Why is everyone so busy? (2014)

Exactly, I think it's some sort of twisted pride — "I work more than you, so I'm superior to you" — and a remnant of Protestant work ethic. Work hard in this life, to be rewarded in the eternal afterlife. It has lost its religious connection, but the attitude remains.

I'll stay half an hour or an hour beyond by nominal working hours, if I have a time critical task that depends on me, but I'll compensate for it the next day. And I won't do it if it conflicts with my life outside of work. Then the work will simply have to be delayed a bit.

Luckily, I have only ever had colleagues and managers who understand this 100%. I've even had a few tell me directly that they wish they could have the same attitude and take better care of themselves.

Frankly i see the pressure coming from the financial world.

There is a massive, blinding, focus on quarterly profits and dividends.

This leads to all kinds of hype cycles and cargo cults to try to goose the stock price, no matter how hail mary or unhealthy it is for the corporation in the long term.

I suspect a lot of the long hours is actually a sort of productivity blindness. I've seen some research that suggests the people who most believe they're being effective working >40hrs/wk for more than 6 week stretches are the least likely to have positive net value after 40hrs. Worse is this compounds, such that working less hours in the short term do tend to result in less productivity, until one can recover from overwork.

Sadly, I'm not sure it translates well to industries like yours, where there is just a lot of physical labor involved, and long door hours. My understanding, is that one of the problems is simply the hours in the restaurant business require chef's attention for long hours each day, coupled with the vital need that the kitchen's output is consistent.

Hopefully you're thinking of ways to not have to be present, or ways to spend money instead of time, or just simplifying the menu to be less labor intensive. My heart goes out to you though, I know some chefs, and they are a special breed.

There's a [1] hypothesis that economic growth is mostly the result of 1) population growth, 2) energy consumption, and 3) interest rates.

Current projections estimate that population will peak at 8.7 billion in 2055. Nearly all of that growth will occur in "developing" countries. Yuval Harari makes the case in Homo Deus that the world is quickly reaching a point where the less developed areas of the world will be mostly ignored and left behind in the coming years, as the developed world has reached a sort of critical mass that it makes more sense -- economically -- to keep investing there.

As technology continues to get more and more efficient, it is quite possible we are near peak energy consumption.

Interest rates have been around 0% for quite some time.

To me, it's interesting to wonder if we live in a world that might "objectively" be getting better, but we don't see the verification with the same type of economic growth that's occurred in the past.

[1] - https://ourfiniteworld.com/2012/08/29/the-long-term-tie-betw...

(this is only a very quick and dirty exposition.)

Humans, like every other organism on this Earth, have been shaped by evolution, which has instilled a set of adaptations into them.

Like most other species, there is a competition for mates, reproduction opportunities and resources within the sexes. So, along the ages, humans have acquired a set of adaptations that "maximize" wealth, status, (whether they still work in the current environment as opposed to the ones in which these adaptations evolved is another question). So, in essence, humans who tended to work more, tended to obtain more resources/wealth thereby becoming more attractive reproductive prospects. You also get more opportunities to help fellow tribe members, improving your status within your community etc. In other words, a highly competitive arms race has emerged.

However, only in recent times, intellectual work has become more common, where the size of the input is not proportional to the quality of the output.

There is another dimension to this. Many humans today work in corporate environments where there is an intense competition for advancing in a rigid hierarchical structure. These advances are strongly correlated with income growth, and power and control over many work-related issues, which is strongly related to status. In these environments, it is often difficult to actually measure the output quality and quantity of each human, partly because there is little incentive to do that, partly because people doing the measurement are not the most technically knowledgeable in the field, but mostly because they are humans themselves and thus have their own interests (namely improving their reproductive prospects themselves, so they need to forge allegiances that stabilize their positions etc). Promoting the most capable worker is sometimes outside their interests. So in this environment, many other cues are used to evaluate the worth of employees, many completely unrelated to their capabilities and work. So, marketing oneself becomes an important aspect in this economy.

One clear way to signal to others that you are very dedicated to the company and an important employee is to spend more time at the office than the others. Busyness is a signal of importance/status and value to the company. Of course, people actually interested in performing high quality intellectual work will know that time spent on a task is only one (minor) factor ...