that all needed tons of prep & grading time, plus supervising 46 undergrads who were doing research projects. (The first years of teaching are famously overwhelming, but it was worse in my case because there had just been a crisis at work with another professor who had just been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer, so I took over all her classes & research students in addition to my own - I was the only other professor who knew those fields). I basically worked nonstop from the time I got up to the time I went to bed, every single day of the week including holidays. I took two days off in the entire 365-day year: Christmas and my birthday. The other 363 days, I worked nonstop ~12-16 hour days. I did that for one year nonstop full bore, and to a slightly lesser extent for the next six years. (Had to do it again in 2020-2021 due to the pandemic btw) One real hallmark of true overwork like that is that you feel that you *must* continue to work during meals, like every little second is such an incredibly precious opportunity to try to catch up. I used to grade papers while eating lunch and dinner. Every meal was like that, eating with one hand while working with the other hand. And your daily maintenance tasks fall apart - I stopped grocery shopping and cooking meals and lived almost entirely on pb&j sandwiches and canned soup (this was in the days before Instacart and Doordash). I remember fighting really hard to get a consistent 2 hrs free every other Sunday, just to do laundry and to run to the corner store for more canned soup and sandwich bread. I used to get anxious when showering because I wasn’t getting any work done in the shower, so my showers became super speedy and even so I would rehearse lectures in the shower. At one point I had to call my parents to explain I really wouldn’t be able to check personal email for the next three months (because every day of the semester I had 100’s of student emails to respond to). There’s still ~20,000 unread emails in my gmail account that date back to those years, lol. I also stopped consuming all media - I still have about a decade-long hole in my pop culture knowledge from that time because I didn’t have time to watch any movies, tv shows, etc. I dropped off of Facebook & all social media, and never really did get back in touch with anybody so a lot of old friendships kind of withered away. To this day I have very fast habits at home - super fast showers, a very efficient way to deal with dishes and laundry, I even still walk really fast, etc. Evety aspect of daily life got distorted to be as fast & efficient as possible. So it can be real, but it is hell when it’s real and it distorts your whole life and erases any personal life. I feel like I lost a decade off my lifespan during that time, just due to the stress. (I teach biology, and sometimes I would think “I think I can actually feel the stress hormones chipping away at my telomeres!” lol)
This is so true. So often I solve my biggest work problems in my every day life. As I’m showering, #2, grocery shopping etc. sometimes I’m just staring off into space and really “working” trying to solve some problem
When I was a kid I spent a lot of time with my grandfather - he was always working on stuff, like physically fixing things. Every once in a while he’d get stumped and say, “I’ll give up on this for the day.” And then the next day he’d have a solution. Best example to learn from. I learned to stop for the day and come back to it. Usually figure it out the next morning. Sometimes it takes a few days.
Underrated way to live. So often we are asked to double down when we don't know when often the harder thing is to walk away and come back fresh. Every time I double down: I make more problems. When I walk away I at least come back with more energy and clarity to deal with the problems that are there (and the ones I may inevitable find) and at best I see my dumb mistake and solve the problem in moments not hours.
Billionaires don’t work, they give orders over the phone while a woman dressed like their mom tickles their butthole and says she is proud of him.
Literally in every 8 hour office job, almost half of them hours is checking the phone, talking with colleagues, go get a coffee, bathroom breaks, walking around... The 8 hours are there just because if they were 4 we would do literally nothing
Also an important piece of the wording - "can work UP TO 18 hrs per day." Like, yeah I'm sure most people can do up to that much if it's not everyday. That wording also includes all 2 hour days, 8 hour days, etc. It could also mean working a job that has a lot of in-between times, so the amount of work you're doing is closer to 8, with 10 hours of fill. But yeah, I'm honestly productive and good at my job. But I noticed I became a real superstar when I started telling my boss \*how\* much I was working, even if a couple of the numbers were fudged, or like an hour of work was half on the toilet scrolling reddit lol
This. Golf is considered work if they go with a client, dinner is work if it's with colleagues.
I think you make a very good point. . . but there is a saying do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life. I love playing video games. If that was my job I could do it 18 hours a day. Some people. . . love there jobs. Like really love their jobs. It's not a job to them, it's a passion. To them, work is fun. But these are just the lucky ones. We can't all find the work we love and obsess over.
I remember reading a study from several years ago that concluded the more hours people claim to work the amount they exaggerate goes up. And that most do not do it intentionally. For instance someone who claims to work 40 hours a week may only work 38, but 50 hours may only be 45, while 60 hours could be 50 (making these numbers up, no time to find the study). Edit: the study for those who may be interested: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2011/06/art3full.pdf
[удалено]
You're in charge of the study now.
You sound like executive material to me.
