Why Excessive Hard Work Gives You NOTHING except GUILT.

Some time ago, I read a post by someone on LinkedIn, which as of 2024 is the go-to place on the Internet, for nauseating, hypocritical and sometimes downright stupid information, posted as wisdom.

In fact, you can safely bet, the wider the reach, the more stupid the information probably is.

So, the post described the CEO of some company who was with his team on a “vacation” in a resort. Then he said, there was suddenly dealing with an angry client who experienced a sudden crisis. So, he got his entire team, who were on “vacation” with him and they worked 36 hours non-stop even while holidaying to resolve the client’s crisis successfully.

He then went on to use it as a badge of honor to show how hardcore he and his team were that they would work 36 hours nonstop even in a vacation.

He may think it’s an achievement, but most of his non brainwashed employees must be at some point questioning why they were sacrificing their precious lives for people who didn’t see them as human beings who deserved rest, just in the name of being “hardcore.”

Well man, if you are so hardcore, a few of your staff members (or maybe you yourself) should have stayed in office to resolve such unexpected queries or you should have made other provisions.  You may fool yourself all you want, you haven’t exactly proven to be a competent boss, but you have surely proven yourself to be a doormat in the eyes of your clients.

If nothing else, you should have just seen it as a mess up to be ashamed of, and quietly given your employees extra days off. Instead, you chose to brag about it on LinkedIn, glorifying your obvious incompetency as if you just saved the world from an alien attack.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they worship. — Voltaire   

You have to deprogram the guilt that has so frequently and deeply been programmed into you with regards to hard work and not staying idle. Such programming is good for the system because then it can make every individual work super hard but it is rarely good for the individual.

REMEMBER the ant eaten by sheep? Most of your beliefs are not your own!

 If a bunch of people die out severe exhaustion and related diseases through overwork, hey, who cares, it is just collateral damage to the system because it doesn’t care about the individual.

And if you get sick because of that same overwork, but don’t die immediately, hey that’s good for the system because now it can make a lot of money treating the diseases that didn’t necessarily need to happen so quickly (or at all) in the first place, had you not been programmed into feeling guilty for not working 18 hours a day.

I am not saying you can’t work that long, but you should do it only when you want to only when it doesn’t feel like work to you.

If you are doing it because the system has manipulated you into thinking you are good for nothing if you are not working and in reality, you hate it, you are screwed big time, and to survive as an individual you need some major deprogramming.

 Another clarification. You may have to work “harder” when starting out when you have energy or when you are starting a new enterprise. But it is only for two purposes. Either you enjoy what you do so much that it doesn’t feel like work or you are working to set up systems that will eventually help you work less hard.

Remember – the ONLY logical reason to work hard should be to build systems and processes that later help you work LESS hard. If someone tells you to spend all your life working hard, for the sake of working hard, even if you hate working hard, you my friend have been fooled by society and wasting away a life that you are never going to get back.

By the way during this time minimizing debt or other liabilities go a long way in achieving this. Choosing not to take on voluntary debt and controlling your expenses by moving to areas where expenses are less is under your control, increasing your income overnight is not under your direct control no matter what the motivational gurus say.

There will be some people who say they managed to become extremely rich by laying out some proven and guaranteed step by step process and will tell you that you can absolutely increase your income by a certain percentage if you follow that process. It’s complete nonsense.

There is no guaranteed step by step process for uncertain things like real world “success.” Everything is contingent on a variety of factors and even if they are genuinely sincere, it is not necessary that what worked for them will work for you.

By the way, don’t get me wrong – I am NOT blindly supporting or berating any economic ideology, because, in the end, they are all ideologies that ultimately benefit the people controlling the system.

 What I am promoting is a thought process (not a rigid ideology) that is best for you as the individual and also the environment around you.

I am suggesting compassionate individualism, or in other words the philosophy that “Your first responsibility is to yourself.” But note I didn’t say your only responsibility is to yourself.

 Showing some “compassion” to the world around you, at least from time to time, isn’t such a bad thing for society as a whole.