Plus, in the U.S., at least, there was the enduring idea, for many decades, that if you worked a traditional blue-collar job (primarily in manufacturing), and you worked hard, you would be able to provide a reasonable (if not comfortable) lifestyle for yourself and your family. You’d probably be able to buy a house, you could afford cars, you could go on vacations, you could send your kids to college (so that they could live good lives without backbreaking work), etc.
Between so much manufacturing being offshored, and some other blue-collar fields like mining shrinking, that idea is, if not dead, at least seen as generally no longer achievable.
I’ve known many people that genuinely preferred working hard all the time and some of them were very happy doing so. Others were just compulsive - it was like a drug fix, they just needed it to stay well rather than to feel good.
That sure as fuck was not me. Hard work is hard and I get no existential rush from doing it. My work ethic was decent and I was considered a good and valuable employee. But said work ethic was almost entirely motivated by fairness. Not wanting to cause more work to devolve on my co-workers because I didn’t pull my own weight. Sometimes as I got older and more senior it was motivated by a sense that if I didn’t do something the next guy to follow me wouldn’t be as up to the task, so I needed to step up and be the responsible one.
But did hard work get you anywhere at my job? Absolutely not. If anything it was a disincentive as the more of a go-getter you were, the more management piled it on and (with no attempt to be malicious) made your job harder. Did it get you ahead? No, generally brown-nosing did. I’d say it was better to be both ambitious and highly competent/hard-working, but sadly even that was not consistently true. A lot of times it was just better to be a used car salesman-type yes-man/woman. I objectively had a great job, but it bred cynicism faster than you can breed rabbits .
Same. Well, if we measure “hard work" in hours and not actual effort required to do the thing. I enjoy doing hard things, just not for 80 hours a week. I buckle down when necessary but I don’t feel I have anything to prove (or gain) from killing myself for my job.
Amen to this, although I’d say it goes a bit beyond brown-nosing.
IME the whole “team player” thing is great if you care about the actual product / service of your company. But far from the best strategy if you want to get promoted.
The people I’ve seen rise up the ranks, yeah they tend to be ambitious, but also pretty manipulative and dicks to people whenever they have had the opportunity to do so. I’ve seen guys who turn almost all their projects into shitshows; always going way over time, budget and resource but somehow convincing senior management that their jerk behaviour is what’s going to get the ship back on course, rather than frequently being the cause of the storm.
Anyway, the relevance of this rant is just that some jerkish personality traits are correlated with success in the corporate world IME. And, therefore, part of the correlation between rich and angry.
I guess maybe I would ask why would you be working 80 hours a week? That’s like 9am to 9pm seven days a week. Unless you were an investment banker, associate at a big law firm, or working at a tech start up, most companies have little expectation that their people work those kinds of hours and it’s usually not a path to success.
As someone who’s worked in marketing and advertising for the last few decades…60+ is pretty much the norm for any career-first person who’s trying to climb the ladder in this industry, and 80+ is absolutely not unheard of.
I don’t know that I’d say that brown-nosing is necessarily required, but it’s absolutely true that what gets you promoted isn’t hard work and extreme competence, but rather good networking/socializing combined with the appearance of at least adequate competence and adequately hard work.
In other words, being a crazy hard worker and good at your job isn’t where it’s at. It’s being reasonably hard working and adequately competent, and making sure you’re well known to all the hiring/promotion decision makers and in their good graces.
After all, they’re more likely to promote the people who they know and like, even if they’re not the hardest working or most competent, over the super-competent and super-hard working people who they don’t know at all (presumably because they’ve spent their time working hard).
It’s kind of a Catch-22 situation if you look at it from a certain perspective, and nobody’s really telling you when you’re 23-24 that this is how the game’s played. I sure wish someone had done that for me back then; I’d have spent much more of my time socializing and networking with the critical people, and not working like a dog or worrying about being extremely good at it. I figured it out in my late 30s/early 40s, but it was too late at that job, and between having kids and just taking a while to find a better job, I didn’t get a chance to try it out until I was 45. And it works. Shockingly well, in fact.
