Looking for Fun and Feeling Guilty

Am I supposed to feel bad about not working?

Photo by David Valentine on Unsplash

Last week I received an urgent communiqué from my subconscious.

I dreamed I am at work in an office, having a few laughs with a good friend. A boss enters the room, and my friend happily reports that he has landed a new client for the company. I can make no such claim, and I feel guilt rising up my gullet because I am not producing revenue. The guilt is quickly followed by anxiety that once the boss discovers this, I will be fired. Desperate to save my career, I cast about for something I can work on, so I can at least create an illusion that I’m still valuable – even though I realize that, unlike my friend, I do not and cannot produce income.

It strikes me that this would be a normal dream for someone who works in a high-pressure job. But I don’t. I have been retired for eight years. It has been 20 years since I had any boss other than myself. So what am I doing with a dream in which I feel anxious about being exposed as a slacker?

What is my subconscious mind trying to tell me?

As much as I enjoy my AfterWork life, I suppose that deep beneath the surface there remains a kernel of guilt that I am not working.

It was more intense guilt in my first five years of AfterWork, at a time when my wife’s substantial paycheck was the primary source of family income. She never complained aloud when she saw me enjoying my leisure, but in my head my Inner Killjoy kept whispering that it was wrong to enjoy my leisure while she continued to bring home the bacon by the sweat of her brow. Now that she also is retired, more or less – she maintains a part-time consulting practice – the guilt has lessened but apparently has not entirely dissipated from my subconscious mind.

Origins of Guilt

Let’s talk about where this guilt comes from. The origin is a powerful current of American culture that undergirds our belief in the value of hard work and productivity. Sociologist Max Weber in 1905 named it the Protestant Work Ethic and credited it with birthing capitalism and making it successful throughout the West.

It’s also called the Puritan Work Ethic, which in the U.S. is more to the point. The Cambridge Dictionary defines “puritanical” to mean “believing or involving the belief that it is important to work hard and control yourself, and that pleasure is wrong or unnecessary.” That says it all: Hard work equals virtue, pleasure equals sin.

“These days, if you consider yourself lazy or a procrastinator – who doesn’t, in some area of life? – you almost certainly share some vestige of this moralism and use it to chastise yourself,” wrote Oliver Burkman, a British author and former columnist for The Guardian.

American culture is obsessed with productivity and work, notes author and pastor Ethan Renoe. “Many people have their own motivations for working hard and being productive. What they may not realize is that this can be traced back to the hard-working Puritans who…may have instilled us [in the Northern hemisphere] with our modern hard work mentalities.”

In this era of extremism, it is only appropriate that the “hustle culture” of Silicon Valley has raised up a new standard of meritorious hard work known as “996” – working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week. Good grief!

Internalized

The Puritan work ethic “is deeply baked into the culture of this country. I’m not the only one who internalizes it,” wrote author Greta Christina in a column for The Humanist.

We feel the impact of this belief today. “This insidious pressure,” writes author Richard Sheffield, “tells you that every moment must be optimized, every day filled with ‘purposeful’ activity, lest you fall into the dreaded abyss of…well, being.” It’s “as if sitting quietly on your porch, watching the clouds drift by, is somehow a moral failing or a crime against society.”

Sheffield happens to be a strong proponent of thumbing your nose at capitalism’s siren calls, especially once your career is done. Pangs of guilt and random anxiety dreams notwithstanding, I am inclined to agree with his stance.

I am not ready to let capitalism’s cacophonous chorus of sanctimonious rectitude ruin a perfectly contented AfterWork life. Moreover, if I am guilty of being unproductive at this stage in my life, I refuse to lose sleep over it.