When I hear people with anti-science attitudes I think back to things like this where an attempt to get a catchy headline published, misleadingly states something that obviously isn't true. So is it a wonder that people are dismissive of the results of other scientific research like climate change research?
Overwork *CONTRIBUTES* to the death of more than 745k per year. It did not solely and directly cause those deaths. How would you even know if it did? But the claim of the title is that overwork killed them as if overwork popped out behind them with a gun and shot them. It's just obviously a nonsense claim. And once you put it this way, tons of things CONTRIBUTE to excessive deaths. Poor diet, exposure to many everyday chemicals, living in a city(air pollution).
In fact, what are the odds that overwork doesn't correlate with living in a higher air pollution environment? Anyway, the claim in the title is nonsense.
This reminds me of a comment that I read years ago and still think of every now and then:
> A few months ago a person of the ones you mention in your first paragraph posted on FB, as a blow against religion, that religion was so unreasonable that parents had to train their kids since youth in order to believe. And I remember thinking at the time about all the years of training needed to get any non-superficial commanding of science.
Edit: I should add that I believe the title is justified in this case. The study[1] identifies overwork as a cause for developing deadly diseases. Without overwork, the given number of people wouldn't have died of these diseases. Unhealthy diet and other factors are counted as a consequence of overwork. It could be phrased as '3.6% of stroke deaths and y% of ischemic heart disease deaths could have been avoided by working less'.
Funny story about this. When I was a kid we had the whole "design a science experiment" in our science class. My dad was an electrical engineer, so I did an experiment with connecting up a clock through resistors to drain batteries more quickly than normal to test which batteries lasted longest (IIRC, I think the Walgreens brand ended up being best).
When I went to my teacher with the experiment, she laughed at me and told me it was absurd, because batteries wouldn't drain that quickly; she was really quite rude and aggressive about it. I'm still not sure what she was thinking; I had to contradict her multiple times and say that my Dad was an electrical engineer several times; she was still skeptical.
I learned while young that people in positions of authority, even when nominally "credentialed" in science, are often completely incompetent, not curious, not open-minded, and are instead arrogant and patronizing. She thought she knew what the answer was and she hadn't seen it before, so she just ridiculed me. This was in one of the best school systems in the country, in one of the best schools in that district.
> When I went to my teacher with the experiment, she laughed at me and told me it was absurd, because batteries wouldn't drain that quickly; she was really quite rude and aggressive about it. I'm still not sure what she was thinking; I had to contradict her multiple times and say that my Dad was an electrical engineer several times; she was still skeptical.
This would only be surprising if your teacher was a Physics teacher. If you want to be extra charitable a Science teacher. Most people don’t care about it understand the scientific method and it’s a profoundly unnatural way of thinking, much like doing formal logic.
> This would only be surprising if your teacher was a Physics teacher.
I'm not sure. Physics teachers often have to deal with absolute laws of physics, e.g. "you can't make a perpetual motion machine".
You can't ever demonstrate that something doesn't exist (philosophy of the black swan/inviting disproof by counter-example), so it's challenging for teachers to communicate this as a fact to curious students: the result is sometimes teachers appearing scornful.
One slightly-misunderstood law of conservation and you're suddenly a physics teacher who is scorning the truth.
> people in positions of authority, even when nominally "credentialed" in science, are often completely incompetent
That's genuinely a baffling lesson to take from that incident. I mean, your father was the credentialed one, with an engineering degree, and the teacher was the unqualified one who was just a science teacher. Surely the lesson should be the exact opposite?
"Science" gets thrown around a ton to refer to about 5 billion different things. There's the scientific philosophy; the results of an experiment; the consensus of a peergroup; the entirety of all disciplines that require consistently, repeatable evidence before thinking of making a claim; the entirety of all disciplines that think one-off but repeatable in theory evidence is a-ok; baking soda volcanoes...
Some other really weird ones: engineering, design, art, math
And my favorite: programming
I generally find conflating any two of these different things to be problematic enough that "science" is a useless word.
The meaning of the word has changed substantially, a long time ago science was "what is known" or "knowledge acquired by study". [1] There was a shift in the English language in the 19th century, when the Scientific Method was formalized, and science communities grew and became influential. The meaning of science was narrowed down to "these studies that use the scientific method", with philosophy, maths and others being left out more and more. This isn't true in other languages/science traditions though. In German for example, all fields share the word "Wissenschaft", which literally translates to science.
Your statement really resonate with me as a scientist (phd) and a father. I want my kid to learn science at an early age (not baking soda volcano).
But more how would you go about testing an hypothesis (design of experiments) how do you know if the result are statistically significant? if it’s statistically significant is it enough to say it’s true (light can behave like a particule and like a wave so is it both or neither ...)
Don't knock the baking soda volcano. I made one with my son when he was about 7 or 8. There's a little engineering that goes into constructing the paper mache structure. A little art in painting it to look realistic. Some chemistry in understanding the release of carbon dioxide from acid-base reactions. Then there's the filming/presentation of the project, for a little media savvy.
+1 if you can get your hands on some ammonium dichromate for an even more impressive, but more dangerous demonstration.
These types of "experiments" are less about teaching science, and more about impassioning a love and interest for science.
"chemistry in understanding the release of carbon dioxide from acid-base reactions."
This is exactly the part I think is less important.
My goal is not for my kid to learn a subset of chemistry theory from the explanation in a book or some fun experiment.
Instead my goal is for them to understand why the human race now have this knowledge. How did the first chemist came up with the theory, how did they verify the theory was correct ... why do we now believe this is how atoms work.