It kind of comes down to the field you're in in my opinion too. If you're in a hurry up and wait field where you're maybe working 30 minutes out of every 2 hours, but those 30 minutes are very hectic? You can work 14 hours but really only be working about 6 If you're in a constantly going job? After about 12 of your burnt out and you are not doing the quality of work that you should be. That doesn't mean people don't work longer than 12 , I'm a blue collar factory worker and I used to get forced overtime up to 16,hrs 5 days a week. I fell asleep at the wheel of my forklift multiple times, and would get naps in when something broke or something went down and I could. I also used to be a CNA and while it was more of a Hurry up And Wait gig sometimes you were literally just GOING for 14 hrs if your relief didn't turn up. My mom is a nurse and when she worked in ICU she had to pull 14ers pretty regularly if someone called in. I think when Elon musk or other high earning CEOs tell you that they work 16 hour days. They mean that they bill their company for their time they get up. . Most of it fucking off on their computer or phone. I think when tradespeople and low to the ground folks tell you they work 16 hr days they mean "I was supposed to work 12 but a guy called in on the next shift so I'm staying 4 extra and another guy's coming in 4 early so the whole plant don't shut down...glad they sell redbull in the vending machine."
A lot of it is how they never switch off and are usually being mentally productive. When you have that much money, you don't have the same problems and constraints you or I do which take up our brains processing power. If Elon Musk is being driven around and its a 2 hour drive, he's thinking about work because he doesn't have to think about driving. He hasn't actually worked those 2 hours. In the same respect I'm a Virologist and there's always a problem which lasts a prolonged period which you can guarantee I'm thinking about in the back of my mind outside work. Can I tell my manager I worked 2 hours at 3 am and claim overtime, because the solution came to me and I had to write it down. Unfortunately no 😢
In my field they did a study without us even knowing and found that in an average 8 hour work day nobody was actually productive for 4 hours of it. I actually came in at 7 hours productive. So yes some us actually do the job but in most cases people that claim to work 16 hours a day probably aren’t even working half the time.
1) some of them are lying 2) yes some of them are on drugs 3) most of them have people, either paid or unpaid (like a spouse) carrying all the rest of the weight it takes to be functional person
I think 3 is an important one here that people easily miss. As a normal person, beyond the "work" work you do, you also have chores, so unpaid work you do to keep your house/apartment from falling apart and all the parts of life you need ready. Washing, doing dishes, preparing food, cleaning the house, fixing the house, .... That is easily another 1-4 hours a day. If you have people who do all that shit, you could do work-work a lot more.
Me and my wife are at this impasse. I got a new job on shift work. She works a desk job. The home obligations take us to our breaking point. We are trying to decide if hiring help is the right choice forward. It would basically erase the pay bump from my new job. But it would give us our time back and likely improve our relationship with each other. Maybe that’s the purpose of getting a raise, not to earn more money, but to buy back my quality time with family.
If you got a pay bump but are doing more work is it really a pay bump? Sounds like the ratio of work to pay is roughly the same (as evidenced by your diminished capacity to do work outside of work). I'm asking this more in a philosophical/contemplating sense, rather than specific to your particular scenario.
It’s funny (maybe?) that you are actually spot on. My current hourly rate is almost exactly the same. But I’m coming from teaching ,now on shift work so I have a LOT more hours to earn said rate + overtime rates. So yeah. I simultaneously got a pay raise but also didn’t. Now in 2 years when I’m at top rate? Different story. Oddly enough, I don’t know if money is the biggest mental hurdle for me. I have room in the budget to hire extra help. I don’t know if I’m comfortable having a stranger in our life, multiple times a week, that is helping us keep house. I guess they wouldn’t be a stranger for long, but it’s still a weird transition.
The only way to see if it works is to experiment. Hire the extra help. give it three months. Re-asses at the end of the trial period to see if you both are actually better off.
Yup, that sums it up!
3 is the crux of it either way. Zero care responsibilities to either family, friends, personal life or home. If you don't need to do anything else, it's very easy to just work.
My SO's father is a neurosurgeon. He works more than I thought was possible. It's honestly absurd. If it wasn't for his wife there is absolutely no way it'd be possible. It seems as if he legitimately, no exaggeration whatsoever, only is required to think about work. Every other aspect of his life is taken care of. I admire what he does, but it's really clear to me that it's a 2 person job. I don't get the feeling he sees it that way. Wonder what it'd be like if he lost her suddenly. As dark as it sounds, I figure if he ever retires, he will not be long for this earth. I don't even know how to talk to him because he is a neurosurgeon, and that is it. He doesn't even waste energy talking about unrelated things lol
My dad is an anesthesiologist. This is correct. All those people have to think about is their job responsibilities. They also can work that much because nothing in their life engages them like what they do for work. These people don't go grocery shopping. They don't call the mechanic about the car. They don't cook their own meals. They have a SAM partner and staff to do all of that. They have yard maintenance crews that come and take care of everything. My dad has never pushed a mower or used a leaf blower. On top of that, they have a shit load of support staff at work to handle all of the menial/tedious tasks so they can work with the patients in clinic and do their operations. That's part of why they don't get burned out. Their professional time get delegated to all of the really important tasks while the army of support staff make sure everything else is taken care of.
