How to Break Away From Workism: Forget Lifehacks, Focus on ‘Life Backs’
Journalist Celeste Headlee on how to escape our modern-day cult of efficiency and endless hustle
‘Pushing Harder Isn’t Helping Us Anymore’
In her 2020 book, Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving, Journalist Celeste Headlee delves into the history behind how we’ve come to this modern-day cult of efficiency, and how it is slowly eating away at our health and happiness.
One reason for why we place so much value on overworking, says Derek Thompson in The Atlantic, is a growing belief in the gospel of ‘workism’: “What is workism? It is the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.”
The first half of Headlee’s book provides a rich history on how we got to this point. The second half delves into strategies for getting out of it. She argues that to move beyond our deeply ingrained religion of workism, rather than superficial lifehacks, we need to embrace several deeper transformations or ‘lifebacks.’ She writes,
“It was self-interest…