> Overwork CONTRIBUTES to the death of more than 745k per year.
I understood the headline figure to be suggesting that 750k people per year around the world are dying early, i.e. 10 years earlier than they would otherwise.
(Unlike you, I find it unsurprising and likely true to the point of not being headline-worthy: this is not very many people against the working age population)
The original article doesn't quite refer to that definition, but does say that 23.3 million Disability Adjusted Life-Years are lost per year, so it does seem to be working on an approximately equivalent basis.
Saying that everything around us "contributes" to death is pointless hyper-factualism. It's useful to have a scientific attempt to quantify how much each factor contributes.
At the same time, I don't think anybody would have issues with claims like "smoking kills X people a year", even though it's also a relationship that isn't 100% direct. The two claims do seem qualitatively different to me, but I'm not sure why. What's the concrete difference between "overwork kills X people a year" and "smoking kills X people a year" that makes one a sound claim and the other sound like nonsense?
I think the difference may be because we've been hearing about the harms of smoking for decades now. So when we hear "smoking kills X people" we understand they don't mean that smoking is the cause of death written on the death certificate, we understand that smoking has a demonstrable causal link to a variety of reduced lung health.
While most people understand that stress probably isn't good for you, we haven't had decades of ad campaigns and public health initiatives dedicated towards it. So the general public just needs time to catch up before we put stress in the same bucket as smoking, lead paint, and asbestos.
Actually "smoking kills X people a year" is also wrong. Yes, there is directly link between smoking and physical damage to the body. But two issues involved:
1. people usually do not instantly die after smoking. There is a long process from smoking to death.
2. people who smoke are different from people who do not smoke. There could be other contributing factors associated with people who smokes.
"smoking kills X people a year" was never a scientifically accurate claim. The accurate claim should be smoking increase * chance of ##, or on average people who smoke live ## years shorter.
However, there are cases where you can say smoking kills someone. For example, a woman who frequently smokes during the pregnancy gives birth to a baby born with severe life-threatening defects and the baby dies immediately after birth. In this case it could be OK to say the mother's smoking killed the baby, because:
1. There is a relatively short period of time involved.
2. There may be no other significant contributing factor to the birth defects, if we can rule out genetic factors.
Otherwise, in most cases, it is not scientifically accurate to claim smoking kills X people a year. In some cases, smoking actually could save people, who would otherwise use more detrimental means to release stress or anxiety.
What about "virus killed x amount of people last year", when the vast majority of these deaths were patients older than the median life expectancy with significant existing health problems prior to the infection?
I do agree people need to be more critical of science reporting. And often science needs to do a much better job at both sciencing and explaining the results to people who aren't experienced in interpreting them.
I think my two tests are still valid on the claim:
1. is the length of the period of those people from getting infected to death relatively short?
2. are there any other significant factors contribute to those people's death in that period?
Even if deaths were patients older than the median life expectancy with significant existing health problems prior to the infection, they can still pass those two tests, so most of them were still killed by the virus.
Just to be clear my question was rhetorical. You have to do an autopsy to have a reasonable guess about the cause. A 90 year old has a 13% chance of dying for any reason within a year (in the US, see here: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html). If it's not the virus it may be their liver, or their heart, or, and this is interesting now, chronic respiratory diseases. This has been a leading cause of death for a long time (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm).
>are there any other significant factors contribute to those people's death in that period?
Multiple things can contribute. Our body is an extremely complex organism. Putting a death down to 100% this or that when in reality it's a lot more complicated isn't just imprecise, it's often flat out wrong.
And just because events coincide doesn't mean there's causality. If 1000 people died on a day with severe thunderstorms around the country that doesn't mean the thunderstorms killed them all. When old people with a virus infection die it's reasonable to assume there could be a connection, but you can't just say everyone who tested positive in a given time died of the virus.
I think smoking is a much more concrete relationship though, because you’re inhaling something which directly and physically damages your body. The tie to death is also more obvious because there aren’t other factors which could make a difference. If you smoke a lot, you’ll get lung cancer —- eating a good diet or exercising won’t stop the bad effects. Whereas with overwork, maybe if you have excellent routines like getting good sleep, exercise a lot, meditate, hydrate, etc, you’ll be able to combat the stress level. So you’re probably not quite as doomed as you might be with smoking.
Like, with smoking, it is the actual thing you consume which kills you. But with overwork, it’s not that you’re working $x hours too many, but that you’re super stressed out. (Even achieving low stress levels with normal work hours can be hard!) I think phrasing it as stress makes the tie more obvious to me because high stress levels are more obviously damaging.
I disagree. You can see clear effects from prolonged stress on the body. And in both cases, people still get lung cancer without smoking, and people can still die of heart attacks without being stressed.
Yeah this is the scary part about this. These claims embolden people who don't take the time to read the work or don't understand it to make outrageous unscientific claims like we know for a fact that there would be 745k less dead people if x y or z.
This then further emboldens the misinformed people on the other side of the debate to be categorically anti science because they have easy go to evidence of "scientific claims" that are easily debunkable.
Whereas this absolutely is not even what they are claiming and it would never be in the realm of science under any circumstances to make this claim the way you are stating it.
> Fig. 1. Conceptual model of the possible causal relationship between exposure to long working hours and ischemic heart disease and stroke.
All they are doing is tying a statistical extrapolation of some data regarding the correlation of prevalence of ischemic heart disease and stroke with length of work week and then extrapolating, proposing a POSSIBLE CAUSAL MODEL for this and then tying this first layer of data to
> ESTIMATES of population exposed to long working hours
They absolutely did not systematically prove causality of anything and certainly not by a long shot did they prove the causality of overwork in specific numbers of deaths.