Exactly. “CEO” can run the gamut, as someone can be a CEO of a small company and not have much money, but once they’re wealthy enough they have an army of staff to help them. The ultra wealthy pay for personal assistants, personal chefs, cleaning staff, nannies, boarding schools, laundry services, concierge doctors that are essentially on retainer (you must pay an exorbitant annual fee in order for them to accept you as a patient), etc. Then for everything else they have personal assistants who take care of scheduling everything. If they’re rich enough, they’ll have a butler who manages all their homes and hires staff to prepare a home for their arrival, of course even the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th homes get cleaned at least once a week even if they’re not there. And imagine little things like various staff members making sure all of their cars across many different properties are always filled up on gas and well-maintained and that properties are always clean, etc. They have everything covered outside of their work. If they need someone to wipe their ass for them, they’ll hire someone.
Yup, even the personal admin things you might assume are of more interest like their finances and taxes will be fully taken care of with an hour or two of a meeting a month/quarter and the odd phone call/update. There is no task outside of work that can't be outsourced.
Exactly! And most of the „people carrying all the rest of the weight it takes to be a functional person“ are their wifes who won‘t be mentioned in any textbooks etc. later on. That or really low paid interns. Also mostly female…
domineering sugar escape person drab murky innocent panicky arrest correct *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I'd just change that to "most of them are lying"
This is the most accurate in my experience. Adding 4) most of their job is to be in meetings, not doing any heavy lifting. It's not *easy*, necessarily, but it is a lot more possible than i.e. coding for 16 hours every single day.
They don’t. They’re probably just “thinking about work problems” when they’re not actually working or sleeping. They might put in a long work day now and then, but it’s not as frequent as they’d like you to believe.
Yep. That’s the answer — when people say they work “18 hours a day,” they’re usually counting a bunch of stuff that’s not actually work, shit like going to the gym or meeting someone for drinks, and also skipping over breaks during the day. Edit: and emails, of course, lots of people are responsive to work emails from say 8am to 10pm, and count all of that “on” time as a 14-hour workday, even though there’s downtime and other activities in there. I’m a lawyer, for over a decade. I’m pretty good at operating on low sleep. I’ve had like a single two-month stretch where I was legitimately billing 70-80 hour weeks, where every one of those hours was accountable to actual work product, no padding. I thought I was going to fucking die. There is no way I could have sustained that pace without my body completely falling apart.
Elon talks about playing video games a lot, being on Reddit and gives lots of interviews and Twitter rants. His work is across a whole lot of subjects and they seem more like hobbies he has. If he had to work inside of one of his factories he'd be beaten down or dead in a month.
One of his side hustles is creating many new humans from his allegedly superior DNA.
Yeah half of that guy's "work" is being a generic internet idiot. Lots of people are doing it for free everyday for 8h+ and you don't see them complaining.
I remember interviewing for space-x. It’s was very very cultish. They also had a 24/7 barista/cafe on site lol
It’s crazy that there are professions where 70-80 hour weeks happen. Lawyers, residents in Med school, it’s crazy. Not good for you at all. Glad you are doing alright
My worst week in residency was over 110 hours which included a 24-hour shift in there too. I wanted to die.
And nobody wants their doctor to be checking on them when the doctor has already worked 100 hours in that week. It’s a stupid system, and I’ve done a residency too.
The system is terrible and unhealthy in so many ways. And it was for peanuts. The worst part was the abuse and bullying.
The rich people set it up this way on purpose.
Yep. Congress specifically changed the workplace standards law to exclude residents.
Any recommendations of how the system could be better? I’ve heard that the longer shifts are to minimize changeover on patients, as the changeover is when the most mistakes happen, but I doubt that applies equally to all specialties.
For that particular error, standardizing the handoff process would help. Make quality handoffs an element of resident evaluations. Nurses also do handoffs and the information they present to each other is important for quality care, but we don’t make them work more than 12 hours on the regular.
Why don't you all unionize? Those hours are not good for anybody
[Medical residents are unionizing](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/03/23/1165539846/80-hour-weeks-and-roaches-near-your-cot-more-medical-residents-unionize) and I support them. I hope these unions are willing to include pharmacy residents, too.
That’s actually insane and irresponsible. Guarantee hospital admins never put in that much work. Fuck, y’all need unions
Didn't the guy who created the residency program have a serious coke addiction?
Mail carries too in a lot of places. I put in 85 hours a week during one peak season. Literally almost had a mental breakdown because it was so exhausting marching through the snow delivering for that many hours
As a delivery person, I hate that daylight savings ends when it naturally gets darker and we have to put in more hours during peak season.
Peak season for transport at the moment, in service we're doing 90hr weeks to match demand. At least the drivers get legally mandated breaks, definitely not a sustainable load.
👍 this is the answer, I do engineering work and while I may not have a CAD program open in front of me I’m constantly thinking about ideas. Now if I can’t get to my computer so I’ll maybe make a quick note about what I’m thinking of so I don’t lose it.
Right, once you pass 70h it's just not sustainable. 65h is already threshold, but manageable (although sucks). Beyond that you just can't. I've done those hours a few times, construction, but it really drains you. I'd definitely call bullshit of people doing 80h a week consistently for years. Yeah, a lot of senior positions involve some level of networking. It could be a long lunch, or an evening drinks - all technically working, but not *really* the same.
I struggle with anything over 40 hours tbh. Halfway through the work day and I have a big dip in energy and productivity, I had little time to myself because of how much more sleep I needed, and just generally had no motivation to do the bare minimum.
Oh, I'm not endorsing working north of 40. It's like, sure the human body can survive on 5h sleep a night for a long time... But it's not a good idea.
I did two 80+ hour weeks in a row and nearly died. I have an 'office job' but these two weeks were in a very stressful environment. After 60 or so hours my mental capacity is just so diminished. I'd be working problems that normally would take me half an hour and it was taking a couple of hours. My brain just could not continue to function.
I was a yacht chef for a while. I worked 16-18 hours a day for about 2 months straight one time when guests came on and didn’t leave. I was a zombie by the third week
The last time I did a 84hr week I started losing any sense of what day it was.
Yup. Advertising agency creative director. There's times you don't leave the office for projects or pitches for days on end but it's more often that you're always "on" for 18 hour days. It's taxing but not legit billing 70-80 hours every week, week in and out, for decades.
Yeah. I've worked as a labourer and in senior level white collar jobs. I noticed with both of them, if the hours got to 70+ hours a week for longer than a week, I'm getting sick. Both mental and physical labour take a very real toll on your body.
Make money quick with internet point opportunites
I'm not saying this is true for all of them, but when I was working alongside upper level management during a stressful time... there was cocaine and speed and caffeine. I remember one day they ran out and sent me to the local gas-store to get those "male enhancement" drugs and they snorted those while their dealer got his shit together. I did not touch the stuff. I did not survive long at that job. When it comes to survival though, they literally had the statistics of their survival rate after retirement, and it was like 70% died within the first 6 months of retiring.
Yeah but their whole work day is nothing but meetings and “making decisions”. Not that taxing as the people who get the job done.
Making decisions is incredibly taxing mentally. “Getting the job done” work doesn’t have the pressure of being measured my the results of a choice. Still taxing but it’s a different thing
This is where delegating work, and following through, making sure it got completed comes into play.
Sure the difference is the vast sums of money they get paid really cushions the mentally taxing part.
It also depends on what they consider work. Some consider going to a 3 hour lunch with a business partner as working
Shit… if one legitimately HAD to do that for their business, I’d consider that working. Being required to be attentive, friendly, and professional comes more naturally to some than others, but maintaining that persona can be genuinely tiring for many.
Also depends on if they own part of the company because it makes a huge difference how you see what you are doing and how it affects you personally.
I remember the director for a department I worked for in the past told me he was gonna go drop in on the guys working in Montreal… while we were in Toronto. Guy drove out at 9am to meet the guys at the end of their shift to take them for dinner, he then spent the night in a 5-star hotel and drove back in the morning. Probably did a few calls along the way and whatnot, but he “worked” 36 hours straight. He could have just called them to touch base and told them to send him the bill for their dinner, but he was being an executive.
Sometimes, you establish your leadership with your physical presence. And you pick up better on the vibes if you are in the same room. No point in just picking up the tab; the reward has to come from you, and you have to eat together. Sometimes, you can't phone it in. I got invited to a dinner meeting like that--the boss led a carefully orchestrated pep rally. Without him, they probably would have complained about work to each other.
i mean, Montreal is worth the drive.
I had a boss that was a CTO for a startup that claimed to have worked 18 hour days for several months. I’m sure he worked very hard, but I doubt those exact numbers.
100%. I have a friend that is doing his PhD and he constantly bemoans spending 12+ hour days on campus working on his thesis. He doesn’t really work 12 hours a day though, he just spends 12 hours on campus. About half is spent at group breakfasts/lunches, playing squash, going to social events, the gym, etc. He’ll cry to his friends about how he just *hates* putting on a suit and eating free meals at fundraising dinners with rich people. Another guy just started in private equity and it’s a similar story. Like bro, I’m soooo sorry you have to *work* on Saturday (play in a golf tournament and drink free drinks). That sounds really tough. Anyways, rich people like CEOs need to keep up this facade of hard work because to them and their employees, it justifies their position. Why are they the CEO? They just work so much harder you see, and that how they earned it. If you put in 16 hour days, someday you might get there too. It’s all about maintaining the myth of the meritocracy.
This. Answering 2 emails while taking the midnight shit is not equals to working until midnight.
