Work hard, play hard culture devalues interpersonal relationships and fails to respond to hyperproductivity.
Growing up, I’ve found myself critiquing the various attitudes of my friends that influenced my philosophy behind navigating opportunity. Unfortunately, when you tell your friend that it sounds like a bad idea to pregame brunch with his family or spark up before a lab final, you come off as paternalistic and disrupt a heuristic present in young people’s social connections and roles.
As students, we have to constantly seek balance between a hyperproductive and play hard culture. The hyperproductive culture is built around the anxiety of never reaching one’s full potential and maximizing every minute working; the degenerative one counters the former by advocating for a casual approach to opportunity and life.
Both cultures are effective at distorting an individual’s sense of self, making it difficult to argue against them without sounding inflammatory. Hyperproductivity asks an individual to progress toward a constantly shifting goal, leading people to believe a sacrificial attitude is the only path to success.
The consequences of a hyperproductive mindset are evident when examining extremely disciplined and high-achieving individuals, such as Michael Jackson, who found success but lacked freedom from this sacrificial attitude. This mentality can be justified by a need for survival and an existential anxiety of not reaching one’s own potential.
The other side is the work-hard, play-harder pundit, who listened to too much Drake and identified — or falsely adopted — the comfort and privilege present in their lives. This comfort justifies their focus on academic performance as an indicator of “working hard,” while their obedience to degeneracy disguised as a “bender” limits how they can meaningfully show up — not only for others, but for themselves — past superficial indicators of success.
Although I believe the attitude derives from the original observation of parental figures who pursued success at the expense of time with friends and family, the attitude only continues through an environment of financial comfort.
This culture is fed by the delusion of basing success on the perpetual accumulation of capital — not to reach self-discovery or survive, but to fund further extremes of the attitude resulting in incomprehensible flexes like staying in the “Missoni room at the Byblos.”
This mindset has grown pervasive in a culture built on countering hyperproductivity, and it finds its strongest footing in highly privileged environments where the desire for social connection and personal development is superficially met, and financial discomfort is nonexistent.
To evaluate this mindset, we have to deconstruct the need for social connection that this superficially fulfills. Part of the failure of the culture to address a necessity for social connection can be found through John Calhoun’s experiment with a mice utopia.
John Calhoun’s experiment “Universe 25” created an artificial utopian environment in which a group of mice was provided with unlimited food and water, initially living in a perfect climate with adequate housing for the initial rat population.
A group, that was labelled by Calhoun as “the beautiful ones,” huddled in the middle and did nothing but groom and eat. The beautiful ones remained physically perfect and disengaged completely from typical behaviors found in mice by failing to both communicate and co-operate with other mice and disengaging from competition for positions in their social hierarchy.
They were interpreted by scholars as showing the ultimate breakdown of social structure and lack of purpose; although we are far from living in a utopia, our college campus superficially resembles perfect environmental factors.
With a vibrant social and professional atmosphere, on-campus housing, and dining hall food with maggots, our college campus resembles Calhoun’s utopia with adjusted standards. However, despite this environment providing the capacity to refine ourselves and expand our intellectual and professional identities, we give in to degenerative behaviors and interests that infest our goals.
These behaviors and interests allow us to continue through our education and our subsequent careers, devaluing the internal sense of discomfort that drives our development as we explore our interests and develop our identities. Because this lifestyle lacks discomfort, after financial security is met, our goals remain complacent and interests that don’t provide support for the lifestyle become irrelevant. Additionally, this attitude allows us to take our environment for granted and believe we exist in the illusion of a utopia forever.
The question of how we should balance our work-play life and take time to develop our non-money-making hobbies and interests is ignored; so long as we find a role in activities that mimic social connection. If we can find how to make money, the behavior is justified. The culture that surrounds degenerative behavior is associated with disregarding reevaluation of values and deeper aspirations, past things like superficial indicators of success.
Social relief should be found in activities that have progression and develop the capacity to connect with others intergenerationally and cross-culturally. Dedicating your time to activities like reading, outdoor exercise, and indulging or creating art drives your personal development and expands your capacity for authentic social connection, assigning you more value than being a consumer of a harmful lifestyle
What separation from this culture takes is individual effort to explore discomfort in social roles and interests. Connecting with others in your free time should contribute to the pursuit and development of the activities you value in your life, they should not act as a social crutch to keep you mindless.
Avoid simplifying your purpose into grooming, eating and playing rage cage. If you genuinely possess the privilege of occupational and economic security, leverage it to generate a positive impact on your community. Continue to pursue goals that extend past fulfilling a capacity to work hard, and direct your interest to create authentic connection to those who live outside your utopia.
We are the only independent newspaper here at USC, run at every level by students. That means we aren’t tied down by any other interests but those of readers like you: the students, faculty, staff and South Central residents that together make up the USC community.
Independence is a double-edged sword: We have a unique lens into the University’s actions and policies, and can hold powerful figures accountable when others cannot. But that also means our budget is severely limited. We’re already spread thin as we compensate the writers, photographers, artists, designers and editors whose incredible work you see in our paper; as we work to revamp and expand our digital presence, we now have additional staff making podcasts, videos, webpages, our first ever magazine and social media content, who are at risk of being unable to receive the support they deserve.
We are therefore indebted to readers like you, who, by supporting us, help keep our paper independent, free and widely accessible.
Please consider supporting us. Even $1 goes a long way in supporting our work; if you are able, you can also support us with monthly, or even annual, donations. Thank you.
This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse the site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies.
We may request cookies to be set on your device. We use cookies to let us know when you visit our websites, how you interact with us, to enrich your user experience, and to customize your relationship with our website.
Click on the different category headings to find out more. You can also change some of your preferences. Note that blocking some types of cookies may impact your experience on our websites and the services we are able to offer.
These cookies are strictly necessary to provide you with services available through our website and to use some of its features.
Because these cookies are strictly necessary to deliver the website, refusing them will have impact how our site functions. You always can block or delete cookies by changing your browser settings and force blocking all cookies on this website. But this will always prompt you to accept/refuse cookies when revisiting our site.
We fully respect if you want to refuse cookies but to avoid asking you again and again kindly allow us to store a cookie for that. You are free to opt out any time or opt in for other cookies to get a better experience. If you refuse cookies we will remove all set cookies in our domain.
We provide you with a list of stored cookies on your computer in our domain so you can check what we stored. Due to security reasons we are not able to show or modify cookies from other domains. You can check these in your browser security settings.
These cookies collect information that is used either in aggregate form to help us understand how our website is being used or how effective our marketing campaigns are, or to help us customize our website and application for you in order to enhance your experience.
If you do not want that we track your visit to our site you can disable tracking in your browser here:
We also use different external services like Google Webfonts, Google Maps, and external Video providers. Since these providers may collect personal data like your IP address we allow you to block them here. Please be aware that this might heavily reduce the functionality and appearance of our site. Changes will take effect once you reload the page.
Google Webfont Settings:
Google Map Settings:
Google reCaptcha Settings:
Vimeo and Youtube video embeds:
The following cookies are also needed – You can choose if you want to allow them: