Overwork: This Century’s Cocaine

Our society’s dangerous immersion in overwork may help explain why we can’t see the water we swim in, why many therapists look blank when the spouses of workaholics complain of loneliness and marital dissatisfaction, and why the concept of workaholism is still relegated to pop psychology. There are hundreds of studies of alcoholism, substance abuse, and eating disorders but only a handful on workaholism. This is a profound omission. Overwork is this century’s cocaine, its “problem without a name.” Workweeks of sixty, eighty, even one hundred hours are commonplace in major law firms and corporations; tribes of modern-day male and female Willy Lomans, manacled to cell phones, trundle through the nation’s airports at all hours with their rolling luggage; cafes are filled with serious young people bent over laptops; young workers at dotcoms are available for work, as the slang phrase has it, “24/7”—twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It is high time that all of us stopped relegating compulsive overwork to the pop-psychology bookshelves and took a hard look at our lives.

Chained to the Desk is a metaphor for the agonizing work obsessions that haunt workaholics even when they are away from their desks. The director-actor Penny Marshall, confessing to being a workaholic in a People magazine interview, said that when she’s working, she’s obsessively working and that she loses all concept of what day it is. Her devotion to work means that she puts her personal life second. Throngs of workaholics openly admit their obsession for work while concealing the darker side of their addiction. They testify to their passion for work, their nonstop schedules—all of which present them in a favorable light. They fail, however, to mention their episodes of depression, anxiety, and chronic fatigue, which almost always occur as an aftereffect of working obsessively for days on end. The upside of workaholism brings honor, but the downside carries a stigma.

Workaholism is the best-dressed problem of the twenty-first century. Workaholics often have comfortable incomes, and their families appear to have all the material comforts. Not only does work addiction look good on workaholics, but it also is becoming on their families from the outside. But behind closed doors workaholics are breaking down inwardly, and their families suffer in quiet desperation. Here’s how one adult who grew up with a workaholic parent expressed her frustration in a letter to me:

On the outside workaholics are glorified do-gooders and hard workers. Our society praises workaholics, but what workaholism does to people on the inside is harmful. It cuts them off from the rest of the world, including friends and family. It causes them to work constantly without rest, to be in their own cold, dark, lonely world—all alone with room only for other tasks to be completed. Outwardly, workaholics are good citizens; inwardly, they’re dying a slow death.

Workaholism is widespread in its devastation. It infects other family members, causing them to experience a whole set of mental health problems of their own. I use an addiction model, combined with a family systems model, throughout this book to show the downside of work addiction and its impact on the individual workaholic, as well as on the workaholic family as a whole. The chapters that follow expose the dark side that successful people are either too ashamed to admit to or too blind to see—that cycles of prolonged highs are always followed by low periods that can last for days or weeks.

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