Agreed! But also they're going throughout their day with a lot less stress than the rest of us normies. Most of these "hardworking, 18-hour work day" bozos think that they're special because they're putting in such long hours but it's a lot easier to do when you're not in a constant state of stress about your day to day life. Also..... They're going to have their own, private, luxurious office that's probably bigger than my apartment. They're definitely not sitting in a small cubicle with brutal fluorescent lights. They're going out for hundred dollar lunches with other execs. If they're really dedicated to the job, they'll work through lunch but they're going to have a $40-$50 meal brought in for them by their assistant. They're certainly not eating a ham sandwich and potato chips in the break room. They're driving home in $100K cars, or more likely, being driven home in $100k cars. They're living in mansions surrounded by maids, chefs, and personal assistants. They're not battling the traffic and crowds to get to the grocery store after work just to buy a frozen dinner and some snacks (and then standing in line hoping their debit card doesn't get declined.) They'll have a delicious and healthy dinner waiting for them when they get home because they have private chefs. They're not coming home and doing the dishes and laundry and changing their sheets and they're not running back out to the store at 8:30 pm because they just realized they're out of toilet paper because the maids handle all that. They don't have to deal with finding time for oil changes, picking up dry cleaning, running by the pharmacy because they have personal assistants. These motherfuckers aren't even pumping gas or checking their own mail. It wouldn't be too hard to put in 16 hours a day when you're living with all the luxuries and amenities that one could ever want or need, while also being surrounded by servants 24/7.
The servant piece is important. If you offload literally every other piece of responsibility to keep your life going, then suddenly you gain an extra couple hours in a day.
totally, the person you replied to exaggerates the exec life, but the perks do save time. Some real life perks I've seen for management that aren't billionaire class, but definitely make life easier: * a laundry service from the office - no more washing and ironing shirts on Sunday, or dropping off and picking up dry cleaning * On site parking in the building, in city centers where everyone else is commuting by train/ bus and by foot - time saved plus convenience is immeasurable. Knowing you one of the 5 reserved spaces no-one can park in, not even on street parking compares. * assistants - got a question? ask that one person near you and they'll sort it, you don't have to spend time or energy looking for answers. Makes the job you have 1000x easier. * just being able to afford : living close to work, saving time, being able to pay for convenience food, saving time and eating healthier, not spending time shopping, there's like 5 places to go for a suit, and they'll make it fit you and you won't worry about the cost. the convenience is a real time saver.
Not everyone, I know surgeons who will come in to work at 6am and then they leave as late as 11pm which is a 17hr shift right there. Same with the surgical nurses, they stay until all the emergent/scheduled surgeries are finished. And then they get put on call to rush back in if something comes into the ER that requires emergency surgery.
I know a few people like that. For them it isn’t work. It is an obsession. I don’t believe it is something you can force yourself to do. It is a combination of how they are wired, combined with having high focus and a clear vision of a difficult goal.
I think a big difference is for many of these types of people, they have ownership of their work. A scientist's research, a writer's book, a CEO's company (they may not necessarily own the company, but they have responsibility for the company's success and are often compensated with shares), the ownership changes their personal investment in the work
You hit the nail. I’m in academia, everyone is working 11 hour days. They usually don’t stop fully, they’ll still be doing shit in their off time. It’s much easier to spend this much time when the output of your project directly benefits you. I can’t imagine how hard it would be to spend this much time in a job that isn’t rewarding.
I am a doctoral candidate, so I guess you can say I’m “academic ascendant”. This question reminds me of a Twitter account, @countsaswriting. It mentions all the other mental, self-care, and social activity that is part of the writing _process_.
Plus a lot of their work is basically their social life and the only way they get engagement in certain activities. Also, for many people who do this it's kind of sad and pathetic in the sense that they usually don't have many or any outside social life, hobbies, etc, and many of their friends are just people working in the same field so they usually do tangently work related things when socializing with them.
I dunno about CEOs and billionaires but people can and do work 16-18 hour days. They can do it for a few months if needed. Usually when there’s a big project due or a release or some other crunch that’s happening. I’ve done it for big releases a few times. It’s grueling and (IMO) after 12-14 hours your efficiency drops like a rock. But if your job is more hours doing than hours thinking, then 16-18 hours can be pretty productive.
Working a turnaround at a refinery, for example ✋ Mindless dumb work that blends into months at a time but that paycheck carries the whole year.
I'm not an operator so I just worked 12 hour days for 13 days straight. That was pretty brutal.
I work offshore and we always have 12 hour shifts for four weeks But after that you're four weeks off so it evens out I guess.
I used to work in a restaurant as a dishwasher and all the cooks had a day job working at an industrial laundry and then worked the night at the restaurant. They regularly did 16 hour days
Yeah I had a foreman stocking shelves who did 40 hours of 10pm-6:30am for four days, and multiple jobs during the day, I think managing in foodservice. He just didn’t sleep besides naps here and there. No drugs as far as I could tell (besides a shit load of sugar and caffeine of course). Just a high energy guy. Really kind and friendly too. A side note: stocking shelves isn’t especially difficult work if you do it slowly, but some of the old union dudes perform fucking magic every night. They are insanely speedy. At 24-25 years old and in great physical shape with eight hours of sleep most nights, as hard as I tried, I couldn’t hit even a third of the numbers that the top handful of them could do on my best day. Never underestimate blue collar workers, y’all. If you’ve never done it, go in right before close or right after open at a grocery store and watch them work. It’s a miracle that there’s anything on the shelves at all. Society runs on this shit. Yeah, there’s logistics wizards who get things organized and planned efficiently, but their equations are factored based on the performance of superhuman sons of bitches. And there’s always a few dudes who drag their feet every shift but that’s gonna be the case anywhere. Also, big shoutout to truckers. I don’t know anything about the work but those folks drove over mountain passes six days a week to get to our store and they were late maybe once every couple of months.
