Extreme workaholic mindsets

Bro, what problems and traumas are you using work to avoid dealing with? When you go beyond being a workaholic this hard, it is impossible to develop as a person because you are avoiding both being alone in your thoughts AND engaging in genuinely intimate personal relationships. You are deliberately stagnating as a human being when you’re like this, and all your interpersonal interactions become transactions solely for your benefit.

I once had a friend who was this kind of extreme workaholic. Since college, it was like he’d completely lost the capacity to have fun and had gaslit himself into thinking that is a necessary feature of living his best life. I have come to accept that for all his talk in college about the importance of self-reflection, during the eight years we were “friends,” he was never reflective or vulnerable with me in a way that mattered.

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying your job or enjoying doing difficult academic work. Believing, however, that needing occasional breaks (from sustained mental effort) is evidence that you have made a Wrong Life Choice… is a kind of perfectionism that is incompatible with the capacity for genuine human intimacy.

I need a break from the sustained mental effort of doing things with my kids sometimes—it doesn’t mean that parenting was the wrong life choice for me. I don’t think any parent would ever argue that needing breaks means you’re not suited to parenting. (There’s an insidious kind of ableism underlying the idea that needing a break from an activity means you shouldn’t be doing that activity at all, but that’s a topic for another time.)

Genuine human connection requires sustained effort and is something absolutely everyone has to work at. No one is immediately good at being genuinely vulnerable. Making every relationship transactional (as an extreme workaholic inevitably does) is easy; genuine human connection is hard. Genuine connections are challenging by necessity—challenging yourself is the only way to grow as a person.

Tomato plants only produced their best fruit where I grew up when watered every other day and when their flexible shoots experienced wind. In order to grow woody vines that can support their fruits without bending or collapsing, tomato plants must struggle. In order to grow or develop at all, we, like tomatoes, must also struggle, or we will never savor the fruit of genuine connection with others—if a tomato plant’s vines are not made strong enough by struggle, any nascent fruits will droop to the ground and be lost before they ever had a chance.