Why You Never Get Caught Up

Why You Never Get Caught Up

A Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

September 3, 2023, Labor Day Sunday

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

The World Is Too Much With Us

Work never seems to end does it? As the poet Wordsworth put it, “The world is too much with us; late and soon. Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers…”

He wrote that sonnet back in 1802 and what he was protesting was the First Industrial Revolution as society moved from being based on agriculture to being based on industry. He believed that the uptick in technology and the focus on structured labor had destroyed something important in the human spirit.

And I think he was correct. There is a huge dark side to technology and what our culture of work is doing to us all. The cause is straightforward and simple. Your task list can be infinite, but your calendar is not. All of us have more that we think we should do, then in fact, we will never have time to do.

Smart people figure that out.

Perhaps you have heard of a medical condition called Karoshi? It is a Japanese term for a condition officially recognized in Asia and it translates as “death by overwork.” Typically, it manifests among people who work an insane amount. Sometimes the deaths are due to heart attacks or strokes, there have been a few cases caused by malnourishment in victims who worked so much all they ate was junk food.

In a lot of cases no cause can be found. On autopsy the body is found to be normal. Apparently the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems got out of sync due to psychological stress and the heart just stopped. According to the World Health Organization there were 745,194 deaths due to Karoshi in 2016 alone.

First described in Asia in 1969 after the stroke-related death of a 29 year old man who worked from Japan’s largest newspaper, we started seeing Karoshi world-wide in 2013, after worker stress hit all-time highs due to forced resignation, layoffs, bullying and increased workloads due to recession. And it’s here too. According to authorities, workplace stress now ranks as the fifth leading cause of death in America, Think about that this Labor Day.

In the entire history of our species human beings have never worked as much as we do now. As far as can be determined our bodies stopped evolving in the Late Stone Age when we harnessed fire and developed clothing. So our bodies are evolved to cope with the stress of a Neolithic campsite, where the biggest worry was the availability of game, roots and berries. But our social systems have continued to evolve and become ever more complex, so that we expose our bodies to stressors they were never evolved to handle.

There is a reality that if your boss ever tells you to “have a good day,” the best way to do that may be to immediately go home.

Works Righteousness

Yet somehow we feel we should be able to keep up with all the tasks and responsibilities we are expected to do. I’ve noticed that when a client begins to tell me about limits and boundaries they are setting in their lives to keep themselves healthy they are always apologetic. They never proudly say that it’s a sign of good character and personal strength that they limit the amount of work they do. It’s always the other way around. They feel sheepish and seem to expect me to object.

But I don’t object. I understand the thought expressed by Robert Frost in his poem, “Provide, Provide.” Everyone knows they need to look out for themselves and working hard is the way we’ve been encouraged to do that. The problem is that we seem to be required to do too much of it these days.

I think I know where this inner drive to over-function comes from. You might think it comes from corporations and employers, and they do benefit and encourage it. But actually, the inner drive to over-function to the point of self-destruction comes from the church. That’s right. The church. Us. Or, at least our spiritual ancestors.

In Protestant Christianity, which has formed the philosophy for a lot of American Culture, there is a theme that comes out of the theology of John Calvin.

Calvin was a French theologian who died in 1564. He developed most of what has come to be called Puritanism, and the people who came to American in 1620 and settled at Plymouth were his followers. Therefore, his thinking was infused into American culture very early and regretfully, hangs on.

An important part of Calvinist thought was something called the “Puritan Work Ethic.” That is, the belief that diligence, self-reliance, self-discipline and frugality were the signs of a good person.

Not surprisingly, the clergy preached that these qualities of being a good person, resulted from the religious practice of Protestantism. Every job was to be treated as a divine calling, and the path to a good life was discernible through study of scripture and other important things - such as the preaching of Calvinist clergy who urged everyone to work harder.

There was a famous American writer named Horatio Alger who wrote more than 100 books that were serialized in the popular press all over America in the years around 1870.

I’m sorry to say the Alger was in fact a failed Unitarian minster. As an alternative he set himself up to write motivational books. Abandoning Unitarian theology he embraced the popular Calvinism, and his books all center on a young boy from poverty who was able to elevate himself to a respectable lifestyle through - you guess it - hard work, diligence, self-reliance and frugality.

Inspired by Alger people of means began to claim that the reason other people were poor is they lacked character and discipline, and the solution to poverty wasn’t economic, educational, class or political reform, but the values of Calvinism.

If you were poor you were lazy. If you were a person of substance it was because of your good character. These ideas still inform politics today and if you listen for them you will hear them in political speeches.