Also check out their own ratings of the confidence in the data they used:
> Ischemic heart disease (Li et al., 2020a) c 41–48 hours/week 20 studies (312,209 participants) 0.99 (0.88–1.12) Low quality Inadequate evidence of harmfulness No
49–54 hours/week 18 studies (308,405 participants) 1.01 (0.82–1.25) Low quality Inadequate evidence of harmfulness No
Most of their data is by their own admission judged to be of low quality for proving this point and in two cases over a high threshhold they established that moderate quality data was sufficient to establish "evidence of harmfulness"
Basically it is difficult to communicate how many different levels you are incorrect on.
You're referring to a headline from an online magazine health section, not "science," nor even the study you are criticizing (which you clearly haven't even glanced at).
> *CONTRIBUTES*
What's the insight here? Do you really think that people can possibly die from "overwork," full stop, or are you being deliberately obtuse for the sake of wedging your politics into the discussion?
> In fact, what are the odds that overwork doesn't correlate with living in a higher air pollution environment?
It comes down to semantics of “kill”. I wonder if there's anyone can believe long work hours are the sole cause of mortality, regardless of whether they read the title.
The usual interpretation, long work hours are the major factor in the mortality of 745k people, is a valid interpretation of the research results.
To say it only contributes to mortality along with many other factors, without pointing out the portion of correlation, is to say nothing at all, which isn't what the report tries to communicate.
Can you find anyone who reads that headline and thinks overwork popped out behind them with a gun and shot them, or anything remotely like it?
> "It's just obviously a nonsense claim"
Yes, obviously, and even more obviously after reading the article and the linked WHO press release which says "The study concludes that working 55 or more hours per week is associated with an estimated 35% higher risk of a stroke".
Attacking straw people based on a title of a newpaper headline isn't pro-science.
I am clearly not proposing that they are claiming an abstract concept held a physical weapon to kill anyone. Actually that's the point though. You would have to believe something nonsensical like this for it to be possible for the headline to be true as it is written.
The headline is "Overwork Killed x" and that implies in no uncertain terms that overwork directly and solely killed people which is again, obviously nonsense.
The attribution effect is implied, is the point the parent was making, and while it's good to be aware of your point, I personally feel like the title is the least important part to critique given the obvious implication. If your point carries into the analysis or synthesis, that is a problem.
> Conclusions — WHO and ILO estimate exposure to long working hours (≥55 hours/week) is common and causes large attributable burdens of ischemic heart disease and stroke.
The study itself uses the word "causes", so I I guess some people misread it to say it causes heart disease and death, rather than contributes to.
Factor analysis is a thing often used in health science and is hardly controversial. Sure, you have to control and be careful with causality - but contribution certainly is possible to establish.
Thank you for pointing that out. It's an easy mistake to make given how very often one can see that terrible disease, "Overworkitis," on death certificates... /s
Not to be too cynical, but I wonder what the result would look like if they were able to do the math all the way. It seems like they can tell us how many people die early from heart disease due in part to overwork, but we don't know how the value provided by their work extended the lives of others. For example, if overwork created a higher GDP, which resulted in better nutrition, medical outcomes, etc. maybe the net effect of overwork is positive. (Now that I think about it, that could get very dark if we embraced the idea, though.)
You'd probably also find some who's early demise would be considered socially beneficial. However, I think it would be hard to know good or bad impacts without extreme and obvious examples. We've also had heroes who looked to be doing a lot of good throughout their life, only to turn out to be monsters behind closed doors.
Also something like GDP is very macro, and not all GDP activity is socially beneficial, so GDP contribution would be a flawed way to make such an assessment. For example, someone scamming seniors out of their retirement money through shady business tactics wouldn't be a net positive to society, but could contribute millions to GDP.
That would be interesting to see. I for one have no real idea what the result would be.
My $0.02 based on nothing more than personal experience is that it seems to be a net negative in practice. I'm sure that some degree of overwork in certain industries has raised GDP, but there are also notorious examples of systemic overwork reducing productivity, like medical providers (mistakes) and Japan (Parkinson's Law), which seem to resonate more with my experience.
Who knows, though? It could easily be the opposite, for all I know. It would be interesting if someone was able to do this analysis.
Anti-science is a meme. Everything 'science' the general public reads is political, and if you disagree with their politics you're anti science. In STEM there's a blind spot where its easy to forget that the general public aren't equipped to think analytically 24-7 and they are preyed on constantly.
How many people didn't get vaccines because they live in a culture that is skeptical of the validity of science. And if this is the science they are getting exposed to, I don't blame them for being skeptical.
Plus in a world population of about 8 billion, the WHO has nothing better to do than worry about factors "contributing to" the deaths of 745k people? That should be considered a embarrassing waste of effort.
> Overwork CONTRIBUTES to the death of more than 745k per year. It did not solely and directly cause those deaths
Slightly off-topic, but the truth is the same can be said of Covid 19. That is, presence of or correlation is not necessarily causation. The best example is, people who were morbidly obese; with high blood pressure, Type 2 Diabetes, other complications, etc. Yet Covid gets sole credit for the deaths?
All that aside, a lack of time (e.g., from working a lot) leads to "compromises." Fast food, not exercise, no mental downtime, etc.
This is an unreasonable standard to apply to any cause of death.
Take cocaine overdose, causing a heart attack. Might have had a heart murmur, asthma, obesity, and it's always possible that without those conditions the patient would have survived. Cause of death was still a cocaine overdose.
