Almost everyone has an opinion about work-life balance. But for many among the highest achieving social classes, work-life balance is a luxury that cannot be afforded. Each moment of leisure is a moment of lost opportunity, lost productivity, and a lost competitive edge over those who devote their entire lives to their work.
In a recent post on X that has elicited a firestorm due to its overt criticism of American culture and suggestion that foreigners are harder workers than Americans, former presidential candidate and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy suggested that Americans had become too content with aspiring to “normalcy.”
“Most normal American parents look skeptically at ‘those kinds of parents,’” Ramaswamy said, referring to families that embrace leisure in their daily lives over extra study hours and academic competitions. “More normal American kids view such ‘those kinds of kids’ with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.”
“Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other,” he went on. “Be brutally honest. ‘Normalcy’ doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.”
In one sense, Ramaswamy is right. In Communist China and other developed countries such as Japan and South Korea, work is life. Cultural attitudes in these nations encourage long working hours and long study hours at the expense of leisure and other nonwork activities, such as devoting time to family and community. A person’s life becomes enveloped by work, discarding any sense of “work-life balance.”
But the United States did not become the United States by competing commercially and technologically with China or any other nation. The United States became the global force it is because it had something that inspired and reminded its people of what is good and beautiful in the world.
In his treatise Leisure: The Basis of Culture, the German philosopher Josef Pieper had this to say about excessive work:
“The world of work begins to become — threatens to become — our only world, to the exclusion of all else,” he wrote. “The demands of the working world grow ever more total, grasping ever more completely the whole of human existence.”
A working world that demands the total existence of a person is a world devoid of purpose and culture. It is one that buries creative minds and demands faceless drones. A person who is a slave to his job has no room for family, no room for friends, and no room for community. He is a number on a spreadsheet, doing his part to increase company profits at any cost and aiding the inexorable march of progress.
But that mindless productivity is what Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, his erstwhile partner in the Department of Government Efficiency, are looking for. DOGE has already advertised its desire for a volunteer workforce prepared to put in 80-hour weeks over a two-year period. It is a mentality that is all too familiar for Silicon Valley.
In November, a Big Tech startup CEO, Daksh Gupta, openly declared that he “offers no work-life balance” and is looking for employees willing to work 80-hour weeks, seven days a week. Musk himself has boasted that he works 80-hour weeks.
No matter what Ramaswamy may say, a work ethic that sacrifices community and family life to put in unmeasured hours of productivity is not what built America. The culture that enjoys watching Friends, having sleepovers, and watching Saturday morning cartoons, all things that Ramaswamy pillories, is the same culture that put a man on the moon, built the interstate highway system and the Manhattan skyline, and invented the first engine-powered airplane.
Americans accomplished those things because they valued the nation they lived in, the communities that formed them, and the families that raised them. They accomplished those things because every night, at the end of a hard workday, there was a smiling and excited child waiting for his father to come home, reminding that father of why he endured the sweat and toil of the workday or quietly listened as his boss yelled at him for the 15th day in a row. And at the end of a hard workweek, there was a family trip to the baseball game or a date night at the movies.
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The most normal things in life are what make great achievements possible. The man who buries himself in his work at the expense of all else has no time for his family or his community. He is detached from the culture and way of life that would give him a purpose to excel and innovate. He works for no one but himself and the C-suite executive who pays him.
Normalcy creates the circumstances for excellence because it is the things that make us “normal” that make the United States a home and a people unique among the nations of the Earth, and a home and people worth working, fighting, excelling, and innovating for.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