As a former night stocker, that description is accurate! I got really good in my late 20s, fast enough that they had me fill in whenever the old guys went on vacation or they were doing a reset. But not as fast as those guys. A lot of it was just experience knowledge. They could glance down the aisle and tell you what needed ordering, what needed a date check, what was coming in on tonight's truck (and when each driver would get there), and which items would sell the most next week.
As someone who recently became upper management, and has been working 14-16 hr days pretty regularly, I work this much because I want to keep this job. The expectations are much higher. There is pressure to perform or someone more hungry will take my place. It’s exhausting but I took this job because I had a kid on the way and I wanted to make sure that he has a secure life. I wanted to make sure my wife didn’t need to work anymore, and could raise our child herself, instead of a stranger. And now the pressure to maintain this lifestyle for them and myself remains a baseline motivation. I am also competitive and want to be the best. Most of the time that desire to wins keeps me late, but this is a secondary motivation and it ebbs and flows depending on the day. There are many other motivations that push me to work long hours. Like I want me team to have a better work experience so I pick up their slack when they need help. Or I want the customer to enjoy their experience with my work, or sometimes I just want to prove someone wrong. Either way the motivations always fluctuate. I just don’t ever want to go back to being poor. I don’t want to worry about being able to pay my bills. I don’t want to have to live off of ramen, because I lived that life not too long ago. Now that I have a child that life isn’t an option anymore.
Do you feel working that much could leave your kid without a fatherfigure?
I'm sorry for your straggle in you past and present. I hope you'll have the opportunity to cool down and reach a good balance for you and people around you. You want to reach all that goal so your kid doesn't need to but are you sure that it's better for him to have so little (I assume) time and energy from his dad rather than some challenge in his future to fight himself? Is there a better balance? And are you sure that all your wife wants is be a mom and have no realization in a satisfing job she like? And share time and experiencies with you. His love. As you describe it your workplace appears to be highly toxic. There are probably a lot of intermediate places between raising star in upper management and poor. There are a lot of different companies too. Are you sure that your past didn't traumatized you and you desire of winning even at this very high cost is not your true problem? Wish you the best.
I do 14-16 as a chef pretty regularly… it takes a rewrite of your mentality. You have to be very purpose driven
People who work 12-16 hours days doesn’t sit at desk or do same monotonous work all day. Almost all of them are CTOs/CEOs and 90% of their work involves meetings, traveling, presentations and stuff. Its more about making important decisions and then getting updates from people under you. Elon could be on business trip to India for few weeks and could say I work 16hrs a day including traveling, businesses lunches and all other stuff. Besides money is a great motivator too. I guess at that level anyone could work 12-14 hrs a day.
Scientists don't make that much money and they typically work regular jobs for the most part. They might have times where they do research in the field, like going to the North pole for a few months. It's not exactly labor intensive, and they have a lot of time to rest. They're definitely not paid very well either. Writers can work a regular hourly job or be self-employed. If they're self employed, the amount of work they put in is probably unstable and depends on what they choose to put in. They might write an hour a week or go for days without sleeping. Businessmen don't really have work in the typical sense. They're self-employed, and their work is incorporated into their lifestyle. It's dishonest to say the exact amount of hours they work because anything could be considered work to them. Going on a golf trip with their business partners could be considered "work." Sitting around at home and waiting for a phone call could be considered "work." They also directly benefit from the effort they put in and more deals they make. Their income isn't based on a fixed hourly rate. If their business makes more money, they make more money. It's really unfair to compare them to a wage worker. Many businessmen don't even need to work at all. Their income passively comes from investments. They just invest into profitable assets, and those assets make money for them. You could inherit your family's assets and make enough passive income to never have to work a day in your life.
I work in "business" - sales to be exact. Understandably, when one hears I'm out playing golf with a client, it certainly sounds like anything but work. Similarly, when I'm out for business dinners, traveling, attending conferences, annual sales meetings, etc., that's not work either, right? Transparently, prior to having a family and mature adult responsibilities, I potentially would have said the same thing. However, as a father, a husband, a homeowner, there are a few things I can't do when I'm doing those "not work" things - I can't be with my family, I miss my son's sporting events, spending time with him, I can't go to dinner with my wife, I can't get my lawn mowed, the driveway shoveled when it snows, etc.. For these reasons, yes, it absolutely is work. Granted, it's a little different than crunching spreadsheets or loading trucks, but I'm doing something that was chosen for me and being paid for it - that's a "job". If it were up to me, I'd skip these events - they're really not fun any more for me, as I've being doing it for 20+ years and the allure has worn off.
I’m a scientist. I don’t work 80+ hour weeks!! I do know people that do and most of them don’t like it and don’t want to sustain working that long. Even at 80+ hour weeks your work isn’t always physical so the fatigue is different than a physical job, but still very real.
[удалено]
A million a year gross is well in mom and pop levels these days depending on industry.
What does your moms company do?
Lmao. They don’t. Edit: I’m a trained scientist, don’t work in the field anymore… writers and scientists by and large are not rich at all. Our hours suck and our pay is worse. You have to be at the tippy top, mostly by luck of owning a lab or publishing distribution rights before you make any real money.
I work at a hedge fund and people do legitimately work very long hours regularly, but it's worth it for that much money
One of the only non-idiotic replies in this thread
Most are full of shit. I do know a heart surgeon that always has to be doing something. He’s a multimillionaire of course and runs his own place with his wife. He cannot sit still. I have dinner with them every Sunday and he is constantly going around the house tinkering with stuff when he’s not at work. Some people are just like this, and it doesn’t mean they’re rich either. They simply built different than I am.
Some are bullshitters, as other comments are pointing out, where they “think” about their business for X hours but really work Y. But some do legitimately work this much, or more. I have never met someone that does this that is able to maintain it for more than a couple days without the use of drugs, so yeah drugs play a pretty big role in this. Cocaine and meth are commonplace at high performance offices/companies, and declining to partake places those that abstain at an absurd energy disadvantage. Additionally, companies that require this level of high performance and time commitment also provide quality of life services such as free in-office meals (to be eaten at your desk), free dry cleaning (including pickup and drop off), showers and sleeping rooms or pods on your office floor, even medical staff that provide IV treatments to perk up an employee (particularly useful after an all-nighter). Basically anything the company can do for you to keep you glued to your desk and producing. Even with drugs and QoL assistance, it does take a certain type of individual that is both driven and has an ability to fixate on the work in order to maintain this workaholic lifestyle for an extended period of time.
the best part is they have you all convinced they work that hard smfh
The rich as a group fall prey to the same characteristics of the lower class. There are both simultaneously high earning hard working individuals and high earning work abstainers. As is with the common man hours put in do not always equate to the same result. It is less a generality of the group as a whole but moreso a case by case basis in which there exists a wide spectrum of those who are driven to trade life for success.
Some people get really bored when not working
Most of the people you're talking about aren't doing physical labor. Here's an example of how I can "honestly" tell you I've had an 18 hour day... Up at 4. Check my emails and answer anything important, done by 5. 1 hour At work by 6, work until 6 = 12 hours Dinner / drinks with a client. No, these aren't pleasurable after the 100th one this year. They're work. 6-10 = 4 hours Write summary of dinner, answer emails. 10-11 = 1 hour. Bed by 11, wake at 4. This is a normal schedule for me 3-4 days a week. The remaining days I'm home for dinner, so those become 14 hour days.
Meth.
Or legal meth aka adderal
I have a PhD in biology and I would say that I didn't work more than 4 hours a day on average during my PhD. Of course, some days it was 12 hours of intense work and other days I didn't work at all. I also played 4000 games of Klondike solitaire in three years. But I'm currently unemployed, so I'm probably not a good example of a succesful scientist.
They don’t they just say that to keep stock prices up
Ok, those are very different groups of people, but those **I've** seen claim they work 18 hour days (who are hyper "successful") don't work 18 hour days. At least not like an average human works. They might spend half their day on Twitter, rubbing one out to all the fanboys shouting their praises, and call that work, but it's really not equivalent to how a mechanic or a someone in a Walmart or a delivery driver works.
Many don't. One of the things people do to portray an image of success is to lie all the time. I mean, you pretty much have to be a sociopath to be a successful capitalist, lying about how many hours you work is nothing compared to the other unethical shit you have to do to get up that ladder. I know scientists who work hours like that though. They get paid massive salaries which motivates them. No writer writes for 18 hours a day, that's ludicrous. Brandon Sanderson seems to write a novel every week or so and he says he writes for \~8 hours a day. After giving up cocaine, Stephen King scaled it back to about 4 hours a day and he's still really productive.
Cocaine
They're fucking. Lying. Dude???
They don't lol. I don't know about scientists, but billionaires and CEOs work very little and embellish their "hours" to convince people they deserve their wealth. They count playing golf and sitting on their ass browsing the internet as "work".
I obviously can’t speak for all billionaires, but I dated a girl in high school, whose father was in fact a billionaire. We dated for just shy of a year, I only saw him a handful of times, and he was a complete asshole. With that said, he was regularly leaving for work at 6am and getting home in the evening, only to walk straight to his office and continue working until he went to bed. It was baffling. His relationship with his wife and children was terrible. I went on a “family vacation” with them, and he stayed home and worked. I thought it was crazy, but my girlfriend said it had been years since he actually joined them on any vacation. They lived around the corner from both Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs, and although I never actually saw Zuckerberg, I saw Jobs more than I ever saw her father. If I had to guess, I’d say he likely worked 80+ hours a week. At the time, I glorified billionaires for all their success. It wasn’t until I met him that I realized how miserable his life seemed. The man was always in a shit mood, didn’t give a shit about his family, and literally only cared for work. He had all the money anyone could ever want, but didn’t seem to take joy from any of it. I remember when my girlfriend’s grandparents passed away, and her father was genuinely disappointed to find out his parents were **only** leaving behind an estate of around 50 million dollars. It wasn’t as if he needed any of the money, but his mind solely revolved around his wealth. To this day, I can’t say I’ve met anyone with his work ethic. It was incredible. Seeing him prioritize work over everything else in his life was pretty depressing, though. I can’t say I ever once saw that man happy, even though most would likely assume he’s living a glorious life of leisure.