There's a separate question, which shouldn't be conflated, whether hospitals were over-reporting COVID deaths because of financial incentives. It's possible there was some of that, but while you can move numbers around a bit, you can't hide death itself, and the US had substantially more deaths last year than would have been expected had the pandemic not come along.
Worth noting that by that standard, overwork doesn't cause death in any case. People die of strokes, heart attack, disease, but they don't die of overwork: or smoking, for that matter.
The study of what contributes to mortality has little to do with the study of what causes it, is what I'm saying. COVID is assuredly a case of the latter.
"Two weeks to flatten the curve" was due to fears that hospitals were going to be swamped with thousands of covid patients. Not only would there be the issue of not enough beds, ventilators, and trained medical personnel, the hospitals would quickly run out of funds to operate. The government wanted to keep this from happening so they created a fund that would pay hospitals money quickly for each covid patient they treated.
This was to avoid the time consuming process of dealing with insurance claims and the uninsured. It unintentionally created a perverse incentive for hospitals to claim as many deaths as possible as covid deaths. That doesn't mean that all or even most hospitals are doing this, at least not intentionally but everyone working in the hospital is aware that it needs financial stability. Even if they're not intentionally sticking their thumbs on the scale to attribute deaths to covid that shouldn't be, there's going to be a bias for it.
As for the amounts, you can probably find those with a web search but be aware that there's lots of bad information out there so be careful about the source you check.
Unreasonable? Why? The Covid hyperbole has beaten up the data (read: facts) beyond recognition. That is far from reasonable.
- Why was the fact that Covid disproportionately affected those 65 & over brushed aside?
"Adults 65 and older account for 16% of the US population but 80% of COVID-19 deaths in the US, somewhat higher than their share of deaths from all causes (75%) over the same period."
Note: Covid rates and deaths are falling off because people 65 & over have gotten the jab. Not necessarily because other less vulnerable groups have; including children.
- Why was the fact that comorbidies - a medical science standard - suddenly abandoned?
Hiding behind aggregation and hyperbol in order to scare Karen is a dangerous tactic; a spin far too many people accepted with out question. The problem with fear is its limits the field of vision - literally, as well as to facts beyond the narrative.
Yes. Covid exists. That said, in terms of the response and data transparency there has been a significant amount of unreasonable manipulation.
Please don't confuse how "popular" a fact is with its legitimacy. Just the same, the popularity of propaganda doesn't increase its legitimacy.
The burden of causally connecting a testable covid case to death in the short term from known symptoms of that viral infection and the burden of causally tying a subjective concept with debatable criteria like "overwork" to specific deaths is night and day different.
In either case, in all cases, correlation is not causation. We can debate the degrees of difference between overwork and Covid but speaking of correlation as if it's causation is unacceptable. Simply because one agrees with the correlation doesn't magically make it causation. Yes, this attitude has been normalized, but that doesn't make it correct.
If anything this number is too conservative, since the study looks at just stroke and heart disease. When you start getting into mental health and other less obvious health conditions resulting from overwork, the results are sure to be devastating.
Men tend to be ok with dying at work. I’m exaggerating a bit but historically, we were doing nothing about safety in 1800s until women started working in factories too.
I’m focussing on men because they die 11-18x more than women in all Western countries, but most of those deaths were in worker jobs, and if we focus on the office workers (and WFH candidates), I’m sure the difference is tighter. But still a multiple. So let’s start somewhere:
We love to overwork ourselves to death, sometimes by sexist prejudice (“men are workers!”), sometime by honour (“He died in a battle”), sometimes by ideals (“This startup is the work of my life”), sometimes for money (“Ok we risk high with this robbery, but we might have money in the end”) and often because we have no friends and no other way to be recognized in society.
It’s not a fatality, but I’m a bit lost at where to start.
Men have "worked" professionally for thousands of years. Women have entered the workforce at the same scale for maybe a few decades now. Give it time and they will be socially expected to kill themselves for the corporate good as well. Equality!
> Give it time and they will be socially expected to kill themselves for the corporate good as well. Equality!
I think this is already true if they want to be recognized as a career woman right? Otherwise they’re working, but basically expected to quit at any time to bear children.
Companies (and therefore politicians) have a huge incentive to push both men and women to work as much as they can, and for smart white men they already spent lots of effort to optimize the hiring pipeline from childhood, so it makes sense to shift the focus on harder to reach demographics.
I'm not sure that's true. It's just the system is often set up with the rule of "overwork or be left behind".
Common work schedule in China these days is "996" or 9am-9pm, six days a week. It's standard across internet companies. ByteDance and Pinduoduo I believe are "11116", i.e. 11am-11pm six days a week.
I don't think anyone actually wants that schedule, honestly.
Yes, it destroys families, it wrecks people's lives, it contributes to screwing up everyone's cardiac and mental health, it drives people to depression and worse. But it's not like you can negotiate with them to work 9am-5pm five days a week for slightly less pay. They don't offer that option.
This isn't really China-specific either. iBankers in NYC do the same or more hours and they also aren't offered a 9-5 option, it's either work all your waking hours or you're fired.
This isn't quite what you are referring to, but, back in the days when I had delusions of becoming a college professor, I had always thought I would die in front of a blackboard, with a piece of chalk in my hand.
> I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.
From Bertrand Russell. The full text is a bit longer, but I really like the sentiment behind these words.
> Men tend to be ok with dying at work. I’m exaggerating a bit but historically, we were doing nothing about safety in 1800s until women started working in factories too.