This view has been enormously influential in the development of American Culture, for both good and ill. As a recent example. give a listen to the song “Rich Men North of Richmond,” by songwriter and performer Oliver Anthony. It has recently gone viral and become almost an anthem for people who feel betrayed by the way of thinking promoted by the good Reverend Calvin. I’ve heard it called “Everyman’s Anthem.”

If you have not heard the song, check it out. You will find it on YouTube and lots of other places.

Here are some of the lyrics:

“I've been sellin' my soul, workin' all day

Overtime hours for bullshit pay…

It's a damn shame what the world's gotten to

For people like me and people like you…

Lord, we got folks in the street, ain't got nothin' to eat…

Wish I could just wake up and it not be true

But it is, oh, it is.”

The songwriter believes that people have bought into a con job. And that con job is that if you just work harder, just apply yourself more, there will be a payoff. The song and it’s viral popularity tells us that a lot people think that payoff has been too long delayed.

More enlightened theologians than John Calvin (and let me drop a foot note here to say the Unitarian Universalism developed, in part, as a reaction to, and rejection of, Calvin’s theology), have taken a different line. In fact, they have given a name to Calvin’s way of thinking, calling it “works righteousness.” That is the mistaken belief that simply doing a lot of work will somehow make you better in a spiritual sense.

It won’t. That’s a myth. And hard work will not necessarily bring you material success either.

To be fair, Calvin himself didn’t believe that good works alone were sufficient for a person to be pleasing to God, but that is how his ideas were absorbed into popular culture. Want to get ahead? Work hard. Not able to get ahead? You need to work harder. The songwriter says that’s nonsense, and regretfully, I think he is right.

The Body Sets A Limit

I don’t know about you, but the idea that I can solve many of my problems by just working more has staying power. I grew up in the Protestant Work Ethic, and in fact I do work hard. And it has mostly paid off for me. But I also own my own business and therefore can set limits to keep things humane for myself that others can’t, because they are working for someone else.

All to many employers have ceased to care about the welfare of the people they employ. I originally came out of the culinary industry, and that’s a workforce plagued by demands for uncompensated overtime and wage theft by employers. It’s an industry where Minimum Wage is often regarded as an aspirational goal, not as something the restaurant owners intend to pay.

I’m no fan of the politics of Henry Ford, the guy who first developed the assembly line, but he paid his people well. When asked why he was paying so much above market rates he said “I have to pay my employees that much. Otherwise they can’t afford to buy my cars!” The Ford Company was, in Henry Ford’s day, a good place to work. But too many employers and corporations try to take advantage instead.

A recent study from Deloitte found that three fourths of all companies report they are dealing with errors and efficiency issues from overwhelmed employees. Workers in those companies are realizing they could work 24/7/365 and still not be caught up.

In healthcare, an industry I know well, I’ve seen this dramatically. It used to be people went into healthcare because they wanted to be healers. Most physicians owned their own practices and most hospitals were run by physicians.

Not any more. Everything is owned by medical corporations or private equity firms and they care only about profit. Medical professionals are leaving the field in droves because they are not allowed to do the work love to do. Instead, they find they are more like salespeople, pressured to upsell by ordering unnecessary tests and making referrals.

The reason physicians are leaving medicine is because they are required to spend most of their time doing something other than medicine - paperwork, pre-approval claims and looking at a computer screen instead of at a patient.

Oh…and congregation…note to self. This is the same reason why parish ministers are everywhere leaving parish ministry. Because instead of doing ministry they are required to spend most of their time on administration and marketing. If you want to know what happens when they get fed up with that; look at me. Because that’s why I left parish ministry.

So what do we see? A massive increase in every disease category that has a behavioral component. The abuse of food, alcohol and drugs are sky-rocketing as overworked people try to numb themselves to the pain they are in. Stress related diseases - of which Karoshi is only one example - are also increasing. Our bodies cannot handle the stress of our culture, and it shows.

Now, as someone who is in a stress management profession I know that all this is really good for my business; but it’s not good for people.

Somehow, somewhere I believe we need to stop working ourselves to death, and to put John Calvin’s notion that hard work makes you a good person in the grave - right along with John Calvin.

Our culture of trying to catch up with an ever escalating set of tasks and responsibilities isn’t just unwise. It’s a spiritual corruption, because self-destruction is never spiritual.

The Myth of Someday

This gets me to the Myth of Someday. You know that myth. It’s that belief that there will come a time - someday - when you are all caught up. When your bills are all paid off. Then, you’ll have time to take care of yourself. That’s when you will have “me” time and when you can focus on your family, Significant Others and friends. There will come a “tomorrow” when things will get better.

