America is facing a war on whimsy, and we are losing ground daily. A monster pervades this nation, stealing sleep from schoolkids, tearing down national treasures and locking us in our homes to toil behind computer screens: efficiency. We have marched to the anthem of productivity since the Industrial Revolution; we think of children working away with coal-slathered faces in factories and believe we have evolved as a society. But I posit that as soon as we pilfered the chisel from the craftsman, we lost what it truly meant to be human.
As a society, we have settled for adequacy and abandoned our passions. American workers reported 49% are satisfied by their job, whereas only 20% are passionate about what they do. For an activity that takes up about a third of one’s lifetime, we should be striving to live this time as more than satisfactory. Additionally, studies show work-life balance is more blurred than ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, meaning people are spending more time thinking about work, work that they do not even enjoy.
As much as capitalism would love for us to believe, we do not live solely to work. It is just as valid to want to work just to work as it is to want to work for one’s passions; our problem arises when we smudge the lines between work and life, measure success solely in deliverables and define self-worth by your value to a company rather than to yourself.
A phenomenon that is readily apparent at Tech is one’s evaluation of themselves according to the numbers on their resumes; constantly, we are thinking ahead to the next internship, crunching the numbers for a better GPA or scouring for our next bullet point on the resume, oftentime forgoing our passions that brought us to this school in the first place. It is unjust by principle that society has morphed these formative years into a capitalistic ritual: those who sacrifice the most and work the hardest may not even be rewarded with the stable job they labored so hard to attain, and those who were still “figuring things out” or, heaven forbid, enjoying themselves are left in the dust.
However, my argument is not that work is not the scourge of our existence; as French philosopher Albert Camus put it “without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.” There is a place for work in every American’s life, but with it there is a balance we must strike between work and leisure, one that is egregiously out of line.
In this battle between whimsy and professionalism, I maintain that we fight on a tipped scale: capitalism in America has skewed our perceptions of what success is, but this is not the way it has to be. Other nations have learned to reap the economic benefits of capitalism without pushing the line between corporate value and work-life balance. Compared to America, capitalist nations like Switzerland, Denmark or Norway consistently rank higher in quality of life without having their GDPs suffer or scaring off businesses with their policies.
What these nations do differently is the way they shift value from the corporation to the individual and the environment. Policies in these nations reinvest wealth in their healthcare, environmental policies and education to create a more liveable environment, all while emphasizing the importance of work-life balance such as a minimum of four weeks of vacation.
It is clear — the American way does not have to be the only way. Measurements of happiness, depression rates and quality of life in different nations all reveal the same truth: members of other nations are happier. A piece of the puzzle must be the emphasis on work-life balance — citizens have a little more room for whimsy.
Overall, philosophers and statistics alike agree: we were born with a purpose far greater than the work we do — it’s the life we lead that defines us. Life experiences are not a forbidden temptation: you should not feel guilty putting off homework to go play frisbee, or feel unproductive for writing a poem instead of applying for internships. While I’m not saying drop everything and rot in bed all the time, I call for us to return to our roots, reconnect with nature, foster our passions and most of all let whimsy overtake our lives with a fervor — you might just find life is the best reward you get along the way.