> I’m focussing on men because they die 11-18x more than women is all Western countries, but most of those deaths were in worker jobs, and if we include service industry, I’m sure the difference is tighter. But still a multiple.
I think you need to qualify those deaths a bit. On a long enough timeline men and women all day at the same rate. If it's while at work that absolutely makes sense given that women didn't "work" like men did until recently.
Your argument is “when the human species dies, half the deaths will be men and half the deaths will be women”. That is a silly statement. Life expectancy among men is lower than women in every country except Afghanistan [1]. The necessary imbalance caused is that women spend more of their lives single. Either later in life or some women the entirety of theirs.
> I’m focussing on men because they die 11-18x more than women in all Western countries, but most of those deaths were in worker jobs, and if we focus on the office workers (and WFH candidates), I’m sure the difference is tighter. But still a multiple.
I asked that they qualify the deaths - men don't die 11-18x more than women - they die the exact same - 100%. Age range it, provide bounds to that statistic. Because even "while working" doesn't make sense if less women work than men.
Example: In France, there are about 500 deaths at work, 40 are women. It’s getting lower in general but actually increasing for women until before the Covid, as equality makes progress in worker positions.
I think it's actually pretty likely that women are just built better than men. I can't even attempt to explain why but it just appears that a lot of ailments that affect men tend to be rather minimized in women after they pass through menopause.
I don't know if it's actually fair to try and ascribe expected lifetimes to lifestyle when there are some pretty clear biological differences - this strikes me as a sort of Occam's Razor situation.
It’s pretty likely we care about women. The modern ad campaign testify a lot of this behavior.
There was a woman who did immense progress for the miners and factory workers, organizing demonstrations and strikes. But she had never had success trying to attract attention of the number of limbs lost or lives lost. No-one cared than men were severing their bodies at work and living disabled. Then she stated wording it this way:
“When a man dies at work, it’s a WIFE and little CHILDREN who can’t eat.”
An employee of mine used to be a paramedic. He said is was very common to for men to die at their computers w/ their pants around their ankles. I guess that counts as dying while working...
Most people only find it brutal because they're not accustomed to it and like to ignore the sad realities, even in their own lives. Most people can get used to it.
By "men", I assume you're switching between "male humans" and "whoever controls society". Yes, society has been happy for male humans to work themselves to death. Maybe it's patriarchy, maybe it's their families who benefit from the resources they bring back.
It's not entirely unheard of for men to do things for their family. It's not uncommon for women to do this either. If stereotypes have any accuracy, men tend to be willing to do an awful lot to impress women (e.g. "happy wife, happy life").
Firstly, testosterone has been implicated as the cause: “A few [institutionalised men] were forcibly castrated as part of their ‘treatment’. Like the Korean eunuchs, they too lived for longer than the average inmate – but only if they had been sterilised before the age of 15.”
Secondly: “female chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons also consistently outlive the males of the group”.
Additionally, I have read that women having XX chromosomes and either one or the other X chromosome is active in each cell (a kind of chimerism) which has been though to provide more resiliency.
Getting into gender biases is a touchy subject to many but I would highlight that (and this is all generalities, please don't assume this applies to everyone who identifies as this gender) men tend to be a lot better at single task focus while women tend to be a lot better at multi-task focusing. I'm in an extreme camp here as I'm a man with ADHD and thus tend to hyperfocus on tasks (or be unable to latch onto them) to the detriment of other tasks.
But I'd actually disagree about gender being the primary drive of this - I'd instead state that the "young" (vaguely defined) tend to be more willing to invest everything singlemindedly compared to the "mature". With an understanding that gender also seems to contribute this but also contributes to maturity with women tending to mature to the idea of having a family at a younger age then men.
Having a family doesn't make men work less. It's more usual for the opposite to happen.
One of my many disagreements with feminism is that it has somehow persuaded itself that this is somehow a privilege for men, and not an intolerable and sometimes literally fatal burden.
> One of my many disagreements with feminism is that it has somehow persuaded itself that this is somehow a privilege for men, and not an intolerable and sometimes literally fatal burden.
It definitely is a privilege, as a whole. People bring up workplace fatalities, and compare the experience of poor or working-class men vs women in general. The experience of a working class woman in this country is absolutely worse than that of a working class man, but both are very bad, because our country is not built for our working class or poor, regardless of gender.
If you compare women vs men in the same class, men undeniable have privilege.
Become a roofer for your entire working life, blow your back and knees out at 45, and tell me that's a privilege. Or maybe tell the overwhelming majority of male homeless they simply squandered it.
I don't know why the possibility of "Yes, men encounter unique problems" is met with derision. I'm not dismissing or trying to minimize problems women encounter, and life at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap sucks in general. But men absolutely don't enjoy some sort of privilege there; it's a grind and it will literally consume you unless you can come up with an out regardless of sex or creed. That suckage is gong to be different depending on circumstances, but I will say nobody really cares, good luck, and can you please keep it to yourself in polite company, because it's gross and makes people uncomfortable.
Seems quite easily deniable to me. Men dominate school dropouts, suicides, prisoners, and the homeless. All of these issues disproportionately affect the working class and other disadvantaged groups, so that strawman can go back in its box for another conversation.
On overwork specifically, fathers are the most likely to work overtime and swap shifts - more so than men without children (and women in general). When it's a choice even other men don't make, it should be obvious even to the most frothy ideologue that there's a unique pressure on fathers in this regard. They're giving something up that literally everyone else finds valuable.
