Missing an argument or two there, perhaps?
Why we must resist the cult of ‘performative workaholism’.
Well, of course he's not interrogating how much this is making a virtue of necessity and being a good Boy Scout and smiling and whistling under all difficulties...
But it's not just that long hours are Bad For You, like what even business efficiency experts in the early to mid C20th were pointing out, sigh, that after a certain point efficiency goes down down down.
I'd say Elon has it wrong end on altogether with “No one ever changed the world on 40 hours a week”, because a case can be made that there are figures who did, who did so on a good deal less time put in, taking time out to smell the flowers and, indeed, considering the lilies how they grow, and the sweetpeas how they breed in the monastery garden, and I wish I could trace that thing I saw which gave Charles Darwin's daily timetable and he really wasn't spending huge chunks of it sitting at his desk thinking big thinkky thoughts on evolution. And if Newton was putting in 80 hour weeks, I bet the vast proportion of that was on Biblical exegesis and not astronomy or calculus.
I'm not sure how true is the anti-cautionary tale I came across in childhood, about that idle youth James Watt, sitting by the fire instead of engaging in productive labour, idly watching the kettle boil and the steam lifting the lid, and going aha, which he would not have been doing had he been the Industrious Apprentice and filling the unforgiving minute with its due sixty seconds of distance run. But I like it.
Okay, maybe once he had got the notion of STEAM, Watt was working furiously around the clock. But just valorising working massive great amounts of time is utterly pointless.
The people who presumably were working long hours in the Darwin household were the servants. Who probably did not have the time or the energy to think about the labour-saving devices that might have spared them some of the effort. This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2877367.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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