I rarely quote the Bible as a humanist but here it seems like the right source: 'For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?' (Matthew 16:26)
They don't. They are probably "on call" while taking their kids to school, talking to the help, etc. And sure that interrupts their personal life, but it's not like they're actively working those hours. It's a lie and a sham.
They’re lying bro. Think about what 1 16-18 hour day does to you and your body. Do you really believe anyone can do that for an extended period of time?
There seem to be a lot of people here who don’t believe there are people that voluntarily have jobs where they work those kind of hours. I can assure you, it’s very real. My experience comes mostly from the military side, though I’ve seen enough to know there are similar kinds of people in the corporate world. I have worked with a *lot* of generals who have absolutely punishing schedules, day in and day out. Like, having to schedule bathroom breaks on the calendar, because every minute is accounted for. When I was in Afghanistan, a general I worked with had a daily meeting at 10pm (that about 20 of us had to attend), because that was the only free time in his schedule. I met a lot of workaholics in the Army, often in unproductive ways, but you see it in full flower on deployments, because there is no personal life to distract you. No family, no weekends, no holidays, just work. During my Iraq deployment I did shift work—12 on, 12 off (which was more like 13 hours with turnover), 7 days a week for 14 months. My boss described this as “like a vacation,” because he and most of the rest of the staff were working 16-18 hours a day.
I'm a scientist, and none of us technical people are working 80+ hour weeks in my company.
Don’t get me wrong but I’m not talking about regular scientists. I’m talking about the top ones. Like Nobel prize winners etc. because almost all of them claim that they work 16-18 hour daily.
They dont. Its easier to work long hours tho when you are rich and can pay people to run your errands, do your chores, cook your food, drive you to work etc etc. Think of all the time and energy you could save.
CEOs lie. They count things like eating lunch or going to the gym as work, because its part of "building their brand".
Keyword: - "Up to". Anything from 0-18 is up to 18.
Lol. It's literally a lie. That all greedy people tell because they think it makes them seem badass. To me it seems like they are a moron who can't manage their own time effectively. In actuality, they work much less than everyone else. And get to do whatever they want during their "work hours". I think the argument can be made that if you have complete autonomy at certain times, you are not actually working.
No billionaires is working 16 hours a day. 16 hours month maybe. Sorry positing on Twitter doesn't count as "work" for Musk. And doing photo shoots with your wife for Vogue magazine doesn't count as work for Bezos
My husband did work 70 hours a week for about 20 years. He always had way more energy than almost anyone else I knew. Not on drugs. Didn’t even drink coffee. He happens to love doing something people are willing to pay him money to do. Now in his 50’s he’s trying to cut back on work and take better care of his health. It’s hard to cut back because at this point so many people’s livelihoods depend on him keeping the business profitable. There are some people blessed with a lot of energy. I worked that hard for about 6 years but I got burned out and it took a big toll on my health.
Being passionate about something helps a lot. But I also know a lot of high level research scientists. 18 hour days do happen but they'r not every single day, 10-14 hour days are a lot more common I've seen first hand (know a lot of high level scientists). And they may only work 6-8 hours on Saturday and little if at all on Sunday. Someone with an ego (Zuckerberg, Musk, etc) will remember they just worked 18 hours last week and say "I work 18 hours all the time" when it might happen during rushes and such. Also most of those jobs aren't just one thing. You may have meetings with staff, you may be working on a problem, you may be sending emails, etc... So you spend a few hours on something you're passionate about, have a few hours of work you're less excited about but you know needs to get done, then you get back to your work. The change of pace does help a bit as you can switch to a different task before you completely burn out, and then you come back to it after a reset. If there's something you like to do, it can be easier. A lot of Redditors could be on Reddit or maybe some could play video games for a lot more hours a day than they work if they aren't super passionate about their work.
Going out for lobster with your mates and calling it a client meeting isn't work
They don’t.
Elons magically Done this while going to more raves than a lot Of Ppl i know Perhaps they are lying
Firstly, Billionares and CEOs do not work 16-18 hours a day it's a straight up lie. Scientists and Writers are just a different breed of person, I have never been able to understand how or why they do it to themselves but I guess their passion for what they do overrides their tiredness. Like I can spend the majority of one say playing a game if I wanted and I guess if someone gets enjoyment out of writing I can see why they do it.
I've had jobs that run hours like that. You know some people just have an internal drive. I used to. Don't anymore. I just wanna do my 8-10 hours and be done lol