Last I looked into this, the whole single focus vs multitasking gender split was a complete urban myth with no scientific background whatsoever. Do you happen to know of any studies to back this?
I don't understand the lamentation over a culture of overwork. What other method is there to get ahead as an individual other than out-competing your peers? My understanding of life as a young professional in China or Korea is that the competition is almost unbelievable to someone from North America.
> What other method is there to get ahead as an individual other than out-competing your peers?
I think there are a lot of assumptions in that statement that highlight the problem.
What does it mean to "get ahead as an individual"? The phrasing implies that you mean earning as much money as possible, but should that really be our primary goal?
It also implies that for one person to "get ahead", somebody else needs to stay behind, but why should that be? Why should I work 60 hours a week, and another person zero, when we could both work 30?
The problem with making that our culture is that most work is not very enjoyable or fulfilling, and so we're basically peer pressuring people into miserable lives, and that causes other problems like drug addiction and mental health issues.
Indeed. And it's also worth noting that the culture of individualism tends to hold everybody back, even the individuals who get furthest "ahead". In general, individuals benefit more when everybody is collaborating and supporting their peers rather than trying to beat them.
There really is no need to "get ahead". Nothing wrong with taking it easy when there's no life or death situation going on. That's good enough for 80+% of productive work and a decent life.
Sadly companies make it seem like that's the case, like there's a war going on, forcing people to work until they drop or lose their income. That applies to offices and factories alike. Just to squeeze that last 10-20% out of people.
For what? A shitty app, 2 more assembled devices, 3 more ready meals, all of which will be forgotten or in a landfill without even being properly used.
Easy to say in a safety-net society in a comfortable city. But if losing a job can mean an extreme drop in standard of living, then competition will naturally be more fierce.
That's not necessarily rational as an individual. Perhaps finding enough allies is much harder to achieve, or comes with more risk, than playing the competitive game well enough to meet your own needs.
I didn't mean it as a criticism, I just think its amusing that any time in the US if someone talks about unionising or workers rights - chants of "that's communism" begin. The workers have been so programmed to not stand up for themselves it has become a tragedy.
I know what you mean, the red scare is very deep in the US. It’s certainly funny that many seem to think unions are communism without actually knowing what either is or what the actual connection between them is. My tongue was in the vicinity of my cheek when I wrote the above comment.
That's definitely true, but not the only important thing in such a comparison. Germans work only 75% of the hours Americans do per year, and a lot of that is cultural.
> What other method is there to get ahead as an individual other than out-competing your peers?
Some of us have started to have issues with the "get ahead" mentality. Otherwise you are totally correct, wanting to get ahead implicitly means getting ahead of others i.e. out-competing them, but, like I said, some of us have started to see/understand that this battle is mostly futile.
It’s unclear the extent to which it’s futile. Does getting educated, working hard, doing side work, DIY work to save money, spending money wisely, saving and investing for retirement, buying one house, marrying one spouse, help your family “get ahead”? Pretty reliably. Nothing’s guaranteed in life, but doing that list gives you pretty good odds to enjoy life and get your kids started on their own enjoyable lives.
This is true, but when so much of our culture and the starting conditions many people find themselves in are decided before our birth, often as a matter of public policy, the whole exercise starts to feel a bit, contrived? The rules of the game are really up to us, we're not talking about axioms of the universe here and yet, we're so often expected not to question anything, and simply focus on our personal success while ignoring externalities and plights of others.
What if succeeding personally while watching many others suffer unfairly, in a rich country where it needn't be that way, isn't enough to enjoy life? Do we have a duty to expand our sympathies beyond the self and the family? Most ancient wisdom says yes, and yet the modern status quo has failed to conserve this crucial pillar of humanity. Instead we have prosperity gospel, and its more secular version, the mythical meritocracy. Failed ideas that the human race has fought off more than once, only to find itself in the same boat again.
People generally overestimate the benefit of working long hours and underestimate the value of working hard during those hours. If working 55 hours a week is enough to cause serious bodily harm, then it seems likely that the optimal number of working hours from a productivity perspective is far less than that.
I sometimes think it’s useful to think of myself as a mental athlete. My job is to perform intellectual feats of strength in controlled efforts. The rest of my time I spend preparing for those efforts by relaxing.
Why do we feel the need to get ahead of others? Because we see how the lower classes are treated and would rather live a better life. Our justified fears of falling behind the curve are manipulated by our circumstances, that we have no control over, but others do. We are driven in the direction of escape from these circumstances. It's just more fight or flight, and we mostly choose flight. Our fears are a yolk, our labors are harnessed and converted to profit. We may get ahead of our peers, but we do not get very far.
Because health is a limited resource. It might not be apparent to you now, because you are still able to put in the long hours "as a young professional", but at some point things inside you will break and if you don't give them time to heal, they will never go back to their original quality.
If overwork is mandated by your culture, you will not find the time to heal, thereby starting a downward spiral. And with so much competition, there will be only few winners and lots of losers. If you lose, the sacrifice of your health will have no benefits and there is no way to get it back.
Life is not about work. Life is about living. And health is essential for living.
> My understanding of life as a young professional in China or Korea is that the competition is almost unbelievable to someone from North America.
South Korea and China competition is "working harder". In the US it's all about "working smarter"
Also with all due respect for South Korea and China...very risk averse.
The big jumps happen when you take a risk and beat the odds, not the endless grinding which goes on in Asian societies.
Asian societies lack the arrogance of the creator/founder, which abounds in the West, especially American Jews.
Imagining something new and having the arrogance to think that it will be a great success and you'll be the one bringing it into the world. This is the trademark American Jew mindset.
