Are You a Workaholic?
A couple of months ago I discovered that I am a work addict. Work-addiction is a real condition that affects many people. Discovering that I am addicted to work helped me to understand some causes of all sorts of problems with my life and marriage. Because work is a necessary part of normal life, and a source of pride for many, work addiction can easily go undiagnosed. If you answer “yes” to a lot of the following questions, you might be a work addict, too. I answered “yes” to nineteen of them.
Twenty Questions: How Do I Know If I’m A Workaholic?
- Do you get more excited about your work than about family or anything else?
- Are there times when you can charge through your work and other times when you can’t?
- Do you take work with you to bed? On weekends? On vacation?
- Is work the activity you like to do best and talk about most?
- Do you work more than 40 hours a week?
- Do you turn your hobbies into money-making ventures?
- Do you take complete responsibility for the outcome of your work efforts?
- Have your family or friends given up expecting you on time?
- Do you take on extra work because you are concerned that it won’t otherwise get done?
- Do you underestimate how long a project will take and then rush to complete it?
- Do you believe that it is okay to work long hours if you love what you are doing?
- Do you get impatient with people who have other priorities besides work?
- Are you afraid that if you don’t work hard you will lose your job or be a failure?
- Is the future a constant worry for you even when things are going very well?
- Do you do things energetically and competitively including play?
- Do you get irritated when people ask you to stop doing your work in order to do something else?
- Have your long hours hurt your family or other relationships?
- Do you think about your work while driving, falling asleep or when others are talking?
- Do you work or read during meals?
- Do you believe that more money will solve the other problems in your life?
Those questions come from this website, which has religious references that creep me out so I don’t offer any guarantees about whether or not you will find help there. I found some of their practical recommendations quite helpful. Pick and choose what seems right for you.
Things That Have Helped Me
You can’t fix it by yourself. – It’s important to talk to your family and friends so they know what you’re dealing with. When you are an addict, you need the support of other people to help you build healthy new habits.
Get outside. – Take a 30 minute walk in the afternoons when the rest of your coworkers are heads-down at their desks. As you walk think about things you can’t turn into more work. Make a list of these things before you go out on your walk, as a backup plan if your mind gets stuck in the usual ruts.
Get out of town. – Take a quick day trip every weekend, it doesn’t matter where. Don’t bring your laptop. Silence your work notifications. Go to a science or history museum. Take a hike in the woods. Visit an aquarium. Eat at that restaurant you would never have tried otherwise. Put yourself someplace that is unfamiliar and far removed from your work routines.
Back to the Past
Apropos of nothing, here’s a six-years-old post from a defunct version of my blog — apropos of nothing except that today happens to be a special day for Back to the Future fans and this post improbably references Back to the Future.
Note: I’m pretty sure I was taking a required Catholic theology course at the religious school where I studied nursing at the time that I originally wrote this.
So yesterday I posted about depression and it got me thinking about all these Catholic rationalist types, these Summa Everythingus Thomas Aquinas types, folks that erect these enormous systematic edifices and elaborate schemata which (rather like that ridiculous clanking barn-sized contraption from Back to the Future Part Three that Doc Brown builds, the one that whirs and hums all day just to produce PLINK one tiny ice cube) whir and clank and manage only to produce POP obvious no-brainers like “Don’t kill” or “It’s okay to oppose unjust laws.” Who the hell didn’t already know that?! Why waste your time and mine by adding unnecessary supplemental certainty? Instead, why don’t we see more people put their analytic powers to work solving life’s real conundrums, like, say, is foolish consistency curable? Or how is it that picky eaters ever manage to try new foods and can it happen more often? Basically, how is it that people change and is it possible for me in particular to change for the better? Analytic skills are only appropriate for practical issues. When analysis goes hounding after the infinite and the hidden and the elusive mysteries of life, it only ends up finding itself. But don’t try telling that to such a person. He won’t hear you. Such are his clunky powers of analysis.
Thoreau on Self-Driving Cars
To make a railroad round the world available to all mankind is equivalent to grading the whole surface of the planet. Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all at length will ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts “All aboard!” when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over, and it will be called, and will be, “A melancholy accident.”
I often wonder what he would have thought of the Internet. Walden is basically a Xanga in paperback.
Mistakes
A master is one who has made all the mistakes that one can make within a given field.
Niels Bohr.
Are You Rich?
Back when I was a registered nurse I had an opportunity to volunteer at a field hospital in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. It was a year after the terrible earthquake in 2010, which killed hundreds of thousands of people and left hundreds of thousands more homeless. Survivors were still living in conditions more appalling then you can imagine — fields covered with tents as far as my eyes could see, strung up between rivers of mud and filth.
The hospital I volunteered at was operating out of a couple of massive tents, like you might see at a state fair in the US. Despite their humble infrastructure, Project Medishare was running a full-service general hospital, providing care for all kinds of patients and conditions. They even had a small ICU, which is where I was assigned.1
One of the volunteers at the hospital was a Haitian young man named Samuel who had been a medical student at a local university. The earthquake had destroyed his school. The closest he could get to his dream of becoming a doctor was to volunteer at Project Medishare. Samuel and I spent a lot of time together and became fast friends.
One night while our patients were sleeping, Samuel and I were chatting about life in the States versus Haiti. In the course of conversation I thoughtlessly mentioned something about my iPad back home. Samuel got quiet, cocked his head at me.
“Jared…are you rich?”
This was 2011. The iPad was still a novelty in the US, let alone in Haiti. I was an iOS nerd who had to have the latest gadget, and as a nurse I had the means to afford it. If memory serves I earned $2200 a month after income taxes. An iPad wasn’t cheap, but I had enough wiggle room in my budget to buy one. By American standards, an iPad was an expensive toy. But in Haiti, $500 USD was an outrageous sum.
I don’t remember how I answered Samuel’s question. I was dumbstruck. Was I rich? Of course not, right? I punched a time clock at work. I drove a Hyundai with only the basic features. My one-bedroom apartment had sparse thrift store furniture. I paid only the monthly minimums on mountains of college debt.
After a week of working in swaying tents and sleeping under mosquito nets and shitting in a hole in the earth, coming home to my one bedroom apartment, where I lived alone with floor-to-ceiling windows and walls that didn’t buckle in the wind, was overwhelming. Everything was sickeningly nice, nauseatingly pleasant. Even my thrift store furniture seemed opulent by comparison.
In the quiet moment after Samuel’s question, I realized more acutely than ever that the truth about my privileged circumstances isn’t in my perception of myself, but in how others perceive me. Relatively, from my friend Samuel’s perspective, I was rich. However much it contradicted my own ideas about myself, Samuel’s perception was the only perception that mattered.
Please consider donating or volunteering with Project Medishare. They do a lot of good for a lot of hurting people.
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By the way, in case you harbored any doubts about him, Sean Penn (the actor) is the real deal in his commitment to helping people in Haiti. I heard stories about him appearing in front of the Project Medishare hospital in a pickup truck, ferrying sick children and their mothers from remote villages — “Take care of this baby!” he’d bark — and heading back out to do it again. ↩