Number of words: 789

So, if it’s not for the money or the fun, why do people work too hard? These patients’ real thing is about avoidance of the rest of their lives, about avoiding control over those lives, Brener argues. ‘Many of them are avoiding relationships or their own feelings. These patients tend to come from emotionally repressed environments. They work harder and harder and harder, but then they come to me when something goes wrong in their lives, for example they have a bereavement, and things start to fall apart for them.” Such extreme examples of overworking offer us a distorting mirror – a caricature of mainstream society that helps us to understand how our long-hours culture is creating evermore work partly to help us avoid the truly problematic stuff of modern existence. Just like pointless, endless shopping for evermore stuff, it’s another form of escapist, existential dummy-sucking. Confronted by the alarming prospect of leisure of unprecedented amounts of time, space and opportunity to grow as people and to face the big-question stuff about the meaning and purpose of our lives, we suddenly remember that, woah, we still have loads to do back at the office. We drown out the big questions by marching behind the brass band of infinite ambition. It’s a march that apparently need never end: today’s idea of success increasingly involves attaining unprecedented levels of wealth, power and celebrity. But it hasn’t always been so demanding – ancient classical civilisation developed the belief that success lay in mere modest fulfilment; from working to discover and develop your talents, then using them to benefit others as well as yourself. So long as we moderns think that we haven’t achieved enough in our careers and hey pal, the sky’s the limit, we can remain convinced that we’re not yet free to explore many of life’s other possibilities.

The world of work, perversely, thus offers us liberation of a sort. Our new office gadgets have proved remarkably useful for producing more documents, more demands, more analyses, more product niches, more reports, more data to keep us preoccupied. In the animal world, this type of avoidance tactic is called displacement activity. When my two cats come to the brink of a fur-flying scrap with each other, they often get stuck ping-ponging between conflicted feelings of fear and aggression. So they evade the dilemma by indulging busily in a little comfort activity such as grooming. Similarly, the industrious frenzy of modern work seems to offer many of us an emotional escape-hatch.

This sort of avoidance strategy helps to explain why divorce lawyers are at their busiest in the weeks following the summer holiday season. Work successfully keeps many spouses apart for the majority of the year, so when they suddenly have to spend a significant period of shared time together within the pressure-cooker atmosphere of “must have maximum holiday fun’, powerful pent-up emotional forces burst free-all too often with catastrophic results.

One seemingly innocuous answer to the overwork problem is to pursue ‘work-life balance’. It’s a sweet idea, but you may have noticed how in practice it doesn’t actually work for most people. In America, large corporations have discovered one important reason why: as individuals, we have an extremely tipsy sense of balance. Given the appropriate support, American corporate execs prefer their work-life balance to favour office over home. Their organisations have discovered that managers do indeed want to enjoy simpler and easier personal lives they want to ensure that family events such as daughters” weddings are professionally organised, they want to keep their cars spick, span and regularly serviced, to enjoy good home-style food and to watch all the best films and TV programmes.

And what could be better for them than having it all sorted out by the office? Many top American managers can now spend longer at work while personal life-support facilitators tackle their potentially messy and time-consuming domestic arrangements. If the execs want to catch a TV show or film, then sure, there are homely lounges at work where they can relax in front of the box. There are cosy little dining-rooms, too. It might sound rather artificial and remote, compared with the deeper, more intense relationships we might expect to foster in our lives, but US research shows that high-flyers get a real kick out of this new arrangement. The fact is, if you ask your secretary at work for a cup of coffee, you get a cup of coffee, pronto, and the way you like it. If you ask your teenager at home for a cup of coffee, you are likely to be told where to stick it.

Excerpted from pages 119 to 121 of Enough: breaking free from the world of excess by John Naish