I’ve been thinking about the rewards and dangers of working hard.
In the fall of 2011, I was in New York City with my friend Sam and my son-in-law Chris at a sidewalk bar in Greenwich Village. Chris, then the the father of two young sons, six and three years old, leaned forward with his elbows on the bar table and asked Sam and me, Okay, you guys have raised sons so tell me, what’s the single most important thing I can teach them?
Sam and I had never talked about this. We had no idea Chris would ask us about it. But we answered immediately as if we were singing from the same page in a hymnal: Teach them to work hard. We looked at one another as quizzically as Chris looked at us, surprised that this identical response came so spontaneously and with such certainty. Shouldn’t we have said Teach them that they’re loved unconditionally? or Help them find their dream? Even something as basic as Be kind to everyone, no matter what they look like or what they believe? No, not one of these, but simply work hard.
More than a decade later, I would not answer this question in the same way. But in that moment, the singular importance of hard work made perfect sense to both Sam and me.
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Though I’m a dozen years older, our answers were rooted in similar personal histories. Sam is a successful litigator who has been at the top of his profession for decades. I’m a psychotherapist with a thriving practice and a plentiful life. Neither of us came from wealth, or even from the middle class: we were working-class kids, he the oldest of four, I of five. None of our parents was college educated: his dad was a mechanic and mine sold newspapers on a corner in Hollywood. Our mothers worked at odd jobs between the births of their children. We each had a deep desire to rise out of the circumstances we were raised in. Through high school and college, we each had more than one part-time job to pay our way; finally, in college, we cut down on playtime, learned how to study, and worked our butts off to get into graduate school.
For too long in my life I was more concerned with being productive than with being authentic. I was driven by external expectations – grades, professional achievement, eventually more money – which I internalized and made my own. I shut down or ignored parts of me that didn't fit this paradigm, and I was rewarded with the approval I wanted. That's why both Sam and I were so quick to respond with teach them to work hard – it was the formula that both he and I had landed on that helped create our prosperous lives.
In graduate school I latched on to something attributed to Sigmund Freud when he was asked what he thought was the purpose of life: lieben und arbeiten, he responded. To love and to work. Though my guess is that Freud expected us to make work and love complementary in living a meaningful life, for too much of my life I lost the balance between these two. I spent much more time and gave much greater effort to excelling at work than I did to excelling in my love life: my marriage, children, and friends; my appreciation of art and literature; developing a love of nature and its survival; the joy in mentoring young and marginalized people. Unlike all of these, I trusted work to give me the recognition, sense of personal importance, and affluence that I made the measure of my success as a human being.
Work had a particular role in my relationship with my mother - it was a large part of her measure of success for me as well. After my father died, when I had a family and career of my own, I’d call Mom about once every ten days. She always answered Oh there you are, as if she’d been sitting alone for ten days by the phone, bereft. I knew that at least one of my three sisters saw her every day, and all three of them called her daily. When I suggested to her that she could always call me, her standard reply was, I know you’re so busy and I don’t want to disturb you. So after ten days I’d finally let the guilt that only mothers can instill get me to dial her number on the damned phone.
In the year before she died, in a quiet conversation as she recovered from surgery, she confided this: Whenever you come to mind, Rick, my first thought is that you’re working hard. She loved me like I was the air she breathed, but it wasn’t love that defined my character for her or made her proud of me. The measure for these was that I worked hard. Even in my one-on-one relationship with her, I was responsible for making the calls, for arranging dinner dates, for taking her to the theater. Whatever work needed to be done to enrich our relationship was mine to initiate and carry through, and because her approval was so important to me, of course I took on the job.
Thankfully, the years since that incident in the bar with Sam and Chris have changed my attitude about work. Whether it’s the weariness of aging or the growth of wisdom, I am no longer so driven, and no longer see the singular value of working hard. The most obvious evidence of this is the way I would now respond if asked Chris’s question by different parents.