But I don’t doubt that there’s a lot of bitterness out there about the whole idea that society tells you one thing (work hard, be good at your job, be loyal to your company) is the right thing to do, and then later on you find out that the actual path to success is something else (job-hop, socialize, schmooze, self-market, network). And for the blue collar sorts it’s largely what @kenobi_65 says- that segment of the population has been sold the tale that working a blue collar job and working hard is a way to be secure in providing for your family and yourself in retirement. And that’s only the case in a narrow set of blue collar jobs. Many are either non-existent, or have little in the way of security versus those blue collar jobs of our fathers’ and grandfathers’ era.
How much of that is actual work though? In my career, I’ve noticed that most of the 60-80 hour workers are really still only putting in about half of that in actual work, and the rest is chatting, taking care of home/family stuff and personal phone calls(because they’re at work), long lunches, and other non-working stuff. They were largely putting in hours, not putting in work.
An old co-worker of mine served in the navy as a young man, working as a nuclear tech/mechanic on an aircraft carrier. He says the following pattern repeated itself multiple times over a few years. The worst ‘wrench’ in their little crew would be relegated to monitoring duty up above where they were less likely to get in the way and fuck anything up, while the more skilled mechanics worked down below trouble-shooting, repairing and maintaining. The officers would then come by the station making rounds and checking in. Where they would then engage in chit-chat with the visible guy stuck on monitoring duty. Who would then end up getting the next promotion in rank. Rinse, repeat.
As I recall he didn’t exactly resent it, because he was comfortable doing what he was doing. But he wryly said it was as regular as clockwork. They just promoted the seemingly competent guy they saw and talked to all the time, not the more faceless and skilled guys they didn’t.
It’s not brown-nosing, and it’s not any sort of deliberate bias on the part of the officers either. It’s just people promoting the people they’re familiar with.
Same thing would happen in most of the IT departments I’ve worked in. Usually the people with the time to chat and schmooze were the ones who weren’t assigned to the really important stuff, but they’d be the ones who’d get promoted, because they’d had the time to schmooze.
Even where I work now, the section I’m in is more or less the historical CIO feeder path. Not because we’re necessarily more qualified to run an IT department than the rest, but because our job functions put us in contact with a lot of high-level people outside our own department, who are typically the people doing the hiring, or who will be doing the hiring in a few years. Meanwhile, the security and infrastructure people toil away in relative obscurity.
Absolutely, some of that is “face time,” and situations where people are meeting their company’s cultural norm of not just being 9-5. It’s the equivalent of the “fifteen pieces of flair is the minimum, yes, but you want to do more than the bare minimum” from Office Space.
That said, IME, the people who are truly career-focused, and intent on moving up into better positions, are, in fact, working their asses off for a crazy number of hours per week. Yes, nearly everyone – even people like those – fits in some time for personal calls, family stuff, chatting with colleagues about sports and movies, etc., but the focused ones are, indeed, actually working for a lot more than 40 hours a week.
I think there is a void, and that void is masked with anger. I think it’s that simple. It could be masked with other negative emotions besides anger. I think this OP could have many true variants (“What’s the deal with rich sex-crazed white dudes?” etc.).
Even more broadly, happiness is purely subjective. You’re happiness is derived from unconsciously comparing yourself to others. It used to just be your close friends and neighbors who you knew well, but not anymore. It’s much harder to have a realistic group to compare to these days with social media/everything online. Now you’re often comparing yourself to massive amounts of people and only the best (often fake) parts of those people. Truly happy people probably aren’t out advertising it.
Finally, I don’t think people are really as angry, or sad, or happy as they present themselves or people say they are. Sad people are also happy. Happy people are also sad. Angry people are also pleasant.
