How Work Alienates Us From Our Social Lives

What does your usual weekday look like? For many of us, academics and non-academics alike, it probably looks something like this. You wake up and spend a hurried hour or so on the morning essentials: showering, getting dressed, eating, caffeinating. Then, you work. You might do this at home or in an office, but you probably spend most of your day doing it, whether eight, nine, ten, or more hours. When you finish, you have a few hours to spare, some of which are occupied by other necessities of life like cooking, eating again, and childcare. This leaves only a little time for leisure activities before you have to get to sleep and do it all again.

What is most striking in this familiar daily routine is the dominance of work. Indeed, work has become so embedded in our daily activities that we may even fail to recognize its reach. Even in the moments where we aren’t working, so much of our daily activity is undertaken with an eye to work—making sure we get enough sleep to perform well on the job, preparing meals to take to the office for the week, purchasing various widgets to work more efficiently, consuming enough caffeine to get through the workday.

I don’t think this is a particularly satisfying arrangement. I suspect it has a lot of negative effects, but here I want to focus on one especially damaging result of this predominance of work: the way it corrupts our sociality.

In particular, I want to suggest that our contemporary work culture alienates us from our social lives. We have the sense that our social life is in some way an afterthought, while our work is the default activity of one’s life. For many of us, work has become the central node around which all other activity is organized, leaving our social activities with at best secondary status.

This social alienation starts with the incredible amount of time devoted to work. In her recent book on free time, Julia Rose lays out the statistics on working hours in the U.S., where I suspect social alienation may be particularly salient. She notes that around one-third of laborers work more than 45 hours a week and one-eighth work more than 55 hours a week. Moreover, one-third of laborers work on weekends and one-fourth work at some point between 10 pm and 6 am. Perhaps even more important are workers’ sentiments about the amount of work in their lives, as 60 percent of American workers say they would prefer shorter hours. How would they prefer to spend that time? Well, two-thirds say they’d like more time with friends and four-fifths more time with family, indicating that they view their social lives as both hugely important and woefully underemphasized in the current situation.

One might wonder how these observations square with certain improvements in working conditions made over the last century. It is true that over the last 70 years in the United States, annual time worked per laborer has fallen by nearly 250 hours, about five hours per week. That conditions have improved from the early 1950s does not of course mean they are particularly good. American workers still work more than 400 hours a year more than their German, British, and Scandinavian counterparts. Moreover, in the last 10 years, American working hours have in fact increased by nearly 50 hours per year. And interestingly, working hours for the elite professional class in particular have increased significantly in recent years. Between 1979 and 2006, the proportion of workers in the top quintile in wages who work more than 50 hours a week has nearly doubled. This might suggest a recommitment to work, starting with economic elites and filtering to others.

It’s not only the amount of time devoted to work that produces social alienation, however, but also the rigidity of the work schedule. People tend to work for a pre-determined number of hours in a pre-determined location, left to socialize in whatever time is left over. Work hours appear on many of our schedules as given, non-negotiable blocks of time. As a result, we have to organize our social activity around these blocks, tagging every interaction with a determinate start and stop time.

Workers therefore not only have limited opportunity for social activity, but even when they are able to engage, it is often only in a degenerate form of sociality. Social activities become stilted and unspontaneous as we must carefully schedule them into our calendars. Moreover, they come to serve as a mere means to the end of rejuvenating us for the next day of work. This relation to sociality is similar to what Stanley Parker calls the opposition pattern of work and leisure, in which laborers engage in escapist leisure in order to decompress and return to work refreshed. In our contemporary work culture, sociality has become parasitic on work for its value, serving as a means to working more effectively rather than possessing its own independent value.

Perhaps part of what makes our contemporary work life uniquely alienating, however, as opposed to the work of 50 or 100 years ago, is a new attitude toward work. Specifically, many have come to embrace the philosophy that The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson calls “workism.” “Workists” embrace the idea that their work is meant to be the principal source of purpose and satisfaction in their lives. This phenomenon may in particular explain the increases in hours among those at the top of the economic pyramid. If people continue to work more despite having the means to work much less, it’s plausible that they’re doing so not for purely economic reasons, but perhaps in pursuit of purpose, identity, and transcendence. It has become a cliché that you should find your calling, never work a day in your life, do what you love, and workism is about devoting oneself to accomplishing these goals to the detriment of all else.