Our granddaughter is twelve years old and just entering middle school. If her parents asked me the most important thing to teach her, I know for certain I would not say work hard. To help her fend off the many ways our culture continues to mold girls into some current feminine ideal, I would encourage them to teach her to love herself as she is, to love her body, her mind, her deep emotions even as these grow and change. I would encourage her not to beat her head against the wall while counting likes on her social media, trying to be what anyone else thinks she should be. I would want her to commit to memory the response the poet e. e. cummings wrote to a high school girl who wanted to know what to do to become a poet:
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
Among my friends and therapy clients I often run into people, young and old, who work hard in a completely different way. Rather than seeking validation from work and minimizing any other pursuit - arbeiten without the lieben - some of them are what I would call aesthetic and contemplative. They pace themselves, doing what’s necessary to make their way but also designing their schedules to include quiet moments, periods to just sit and think, sometimes not filling their minds with urgent requirements but emptying their minds to find that calm center that gives them their sense of balance. Since they are not constantly driven to work hard in the way that Sam and I would have defined it, it’s no wonder these people seem calmer and more content with life than I once did.
I also often find myself in conversations with people we identify as neurodivergent. If someone has dyslexia or attention deficit disorder (a.d.d) or attention deficit hyperactive disorder (a.d.h.d) or is on the autism spectrum, their brain works differently. They work as hard – often harder – than I do to accomplish whatever tasks lie before them. To me, their routines seem less orderly than mine but, of course, that’s because their brains function in a way different from what I consider orderly. Like me, their hard work can make them productive, but their path to achievement might be more erratic than mine and therefore worthy of respect for the effort and courage it takes to navigate a system of work that isn't built for them.
I am often confounded by the parents of these aesthetic/contemplative or neurodivergent children and adolescents; they hold them to expectations that are unrealistic, given their children’s unique ways of functioning. Their childrens' difficulties with fitting into traditional learning settings are too often seen as a lack of effort (or hard work) and an irresponsible attitude; parents insist that these sons and daughters could achieve more if they would just discipline their time, concentrate on their assignments, and work harder. These are the very qualities that are contrary to the ways in which neurodivergent brains operate. Rather than judgment and stigma, we need to see these people as simply different – no less intelligent, no less dedicated, no less hard working than non-divergent people. The Maori culture in Australia has developed a vocabulary that captures what I’m trying to make my own understanding of neurodivergent people. The Maori explain our differences by referring to the many faces of the mind and understand neurodivergent people as those who do things in their own time and place.
Why have I and others been so devoted to a system that places hard work at the center of a moral and developmental universe? Because alongside and braided into this devotion to productive hard work is a long-held but perhaps deceptive belief in our culture that hard work is the way to improve our families’ circumstances and share in the prosperity that may seem just out of reach. Work hard, play by the rules, and you can achieve the American Dream of owning your own home in a safe neighborhood with good public schools nearby. Since the depths of the Great Depression, this promise has been held out to poor and working-class Americans and is an underpinning of the promise of every politician, inspirational speaker, and moralist who insists that this dream is still alive.
But hard work and playing by the rules are no longer the guarantee of upward mobility that they were to Sam and me. The income of working-class and middle-class people has been stagnant for forty years while the cost of the basic elements of the American Dream – a home in a safe neighborhood, excellent schools, public safety – have soared. Seldom do middle-class and working-class families have parents or grandparents to help them buy a home; for two and sometimes three generations, they’ve barely kept their financial heads above water and, as the rising tide of homelessness makes clear, too many of them are drowning. The American Dream is a false promise to increasing numbers of our neighbors. For them, the value of working hard is to purchase survival, not the American Dream.
At this moment, I view the value of hard work with resolute ambivalence. I firmly believe that hard work paid off in many ways for Becky, me, and our children. It has afforded us much of what was promised in The American Dream. With equally firm belief, I question the singular emphasis I’ve placed on hard work as an indicator of my personal worth and the measure of success in my extended family and, more widely, among my fellow Americans. It embarrasses me to think I have allowed the issues of hard work and productivity to modify my deep affections for anybody. I mourn the loss of understanding for people who bring a different experience and way of thinking to the world: I wish we could learn from that diversity instead of demanding that it conform to our pre-existing structures. I want to value every person because they are children of the same Creator, important just because they are human beings, free to be whomever they choose to be.