One of the most important factors in “getting ahead” is the willingness to boast and lie. Talking yourself up, stealing credit for the accomplishments of others is key to advancing your career. “Hard work” isn’t important, convincing the people judging you that you are valuable is what matters; the hard workers are the ones whose credit gets stolen (and possibly fired as superfluous), not the ones who get promoted.
Heck, that’s an important reason why men are the ones who have the credit for nearly every invention and accomplishment; if a woman did it, the credit for it was stolen by a man and her existence was effectively erased. Or nobody bothered to take the credit, and her accomplishments were still erased. Because hard work isn’t how you get ahead; it’s all lies, workplace politics and whatever mix of bigotry and favoritism the bosses like to indulge in.
In a way I think they do tell you when you go to elite private prep schools and colleges. Maybe not directly, but I think you pick up on that it’s not just about doing good work. You still have to do the work. But there’s a lot of networking and social politics and entitlement that often translates to the real working world.
Working on what though? Spending 60 hours a week working on crap no one cares about, even if it’s necessary, doesn’t advance you’re career. You just become, I don’t know, like a really competent pool boy or housekeeper. Part of the “help” that leadership really doesn’t give a shit about until they fuck up.
From my experience, 90% of business is “face time” and “cultural norms”. Maybe it’s because I usually come in as an outsider to help companies do something new. But from what I see, most of these middle and upper management types have no particular skills or expertise or even any ideas on how to do anything better. They just sort of pass paper back and forth or focus on some unimportant minutiae so they can look busy and thorough. Like they will spend an hour arguing about what shade of red to use on a RAG status report instead of figuring out why the project is red in the first place.
My point is that people who work long hours in white-collar jobs aren’t necessarily just chatting and putting in face time, they are actually working on delivering what they are hired to do, and usually going above and beyond that. Those are the people who get promoted regularly, get tracked into senior management, etc.
To be clear: I was never that kind of person in my career, I cared about doing my job well, and I long ago decided I didn’t want to be in senior management. There were times when I did work 60-70 hours in a week, due to specific projects, but also times where I probably worked less than 40, just because we weren’t busy.
Well, as therapists describe it, anger is what’s called a secondary emotion. Meaning that it’s a response to some other primary emotion, and in anger’s case, those are fear or sadness.
So the question is, what is making these rich white guys sad or afraid? My guess is that it’s a combination of sadness that what they wanted/hoped for did not come to pass, and fear that the world is changing, and their position (and their family’s, I suspect) will change for the worse.
How do you assuage the fears and console a huge demographic like that? That’s a job for the politicians, but they’re often notorious idiots.
You say that like self-promotion is a BAD thing. How is anyone else going to know how awesome you are at your job, if you’re not making a point of showing it? And I’m not saying that sarcastically or tongue-in-cheek. You have to do a certain amount of self-promotion just to get that message out there.
Assuming that your bosses are spending a lot of time carefully discerning who does a good job and who doesn’t, and WHY is not realistic. That’s just one of probably a thousand things they’re being made to do, and probably isn’t one that they’re being judged on, so they DGAF when it comes right down to it.
It’s like a resume; it’s not some sort of dry recounting of your work history. It’s basically your advertisement for yourself, but in a standardized (more or less) format. So it behooves you to approach it as such, and embellish a little bit. Not outright lie, but just play up your role without actually lying outright.
I don’t advocate stealing others’ work and listing it as your own though. That crosses the line into fabrication from mere embellishment.
One thing to bear in mind is the general toxic-masculinity environment, where a large fraction of males are brought up conditioned to that it is “unmanly” to visibly react to suboptimal results with anything but anger, doubling down, or stoic endurance. It will be especially drilled into boys/young men that “winners” must be “competitive” and “aggressive”, that it is “better” to be feared than loved, etc. So when they do get to a position of ostensible success and privilege, but find that is still unfulfilling, they get mad at themselves and double down on the aggression, growing bitter as opposed to going philosophical and repeating to themselves “vanity of vanities…”.
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