I suspect that workism may be the worst culprit when it comes to social alienation, one of the key root causes of the practices that sever our relationship to our sociality. If work is the central activity of our lives, it is only sensible that everything else move into the background. We should always be working, as work is what gives us purpose and identity. From a workist point of view, our social lives should become mere footnotes to our work, valuable only insofar as they allow us to work more efficiently. As we adopt this philosophy, those features of our lives that were once reserved for our social lives have been swallowed by work. As labor journalist Sarah Jaffe explains, “…the things we used to keep for ourselves—indeed, the things the industrial workplace wanted to minimize—are suddenly in demand on the job, including our friendships, our feelings, and our love.” Energies and sentiments once devoted to developing meaningful relationships outside of work have now been redirected toward work itself.

The result of all of this is an unsatisfying relation to our sociality that large majorities of workers say they’d like to change. Workers feel powerless and unfree in their social lives, in thrall to the workist culture and the habits it demands, unable to reorient their lives to prioritize free social activity without risking their careers, livelihoods, and identities. Their social lives therefore appear alien to them, not spontaneous loci of connection but overstructured tasks, not essential parts of their lives but rather mere interstices between bouts of work.

If this is such a deficient way of relating to our work and social lives, what can be done about it? Certain political reforms might go part of the way in easing social alienation. Introducing economic programs, such as universal basic income, could allow people to work less frequently and more flexibly, reducing pressure to take bad jobs with long hours and rigid schedules. It might even encourage employers to offer higher wages, shorter hours, and more flexibility in order to attract workers who would turn them down otherwise. Increasing the minimum wage would likely have a similar effect, allowing workers to make a decent living while working fewer hours. These programs might also have an expressive function, emphasizing that it is in fact desirable for people not to work all the time, that they ought to have a cushion that allows them to pursue other endeavors outside work.

There’s reason to be skeptical, however, that these kinds of economic reforms would be sufficient to significantly reduce social alienation. After all, it is those at the top of the income bracket who have increased their working hours in recent years, and UBI or a higher minimum wage are unlikely to make much difference to them. What is really needed is a cultural shift away from the idea that work is the only or at least the principal source of purpose in one’s life, a much more elusive goal.

Of course, structural conditions may be partly responsible for this cultural phenomenon. One might think that the impulse toward constant work is an adaptive preference, formed in response to the profit-maximizing logic of the market. At first people worked constantly because they had to or because they equated money with success, but these compulsions have since become such a bedrock part of our culture that their original purpose has been lost. As a result, the impulse to work no longer manifests as a mere desire for economic gain, but rather as a deep part of people’s identity. It’s worth nothing as well that this vision of work as a source of purpose and transcendence is very useful to profit-seeking firms, who can get more out of their workers without paying them more. It is therefore unsurprising that many of these firms participate in the “find your calling” type of advertising that is now persistent.

Even if this is the case, however, it’s not clear that structural reforms would be sufficient to curb workism and by extension social alienation. Market interventions can help mitigate the economic incentives to work without end, but if these compulsions have become so deep seated as to transcend mere economics, it seems unlikely that softening the initial incentives will eradicate the new transformed impulses.

Rather, it is likely that more explicitly cultural reforms are required. One potential area for intervention is the education system. Workism clearly has origins in schools: it is all too common these days to see students start taking SAT prep classes at age 13, sign up for tons of extra-curricular activities they’re not particularly interested in, and agonize over the difference between As and A minuses, all with the support and endorsement of schools. If, on the other hand, schools emphasized the importance of community and social connection to the same degree as they do academic and professional achievement, students would be more likely to develop the sense that sociality is an equal and independent locus of value. This also implicates parents, who have become increasingly concerned with children’s academic and ultimately professional achievement rather than their social and emotional development. In a recent study, while 90 percent of parents say that one of their top priorities is that their children care for others, 80 percent of children say their parents value achievement over caring.

Another promising avenue is to reinvest in arenas for communal activity. This might mean offering opportunities for people to restructure the way they live, creating co-living spaces and other forms of communal living, and replacing the civic societies that have disappeared in the last few decades, as famously documented by Robert Putnam.

Of course, there are bound to be practical barriers to implementing some of these reforms. Offering a viable strategic plan, however, is not my purpose here. Rather, my hope is to have sketched a picture of a kind of social alienation that resonates with readers and to have suggested a few promising, if inchoate, ways of resolving this alienation. 

Chris Bouqsuet

Chris Bousquet is a PhD student in philosophy at Syracuse University, where he focuses on philosophy of law and social/political philosophy. Much of his recent work concerns free expression, specifically what grounds the right to free expression and what this can tell us about how to resolve hard cases.