The propaganda about work as being prestigious and important is one of the primary reasons fertility has collapsed in OECD and east Asia, such that the populations of China, Japan, Korea, and some European countries will roughly halve by 2100, and all these countries except possibly the USA and Canada will see a population decrease. (The child-bearing-age populations will decrease by more.)
Work, as currently constituted, is long-run unsustainable. Overwork or not.
It’s deeper than harder/less hard work, it’s that with knowledge work you are potentially always on the clock. Thinking about work problems. That wasn’t the case with manual labor when your body was leased out to employers instead of your mind.
> But let us not allow the current hysteria about “overwork” to distract us, as a society, from the bigger problem of the number of people dropping out of the labour force. Enough people are lying flat already without more encouragement from management gurus. And let us not use it, particularly in Europe, as another excuse for creating yet more legislation about how much we can work. The last thing that growth-starved economies need is another excuse for taking a nap.
The western world's workers fought bloody and deadly battles to get decent hours. Also, every single Chinese Dynasty has always ended in a peasant revolt. Just be glad they are laying down.
For me it is hilarious because people were paid not to work and to stay at home just a couple of years ago. Plus, vast swathes of population were told that what they did was not “essential”.
Work, as currently constituted, is long-run unsustainable. Overwork or not.