Nanakorobi yaoki.
That's an old Japanese adage. It means: "Fall down seven times, get up eight."
That's what most of us do, most of the time. We can't go on. We go on.
Maybe if you run the numbers, you can see a way clear to quitting. Maybe you can imagine yourself selling off everything, taking your equity to a beach in Costa Rica. You probably won't do it. You'll probably persist. You'll probably keep grinding. I know I will.
Why do you think we're like this? Why do Americans work so hard?
OK, not all Americans. All of us know a Darrell in accounting who gets by doing the bare minimum, but most of us work really hard.
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, an intergovernmental organization which The Economist habitually refers to as "a club of rich countries," workers in the U.S. spend an average of 34.44 hours per week, which sounds pretty cushy until you think about how most people take at least two or three weeks of vacation per year.
On average, Americans work 184 more hours per year than famously hardworking typical Japanese employees. (For the calculator-challenged, that works out to more than a month--4.6 weeks, given a 40-hour work week.) And the Japanese are notoriously overworked; in the 1990s, Junko Kitanaka, a medical anthropologist at Keio University, identified a phenomenon she called "karoshi culture" where young and middle-aged office workers were literally working themselves to death.
"Karoshi," which translates as "overwork death," was recognized as a problem well before Kitanaka started studying it; it seems a lot of Asian cultures saw it as a problem as far back as the 1970s. (In South Korea, it's called "gwarosa" and in China, "guolaosi.") A trio of Japanese doctors published the book "Karoshi" in 1982, describing the death of otherwise healthy young men who died from heart attacks and strokes after working more than 60 hours a week.
If you are of a certain age, you might remember a spate of news stories in the '90s about Japanese salarymen dying on the job. When Kitanaka started presenting her studies on karoshi and "karo jisatsu" (suicide related to overwork) to academic audiences in the West, she says the reaction was largely one of disbelief. Western academics couldn't imagine that someone would put their jobs above their physical and mental well-being.
But the Japanese government took it seriously. They introduced initiatives to combat karoshi, including mandatory vacation days and office lights that switch off automatically at 10 p.m.
It helped, a little. It depends on who you ask. These days the Japanese government accepts only around 200 workplace injury claims for karoshi annually, but workplace advocates claim there are still about 10,000 karoshi deaths per year.
And in 2022, there were nearly 3,000 work-related suicides. Kitanaka thinks Japanese workers "might be" more susceptible to work-related suicide.
"It has long been recognized that the 'model' employee in Japan may also be the person most susceptible to depression," Kitanaki said at an international conference on affective disorders held in Tokyo in 2012. "In the 1930s, Shimoda Mitsuzo, a professor of psychiatry, noted that many of his depressed patients were otherwise socially adaptive people who were enthusiastic about work, meticulous, thorough, honest, punctual, and had a strong sense of justice, duty, and responsibility . . . the kind of people who were praised by others and seen as reliable and trustworthy . . .
"The rise of industrialization and isolation from family reinforced the importance of the workplace for these 'model' employees. These socially reinforced individuals often define themselves by their work success that requires over-responsibility, perfectionism, and sustained social pressure to outperform. Ultimately, the armor of some of these 'model' employees crack and they become depressed because they cannot meet these work expectations."
American karoshi isn't as dramatic as the Japanese variety, probably for cultural reasons. We kill ourselves with stress eating and self-neglect instead of hanging ourselves or jumping off buildings. Stanford business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer has analyzed more than than 200 studies on work in America and concluded that work has become so stressful it can be considered the the fifth leading cause of death in the U.S.--20 percent of all cardiovascular deaths among those of working age can be attributed to work.
Pfeffer isn't talking about inherently dangerous jobs like firefighting or coal mining, but the very psychic hazards of work-family conflict, high job demands, long work hours, feeling low social support and/or a lack of fairness and "justice at work," along with job insecurity or being unemployed. This deadly stress is rooted in a growing power imbalance in the workplace, where employers can make more and more job demands and workers have less and less control.
This isn't just true for precarious entry-level workers or exploited associate professors, but of white -collar professionals.
Why do Americans work so hard? Because we have to. A lot of us take on more work because we worry that if we don't, our bosses will find someone who will. And they might. In a world where shareholders are the first concern, it's managerial malpractice not to sub in a cheaper widget.
Alone among industrialized nations, the United States has no mandatory paid vacation or holiday leave. And we have the technology to work anywhere at any time, so we surrender our vacation days and answer emails at 11 p.m. We jump on Slack first thing in the morning to signal our eager attention to the demands of the job.
I do it. I grind. Like Guy Clark said, "Work's my middle name." It might be wrong for it to be such a big part of my identity, but I don't know any other way. I love my job.
Even when it slaps me around.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@adgnewsroom.com.