In the growing gospel of ‘workism,’ is all work holy?

Jake Hammel kinda gets why a bunch of Hollywood celebrities and Manhattan muckety-mucks might try to spend their considerable dime trying to finagle their kids into a big-name college.

His own are just in kindergarten and first grade. When he heard on the radio how the FBI caught 50 of the nation’s most successful and wealthy families paying bribes and faking the merits of their children to get into the nation’s most prestigious schools, he could at least understand their motives.

“You know, wherever you’re at financially, you can just kind of scale it down and think, well, if I had a percentage of my salary that I could try to buy my kids’ way through something, would I do it?” says Mr. Hammel, a sheet metal worker in Carlyle, Illinois, a rural town in the southern part of the state.

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But, yeah, while one of the most of important values in his life is to take care of his family and provide for their future, it also means a lot to him to be able to work hard, earn an honest wage, and feel good about what he does. He wants to instill that in his children too: that no matter what they do, they should want to put in the work for what they want to achieve.

“Later on down the road I’d like to be able to see them have and do whatever it is that they want to do,” he says. “And, you know, I’m gonna work as hard as I can over the next 15, 20 years to give them as much as I can, but they’re going to have to put up some of their own dukes and work hard for themselves to get them in the front door.”

Last week’s news struck a deep bipartisan chord across the country after the Justice Department announced it had broken up a nationwide college admissions cheating scheme. A wide cross section of Americans remains stunned at how a cadre of elites, including Oscar-nominated actors, fashion designers, and high-powered New York attorneys, could spend as much as a college education itself to fake the merits of their children.

The scandal broke too in the midst of a wider national conversation that many were having about about the nature of American competition, the ideals of a meritocracy, and anxieties caused by a “religion of workism,” especially among millennials.

Behind the “gospel of T.G.I.M,” or “thank God it’s Monday,” preached by many of this generation’s competitive and mostly urban workaholics, lies a host of factors. One that cannot be discounted is economic anxiety stemming from growing up during the Great Recession and entering adulthood saddled with more than $1 trillion in collective college loans that have so far not guaranteed that this generation will have a more affluent life than its parents did. Certainly many Americans were zealous about seeking a sense of purpose from their jobs long before psychiatrist Wayne Oates published “Confessions of a Workaholic: The Facts about Work Addiction,” in 1971.

“Why we work so much is at least partly due to our national identity as hard-working, industrious people who live in the ‘land of opportunity’ where one can be self-made if only one tries hard enough,” says Carrie Bulger, professor of psychology at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. “The Calvinist principles underlying the birth of at least part of the nation emphasized hard work, discipline, and frugality.

“And it’s is true that American workers still spend longer hours at work than any other developed nation in the world,” continues Professor Bulger. “It’s also true that we pay a psychological and physical toll for this in terms of rates of occupational stress, burnout, and stress-related illnesses.”

In the upper rungs of American achievement, urban professionals and others have wryly celebrated the 100-hour work week, and “workism” is certainly not a new phenomenon.

But as many millennials and others have embraced the tag #hustle to convey their commitment and brag about their hours worked, many observers say this ethos includes a more invested quest for meaning than other generations’. For millennials, “a job is about more than a paycheck – it’s about a purpose,” a Gallup poll in 2016 concluded.

“The problem with this gospel – Your dream job is out there, so never stop hustling – is that it’s a blueprint for spiritual and physical exhaustion,” noted Derek Thompson in The Atlantic, in his essay arguing the futility of seeking transcendence, rather than money, from a job. “Long hours don’t make anybody more productive or creative; they make people stressed, tired and bitter.”