Why America’s Hustle Culture Might Kill Us Before Anything Else Does

Just like every year, I took much of August off. In many — if not most – European countries, this is still a pretty normal and common thing to do. Actually, it existed for long enough for some historians to <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/why-europeans-have-such-long-summer-vacations/#:~:text=Every%20August%2C%20Americans%20watch%20with,scarce%20for%20Europe%27s%20working%20classes." rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">start calling it a ‘tradition.’</a> When I used to work for an Italian-owned company in London, it wasn’t even a question of whether I would take time off during that month, but how many weeks this time. (I still burnt out, but that’s another story.) However, our fondness for enjoying the brief existence on this giant piece of rock floating through space while we can doesn’t always seem to go down well with our neighbours across the pond. Over the years, I’ve gotten several mostly passive-aggressive, but sometimes even downright aggresive, emails from Americans I worked with precisely because of it. It’s ‘slowing them down’ and ‘makes things less efficient,’ they claimed. This year, my ‘sorry, I’m out of the office this month’ email was met with the following response: ‘that’s a shame, but let’s try to schedule a call anyway.’ I’ve also seen some refer to this phenomenon as ‘Euro Laziness.’ Is it really ‘laziness’, though? And why are so many people adamant about driving themselves to an early grave? Because, yes, American hustle culture’s ‘grind never stops’ ethos is a slow but steady killer. And we don’t talk about it nearly as much as we should. <a href="https://medium.com/the-no%C3%B6sphere/why-americas-hustle-culture-might-kill-us-before-anything-else-does-c0a0710deb48">Website</a>