Zuck turned down 1 Billion for Facebook...Larry and Sergey 1 million for Google. It takes guts and arrogance to think you'll beat the odds and say "no thanks" to 1 billion (and to 1 million too! considering it was back in the 90s and it was a very good deal for the effort they put into it)
Interpersonal violence and confidence in yourself go hand in hand at the societal level.
Places where interpersonal violence abounds has people being so arrogant and believing in themselves that they have no qualms attacking others, because they KNOW that they can't possibly lose. This is Africa
Places where interpersonal violence is low has people being very conservative and avoiding confrontations because they are scared of losing or succumbing to them: this is clearly Asia and Europe to a certain degree
The US is in a sweet spot, actually it was in a sweet spot in the 80s, now it has abandoned it and moving towards European type society. Still it's the closest place to a sweet spot it once occupied and still benefiting from the time it spent in that sweet spot
Interesting that this outrage has only started appearing now when there are moves to electrify transport, and was somehow never a problem for all previous generations of electronic processes - which have relied at least as heavily on cobalt.
The overlap between environmentally concerned and electric car users is lot more than electronics users. It is serious conflict with their story of why they and you should switch to electric.
What irks me about outrage culture is many of these pro workers types of people think that we can somehow have an ethical society but still maintain. So the push for anything moral and affordable means someone is gonna get exploited. If those people can't be exploited costs will go up. If costs go up the product can only be bought by rich people. Then the cycle begins again. I wish people would just get a reality check that life is filled with people who are exploited. That's been our history for millennium. Some new idea is not going to change it. The faster people accept this the quicker they can work to get to a point where they can try to end the cycle...until they realize they're themselves are just another cog in the impossible to control machine.
[1] doesn't directly answer your question, but there are some interesting stats there -- over 300k children, 5 and up, work in Bolivian mines. Bolivian Miners die on average 25 years earlier than the average Bolivian. Overall, that appears to point to a significant amount of premature death caused by mining.
On the other hand, the answer to GP's question is that this study isn't predominantly about officework. It's a global study[2], and miners are likely accounted for. Americans account for less than 5% of the statistic.
"Paid less than $1 a day children are primarily coerced into cobalt mining work due to injury or death suffered by parents in cobalt mining, the inability to pay school fees, ..."
Did you mean to enclose an actual source with that comment? Without that, it's difficult to verify the scale and validity of the issue you're raising (not that I necessarily doubt it; I just like to have more coherent sources than a pull quote from an anonymous commenter on an internet forum).
It’s only work if you don’t like it. I worked far less last year on my military deployment but it was really stressful work that raised my blood pressure 40 points and resulted in serious weight gain.
Now that I am currently working from home where I can pet my cat, tend my garden, watch Netflix, and still work as much as I want I am happy as a clam.
Could that be confusing cause and effect? Maybe some workers choose to retire when they're diagnosed with a serious medical condition and know they don't have long to live. If my doctor told me I had an incurable disease with only months to live then the first thing I would do is quit my job.
I bounce back and forth between if I would quit or if I would keep working. If I keep working, then I can save a few thousand for the family and have health insurance to protect against some bills. What's a few months of happiness worth? It's not like I'll be creating memories that I can look back on.
That might well be another symptom of overwork. If we worked less through our productive years and invested more time in hobbies and friendships, we would be less likely to feel like we had no purpose after retiring.
Some physical jobs have a point at which you're no longer able to work them and I'm not sure if reducing the hours and adding years will help that. Knowledge workers have much less of a concern in that regard.
Not sure how to interpret this. In the 1800's, a 12-hour shift 6 days a week was normal. Life expectancy wasn't much different (except child mortality of course).
Have to think its our attitude toward work that is part of the problem? Now, I don't endorse 12-hour days. But it seems that 60-hour weeks aren't the whole story, if 72-hour weeks used to be the norm.
> Not sure how to interpret this. In the 1800's, a 12-hour shift 6 days a week was normal. Life expectancy wasn't much different (except child mortality of course).
Not in an industrial job? Here in my town there was a paper plant. 12 hour shifts alternated six days a week. Off Saturday midnight until Sunday midnight, giving both shifts 12 hours off.
I’d suspect not very many. Filing the TPS report by some made up arbitrary deadline, forcing the victims to work overtime so that a middle manager somewhere can feel important is very unlikely to save a life.
When you think about it, most of the work most people do is utterly inconsequential and doesn’t matter much if at all. And even when it does, it’s really not so critical that the world will end if it’s a week or two late, making most overwork useless.
That makes no sense. If most work was truly inconsequential then a smart CEO would fire all the inconsequential workers to improve profit margins. Companies lay off redundant workers all the time.
Are you never grateful to your coworkers for all the things they do that make your life easier? And you aren't even there to see the things you do for your customer that make their life easier. If you got hired and it wasn't because someone made a law you had to be hired, you're probably doing something pretty consequential.
I should have qualified that I meant it in the context of overwork. Almost nothing we do is so crucial that sacrificing people’s lives to overwork so the deadline can be met is morally justifiable.
There are very few mission critical, literally life saving exceptions. 99% of it all is not: if the TPS reports are done a week or two late, no one dies and nothing explodes.
My sibling comments are a bit cynical. Considering the widely reported stress on health care workers during the pandemic I'd suspect that number may be higher than one would think despite the millions working on throwaway products.
Obviously, society should incentivise that those professions that are overworked and useful to society hire/train more, so they are not that overworked.
Well, so many life-saving physicians and other health care workers undergo periods of extreme work hours.
