On The Quest for a Better Life

Why are Americans trapped in a cycle of overwork, and what can we do about it? This is one of the questions the author and director of the Better Life Lab at New America tackles in her new book, Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life. Schulte is an incredible journalist, a trailblazer, and the director of the Better Life Lab at New America. I'm not exaggerating when I say that so much of the work that is happening in the care space is possible because of the groundwork Schulte has laid as a journalist and in her first book, Overwhelmed: Work Love and Play When No One Has the Time, along with her work at New America.

In this interview, Schulte discusses her feminist stealth agenda, what America and Japan have in common regarding overwork, her issues with facing workaholic tendencies, and meaningful solutions from Iceland that could be replicated in the U.S.

Here’s an edited and condensed version of a conversation I had with Schulte as part of programming for The CareForce, a group of academics, researchers, storytellers, and entrepreneurs working in the care space.

Katherine Goldstein: “Burnout” is a buzzword we've heard often over the last few years. It's usually seen as an individual problem that requires personal solutions, such as getting more sleep, taking a vacation, or doing lunchtime yoga. Your book challenges that prescription and effectively lays out what overwork is and how it's a systemic problem that causes burnout.

Could you share some stories about what overwork looks like in the U.S. and some of its consequences?

Brigid Schulte: Writing about work and overwork and being seen as a productivity expert or a time management expert is part of my stealth feminist agenda. You have to be able to speak in the language of the people who have the power to make change. “Burnout” is this buzzy term. So it's like figuring out how to use the language that will get to the most people but then get these ideas of care and gender equality injected into the conversation.

Burnout is tied to gender equity because work cultures assume that the best workers are always working. The “ideal worker” norm is still so very powerful: come in early, stay late, work through your lunch hour, appear busy, and send late-night emails or Slack messages. If you have care responsibilities, you cannot put in those same kinds of hours. So that is one of the things that I tackle in the book is understanding that overwork, for knowledge workers, tends to be more of a cultural phenomenon where you're expected to overwork in one job to show your commitment and dedication, which disadvantages women and caregivers with care responsibilities. At the other end of the socio-economic spectrum, I found hourly, service and retail workers overworking in a bunch of different jobs, gigs or side hustles just to survive. And if you care about gender equity, you have to care about making those jobs better jobs: two-thirds of the lowest paying jobs are held by women, many of whom have families to support.

What I want people to understand is that the job market is bifurcating. It's creating high-wage jobs that require skill and education, or it's creating really low-wage service jobs. Part of what I want to help people understand is that all of these are choices. These have been tax and public policy choices and political choices. We can make different choices.

In the book, you discuss the ‘expert’s dilemma.’ And I would love it if you could share a bit of your own story with overwork. I want to bring this out of the big-picture theoretical because this also is just so personal.

There’s the adage, ‘you write the book you need to read.’ Regarding my challenges, I was in the hospital the day my book came out. It had nothing to do with overwork, but I fell, and I fractured my ribs. And two weeks later, it turns out I had internal bleeding that I didn't realize. So, I wound up rushed to the hospital. I had more than a liter of fluid in my chest, collapsing my lung.

As the trauma surgeons began to prepare to put in a chest tube and drain some of the fluid. they were making small talk, like, ‘So what do you do?’

I said, ‘I'm a writer and a journalist. I have a new book coming out. I'm supposed to be in New York next Thursday. I fly to Pittsburgh to give a speech. This is very inconvenient for me to be here right now.’ Then, what was wild, was that throughout the procedure, they talked about the overwork and burnout culture in medicine, how it cost relationships, and people’s health, and it didn’t make care any better. Why do we do that? They asked.

I have a chapter in the book about workaholism. I visited a Workaholics Anonymous chapter in DC. They asked me about my work habits. I realized that I probably work too much, so they told me I should take this very unscientific Worics Anonymous quiz. It says if you circle three or more of these things, it indicates a problem with workaholism. I circled 13.

Fascinatingly, some of the best workaholism research is done in places like Italy. And we don't do a lot of workaholism research here in the United States. Because we don't think it's a problem. We think workaholism is something that you should be proud of. That’s the problem—you can be driven internally to overwork for both positive and negative reasons. But it’s difficult to overcome when, externally, the culture rewards what you regard as an addiction that’s sapping time and energy from other parts of your life.

You have a very chilling chapter about ‘karoshi’ in Japan, which is this idea of ‘death by overwork.’ A lot of times we think businesses are always going to make decisions for their bottom line. But you just give so many examples of companies that are so entrenched in an overwork culture that they are more committed to their status quo than they are to productivity or making money. So I would love it if you could share a bit more about what you found with karoshi in Japan and how overwork culture is not just bad for humans; it's actually bad for business.