The hallmark of this is when you hear a person start to play the game of “if only.”

If only I had an extra hour in the day. If only I had an extra day in the week. If only I had an extra week in the month - then! I would be caught up.

And that is all B.S.

Because that’s not how things are structured for most of us. For most, the people in charge will keep the workflow pipeline full. And as fast as you complete one thing and it moves out of the pipeline, they’re loading something else in.

The rub is the workflow pipeline will never be empty for most of us. There will never come a “someday” when everything is caught up and you can take care of yourself then. We need to stop buying the Calvinist con.

The workflow pipeline will never be empty until you retire, if you retire, and even then, a lot of people find that it has a way of staying full.

Therefore, the wise give up on the Myth of Someday. Instead, they realize that trying to work your way out of overwork makes as much sense as trying to borrow your way out of debt. It can’t be done. Instead, you have to find a way to be happy, healthy and functional in the midst of our responsibilities.

In my life I have a To Do list. I also have a Do Not Do list. That’s where I put all the things people ask me to do that I really don’t think are relevant to my happiness. Every month, on the last day of the month, I go through that list and cross off most of those things. Because mostly, they never were really worth my time, and at least once a month I remember that.

I believe some of the younger generations have an idea that may work. They are using the Power of Choice and starting to say “no.”

Many years ago a writer in the positive thinking movement wrote a book that quickly became a classic. The writer was J. Martin Kohl and the book is titled Your Greatest Power. In that book the writer pointed out that the greatest power a human being has is the ability to make choices. I am not determined by things that have happened to me in the past or what I’ve been taught or told. I have the ability to choose how I will be in the world. We all have what counselors today call “agency” or the ability to take control over our lives.

Now, this control is not absolute. I can’t choose to have intelligence, sensitivity or athletic ability I do not have. I can’t choose not to have a disability. I can’t demand my employer do things my way, nor that other circumstances of my life change if they are not under my control.

But that said, there are often things I can do to insure than I make time to be happy and have a life, despite ever-increasing demands to work more.

Young People May Be On To Something

There is a phenomena going on right now in the workplace called Quiet Quitting, mostly championed by the younger generations. I think that is an bad term, because it is not about quitting. What is meant is simply doing the job you agreed to do and are being paid to do. And that’s all. Recognizing that if the person doing the work doesn’t call a halt when the job description has been fulfilled, the employer never will.

It’s popular with people of my generation to poke fun at younger people who are setting better limits with work than our generation did. I think we are unwise to do that.

This approach is becoming popular with the younger workforce because, quite frankly, they’ve looked at their older colleagues (like many of us here today), and realized that working above and beyond the call often isn’t rewarded at all. Or, that the reward is a deteriorated family and ill health.

Instead, they want to stop the Puritan-inspired practice of always trying to do more and work harder. The claim used to be that doing that really made you shine, except today the reward for great performance and hard work is, typically, more hard work.

And the body keeps score. Oh yes it does. And the body is not going to let us keep doing what we are doing.

In order to be spiritually as well as physically healthy, most of us need to try something else. We ned to say “no” to the spiral of escalating demands.

There is a lot of power in saying “no.” It’s not an easy power to use, but there is nothing aggressive in saying “no” to a demand to over-function.

There have been times when I was an employee and I got fired for saying “no,” but there were more times when the boss backed down - because good people are hard to find. And the jobs I lost because I wasn’t willing to work at a self-destructive pace - everyone one of those jobs was replaced by a better job. If you demand good treatment you will often get it.

A Way Forward

In my personal life I follow an ancient philosophy called Stocism. Basically, the core idea is to take responsibility for life events by making a sharp distinction between when I can control and what I cannot.

There is a principle among Stoics called Momento Mori - or to remember that life is fleeting and all must die. Therefore, the counsel is to try to live each day knowing that it could be the last. In the case of someone like myself with a heart problem, that’s especially literally true, for I know my life could end suddenly with no warning. But all of us are mortal. As I’ve often said, being alive is a sexually transmitted terminal disease.

As a solution to the realization that we all must die, I advocate for thinking through and making decisions about how you want to be in the world; Proactive rather than reactive about how you want your life to go.

Decide if you want to be partnered or not. How much time are you prepared to devote to your occupation or other responsibilities. When do you give yourself permission to let that go so you can have other things in your life? Don’t let your life disappear into the black hole of someone else’s plans.

As I have been with people at the end of life, no one ever says they wish they worked more or longer. They say the opposite. Use your power of choice. You will never be caught up. Learn to be happy regardless by not trying to do the impossible and finding ways to say “no” instead.

And that’s my sermon.