If they wouldn't have been capable of accomplishing so much over as short a calendar period, I would estimate higher fatalities, especially during the pandemic but also over all the other decades.
I expect there is an equation for this tragic number.
It doesn't matter how many more life-savers you deploy, simply because there will never be enough of them, things will always be better if one or more of them put in a little extra time.
Should also be equations for the positive-outcome/number-of-hours.
Not everyone works in software or builds apps, even if you don't find meaning in someone's work( or yours) it doesn't mean they don't find meaning in that themselves however trivial or useless it may seem to you.
A job overworked or not gives a purpose, a lot of people get depressed if they loose a job because they lack the purpose. Also overwork makes sure there is not much time to think about anything else.
I don't encourage overwork, however it can have both positive and negative impact on lives.
Smartphones are life changing! They freed me to travel anywhere (GPS), to take my pills on schedule, to Google what to do in emergencies. I bet each smartphone adds more quality to people's lives than the one who dies loses.
I'm 100% with you there, but the current ~6 month cycle is ridiculous. And people actually buy a new phone every year, there's no practical reason for that. My 2018 phone is perfect, even my 2014 older phone still keeps up.
I used to work at a startup, but I left 3 months ago. I just heard that yesterday my old boss had to be taken away in an ambulance, collapsing from complications caused by stress.
I have noticed this too during crunchtime projects. At some point you lose your ability to do other things besides working. For me this is a clear signal to take a vacation or work less. I don't really want to sacrifice my life to my corporate overlords.
This is what killed my dad though it was not the sole cause: divorce (his fault, but still) which led to depression which caused him to devote all free time into his work. Being a QA manager all the stress of timelines fell on him and it worked him to death.
How do they determine this number, or that someone died of overwork? Can someone summarize the methodology in layman's terms? I tried reading the paper but it is (understandably) technical.
This study is very flawed. They claim there is a direct link, but they didn't control for alcohol and tobacco consumption. If you look at a map of tobacco consumption vs. their map of deaths by overwork, they're very similar.
Lower income folks work more hours and are more likely to self-medicate. It isn't the additional hours that kill them, necessarily.
Overwork only directly kills you if there is workplace accident because you worked long hours and your attention slipped and you drove off the road/ machinery fell on you etc.
Almost always overwork does not kill "directly", if your premise is alcohol and tobacco is not controlled, my question is then how much of alcohol or tobacco consumption is driven by overwork.
So it is possible there's an indirect link instead of a direct link. Still for practical purposes it might be that the intermediate step (e.g. self-destructive behavior) is extremely hard to get rid of.
Arguably true, but given that people consume cigarettes as a mild(ish) fast-acting stimulant, it's certainly reasonable to treat overwork as a proximate cause.
I wonder how many were overworked doctors treating overworked patients. I could imagine a chain reaction occurring where you could wipe out several thousand doctors and nurses merely by showing up at the ER. (Not to mention all the overworked health insurance adjusters who’d necessarily be involved.)
It's sad, but while this is far from the first article on the damage that comes from overwork, the people who have the power to stop it don't seem to care enough to do so.
I've always been heavy but while working in the gaming industry I put on enough extra pounds to develop full blown OSA (obstructive sleep apnea) from pounding down sugary coffees in the mornings I felt exhausted (eventually every morning, because OSA).
Working 9AM-8PM regularly has real health side effects and, honestly, it can get a lot worse than 11 hour days in the gaming industry.
In addition, there is cultural conditioning towards overworking. The problem will likely continue until this changes. There are progressive movements like UBI and 4-days work week but the inertia will take its toll for some time to come I reckon.
I don't think an ambitious all-or-nothing approach will pass in the voting chambers. It needs to start with moving to 4 days. In fact in some places 6 days is the normal work week so for them a change to a legal and cultural expectation of 5 work days would be a big step.
I've seen this funny effect too. I can deal with enormous projects and complexity at work, but sometimes my personal life feels like it's in shambles and nothing on my to-do list is getting done. The reality is that work has taken up everything I have and there's nothing left over at the end of the day.
I work with pricing life insurance in a european country. This study of course piqued interest, because I also see a negative correlation between socio-economic class (e.g. wage) and death probability. I don’t think working a lot is enough for a higher probability of death, you somehow might need to be a lower socio-economic class, as well. I’m not sure if the study controls for this.
> Conclusions — WHO and ILO estimate exposure to long working hours (≥55 hours/week) is common and causes large attributable burdens of ischemic heart disease and stroke.
Surely this is the stress these people feel rather than the number of hours? If you work 80 hours per week with 0 stress or pressure, does it still apply? If so, what mechanism causes it?
Can someone explain why overwork kills people? I'm curious, maybe there's a way to work 70 hour weeks without harming your health? (I.e possibly overwork is correlated with lack of sleep / exercise, which are the real dangers, not the work itself).
I love my job and it's not really stressful. I just have goals and am ambitious. Is working this much bad for me? I go to the gym three times weekly and still manage to socialize quite enough for me.
Overwork *CONTRIBUTES* to the death of more than 745k per year. It did not solely and directly cause those deaths. How would you even know if it did? But the claim of the title is that overwork killed them as if overwork popped out behind them with a gun and shot them. It's just obviously a nonsense claim. And once you put it this way, tons of things CONTRIBUTE to excessive deaths. Poor diet, exposure to many everyday chemicals, living in a city(air pollution).
In fact, what are the odds that overwork doesn't correlate with living in a higher air pollution environment? Anyway, the claim in the title is nonsense.