Shouldn’t you be studying for your midterms right now?
This is the question that I’ve been asking myself every waking minute for the last week, and I imagine I’m not the only one. It’s not that I’m anxious about getting a good grade — it’s that I feel guilty for not working my hardest at all times. Even at the Happy Ivy, our capitalist culture influences us to believe that a work ethic is the greatest virtue one can have. But there’s no reason to believe that hard work is inherently good — we ought to direct our education and work towards greater purpose, rather than seeing work as the purpose itself.
In the United States, the “American Dream” extolled hard work as the key ingredient to upward mobility, so it became a part of our national identity. Today, most U.S. adults believe that hard work no longer pays off or that it never did. Yet hustle culture seems more dominant than ever. This suggests that Americans have come to treat hard work not as a means to economic success, but as a moral good in itself — valuable despite its general failure to deliver material reward. This belief makes some sense: Hard work is often necessary to produce good things. A strong work ethic shows self-discipline, which is often seen as virtuous. But this doesn’t show why hard work itself is good, just that it’s a tool that can produce good things when properly directed.
There is something deeper than economics going on here. The journalist Derek Thompson argues that American culture suffers from workism, the attachment of one’s identity and sense of purpose to work. Work has turned from merely a way to sustain life to the meaning of life itself. It’s why the elites now work more, not less, than the non-elite. It’s why teenagers see having a job they enjoy as more important than money or family. It’s why college is no longer seen as a place to develop intellectually, but as training for a career.
College is becoming an increasingly pre-professional affair, which is both a cause and symptom of workism. From the 1960s to the 1980s, first-year college students’ top stated purpose of their education shifted dramatically from “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” to becoming “financially well off.” If the purpose of education has changed from discovering the meaning of life to preparing for a career, perhaps it’s because having a career has become the meaning of life.
Eighteen-year-olds never stopped asking big questions about why we have been put on this Earth. But today’s college environment gives us a resounding unanimous answer: to secure employment. At Brown, pre-professional clubs are on a meteoric rise. Consulting firms, who recruit at Brown, are shifting their cycles even earlier. The unholy trinity of applied math, economics and computer science remains dominant, while undergraduate humanities concentrators shrink. How have Brown’s humanities departments responded? Not by defending the innate value of history, but by emphasizing its relevance to the labor market.
Since work has become an identity, it has become sacred. One example is the Japanese concept of ikigai, which has become influential at U.S. business programs — including Brown’s Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship. It teaches that one’s life calling ought to sit at the “intersection of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs and what you can be paid for.” This philosophy makes the job search a spiritual journey, and the 9-to-5 a sacred duty. Like marriage or sex, doing it purely for money would be deemed shallow and shameful.
But work is a toxic lover. Basing your identity on a job that might not love you back is a recipe for disappointment. Your success at your job is at the mercy of macroeconomic forces, bad bosses and dumb luck. Your life’s purpose should be found somewhere besides your job. This is why hustle culture is inherently performative: It expects us to derive spiritual fulfillment from work, but this expectation is unrealistic, so people pretend. If a job interviewer asked me, “Why do you want to work at our company?” and I answered “to afford food and shelter,” I would get a cold stare. No, this work has to have been my lifelong dream, my passion, my ikigai.
In his book “Bullshit Jobs,” the anthropologist David Graeber shows that large quantities of white-collar jobs in both the public and private sectors serve redundant purposes, like making superiors feel important or giving their company license to say it is doing something it is not doing. Graeber argues that the moralization of work on a societal level has led to the creation of millions of bullshit jobs simply to keep people employed. We expect everyone to spend 40 hours a week in the office, even as technology has made us more productive. The workers find themselves in a position of immense stress: aware that their jobs are useless, but pretending to be productive to keep their livelihoods.
Once I read Graeber, I noticed that all the careerism of college was simply training for a future career of fake work. The growth of AI cheating has revealed that students see a degree as simply a hoop to jump through to get a job. There’s no need to learn, just a need to check off a box saying we learned. As it was put at Harvard, our professors give us A’s, and we give them fives on their end-of-semester evaluations. And we’ve all heard of internships that assign little meaningful work and teach you nothing, but are highly sought after anyway for the stamp on your resume. If Graeber is right, our professional lives don’t get any less fake after graduation.
The good news is Brown has a unique way out of this vortex of futile labour. We have earned our reputation as the Happy Ivy, where the Open Curriculum gives us freedom to study what we choose instead of restrictive requirements. If work is not the purpose of life, we need to find it in other places. Exploring the diverse fields of scholarship offered at Brown is a great place to start. I don’t mean exploring career paths until you find your passion, but exploring academic interests that help you develop a philosophy of life to which work is subordinate.
Once we’ve unlearned the tendency to make work the meaning of our lives, we can stop feeling guilty for not working hard at all times. A harder degree isn’t necessarily more valuable, an easier degree isn’t necessarily fake and being busier does not make you a better person. Instead of asking yourself, “Is my calendar full?” Ask yourself, “Am I happy? Am I growing? Am I a blessing to those around me?”
Dethroning hustle culture will be a generational task, but it starts with us. I look forward to the day when our dreams are grander than our career, we work no more than we need to and life is S/NC.
Evan Tao ’27 can be reached at evan_tao@brown.edu. Please send responses to this column to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
