Workaholism

It is a terrible problem, workaholism. I'm not sure it is a purely American problem, but certainly many Americans suffer from it.

The reasons Americans are prone to workaholism are economic and social, of course, but also endemic to industrial, highly competitive structured environments. It is just as easy to be workaholic on the farm, as well, where 24 hours might not be enough to get everything done. Americans tend to honor caffeinated beverages and individual achievement -- we try to race the Devil and expect to win.

It hurts your body and probably your mind to repeat anything over and over ad infinitum. This is the death of humanity but the realm of machinery. Humans are less likely to integrate huge amounts of information of such repetitious nature without huge amounts of error and negligence -- wearing out attention, assured of mistakes. It seems fair to allow for machines this realm of capability.

So, "one day", it is often said, we will all live in leisure and give over our minds to purely esoteric and profound knowledge -- no further need to get our hands dirty. The machines will do all the wretched work.

But there are no days like that. Even with huge amounts of actual repetitious actions done by machinery, there remains immense amounts of wretched work left for humans, if not even more than before machines were employed "to simplify" our lives. So I toil away, climbing to the peaks of the next horizon, hoping to find the sea of leisure, where I can say "I am finished."

Yet, the reward is more in line with the pellet for the rat in a plastic box. The lever is pressed and pressed until a pellet comes out. So long as the pellet is given at intervals that are at least sooner than the spontaneous recovery time, the rat will press the lever with undiminished vigor until it dies from exhaustion.