I'm so glad you asked that because a lot of times, we tend to think of karoshi as somehow exotic or foreign, or that's happening there because in Japan they have a bushido, or samurai culture. I found that the very things that drive the karoshi culture are also driving overwork here in the United States.

The difference is we don't have a word for it, and we don't have a law like they do, or [a requirement that companies] have to track it. But it's happening here as well. There was a junior banker at Bank of America who worked intensely long hours—100 hours plus per week— and died. One thing that struck me in Japan—and the United States— is how shockingly powerful leadership belief is. What leaders believe is true becomes true, even if the data and the evidence are entirely antithetical to their beliefs. Just like here, in Japan, there is this belief that long hours are what you must put in to be productive and do a better job. It's more about status, identity, and culture than it is about evidence, data, meaningful, valuable work, productivity, or profitability. In the United States, this matters because we do not have a public policy framework that could serve as guardrails.

It's not a cabal of evil white men who are CEOs driving overwork, but they live in an echo chamber. They often worked in overwork cultures and were successful enough to get into positions of power and authority. So, it's more myopia, and that's what they think works. They create these systems that only people like them can succeed in, which tend to be white men who have no care responsibilities. So, they replicate corporate monoculture over and over again. That that continues to disadvantage women, workers with care responsibilities, workers with disabilities, workers of color—anyone, really, who wants time to live a rich full life that includes meaningful work, but isn’t consumed by it.

Let’s discuss solutions and Iceland. You are clear that not every country can be a high-wealth, low-population Scandinavian utopia. I would love for you to share what you found in Iceland that could be applied more broadly because Iceland had both financial problems and problems with overwork culture.

I resisted going to Iceland because of everything that you just said. But I started looking into the short work hours movement. In the US, it was, at the time, focused on elite, small, boutique, “tech bro” companies. I thought, ‘Where are all of the care workers, the child care workers, the home care workers already working seven days a week with really crappy pay? Where are their short work hours at the same pay? How does that work for them?’

But what they've done in Iceland that's so interesting is they've made not a four-day work week, but they've made shorter work hours available to 85 percent of the population. And that's not just the tech bros, but everybody. In Iceland, they saw themselves as a real outlier in the Nordic countries, and they didn't have a 40-hour work week until the 1970s. We got that back in the 1930s. So they had that same kind of long work-hour macho culture that sprang from their fishing culture. But those very financial problems you mentioned in the global meltdown in 2008 opened the way for change. People had become fed-up with a system that favored the wealthy who, as they became richer, were supposed to enrich everyone else, but instead has led, not surprisingly, to economic inequality. They were done with leaders pushing endless growth as the way to measure the health and success of a country. So new leaders were elected who joined a movement to center their economy on the well-being of people., As part of that new effort, they wanted to figure out, ‘Okay, people are feeling stressed with time. They're feeling that they're working too much. There's still too much unfairness and gender inequality in the division of labor at home. What if we shortened work hours at the same level of pay? Would that increase human well-being as well as planetary well-being? And would that also improve gender equality?’

So they ran a few pilots, and that's exactly what they found. As work hours came down for men in their paid work, they ended up spending more time being much more involved at home.

So there was more gender equality in paid work hours and more gender equality in unpaid care hours. Many women with care responsibilities had been working part-time. So when paid work hours came down to 32 hours a week, those part-time hours became full-time hours.

Suddenly, these women were able to qualify for much better long-term benefits and pensions. This added to their economic security, stability, and financial independence. So it worked. When I went, I talked to not just the desk workers and spent time with professional knowledge workers.

I also talked to police officers, childcare workers, shift workers, front-line city workers. And what became clear is that the process they went through to move to shorter work hours could work anywhere. It’s really about being focused, not on overwork, but effective work. What they had to do was get clear on what the most important work was and then work backward. They eliminated a lot of what I call ‘stupid work.’ They got rid of a lot of meetings where, in an overwork culture, you may be rewarded, but doesn’t help anyone get closer to producing valuable work. It’s a process that anybody could use in the United States on the organizational level, but also, for individuals, it's a place to start pushing back against overwork expectations. Take time to pause, and ask yourself, ‘What's most important? And how do I organize my day around that?’ Then communicate it. Especially women. Show how you’re adding value, and not just “performing” busyness. I found even small steps can lead to big change.

Schulte’s book, Overwork: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life is out now.