Society always advised me to heroically have a success ethic and to keep on keeping busy. This I never questioned, as I’d rather not be Tarzan but Clark Kent, as in Superman’s Song, “… he would not be caught hanging around, in no jungle scape, dumb as an ape, doing nothing.” (By the Crash Test Dummies)
But now, in my retirement years, I have time to ponder hearing society say, “The American dream is that if you work hard—” Wait. What does “hard” even mean? Maybe, instead of “hard,” it only means “work normal.”
A senior older than I, of the great generation, tells me younger people aren’t motivated because they’ve never known war and hardship. True, they’ve never lived getting “one day older and deeper in debt” (link) or “working on the chain gang” (link) to name two songs from my childhood.
Maybe “work hard” only means work harder than those stereotypical generation X or Y or Z or whatever letter we are up to now. Those “Generation Zero” kids may call themselves “slackers,” but… Every year young newbies —who sometimes will rush too much, remember?— learn what the heck “work hard” means by role modelling from seasoned workers. So simple. And “hard” should not mean “setting yourself up for failure” by defining “hard” as being beyond what you can do. So sensible.
Peers vary. I remember, as a corporal among corporals, training privates in trench digging. One corporal asked our platoon sergeant, “Shall we have them dig as hard as we do?” The sergeant answered seriously, “No.” I’m sure the privates who were matching the work of their peers innocently saw themselves as working hard.
We heroes learn by striving to match our peers. As any union member who has ever faked a production sheet downwards, to not “look too good to management,” knows full well:
“to thine own peers be true.”
Back in my teenage years during the Cold War, back when the Arms Race was on, I would read the same best-selling self-help career books as everybody else, without ever thinking we might be in a Book Race.
In my glossy high school annual, from when I was an earnest bespectacled scholar, is a dimly recalled photograph. Where my pocket protector would have been, I had a notebook poking out—so I could work hard at my planning. I was already reading management books and trying out the planners and tips on how to “work efficiently.” Years later, at university, I observed some undergraduates slacking on our group projects and felt contempt: I related to grownup working in the real world, “on the square and on the level,” not idiots who found group-ethics too challenging.
Office workers have peers, while the lonely salesperson on the road has a “sales quota.” Same as the writer at her kitchen table holding herself to a quota of hours or words per day.
At my local writers centre we all know about lonely desks where people “sharpen pencils” while “getting ready to work.” And so we schedule “drop-ins” as “a time to write.” Perhaps to be communal—that is, if you can be communal when other writers are saying, “Shhh!”—but mainly to be productive. Because hobby writers like me, with the office tower behind us, might slack off from being overly removed from our writer peers.
Hobbies help me feel lucky. Being a senior citizen, unmoored from a life of heading off to work, I know the possibility always exists for me to become underfed, under-bathed and under-socialized, becoming evermore isolated and eccentric… at last not even knowing what month it is, drifting along…
Luckily, I’m still earnest about keeping busy—such as by writing and philosophizing about “work hard.” Maybe I can offer advice to young whippersnappers: “Yes, I have observed down the decades how so many self help books give you a motivational message to bust a gut “trying hard.” But “it ain’t necessarily so.’” (Sung lately by Bronski Beat)
A successful businessman, with a chain of cafes, told me: “I’d rather be ‘good’ 80 per cent of the time than ‘excellent 10 per cent of the time.” He explained that if he wrongly expected his staff to be excellent all the time then, he assured me, it would “break them.” Yes. And as for “productivity in writing,” I don’t guiltily compare myself to what I’m like on my best days, because, as God knows, I’m not always at my best.
“Hard enough” equals “sustainable.”
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Sean Crawford
Alberta
August
2025
Footnotes:
Essayist Paul Graham, at length, explicitly addresses the problem of wanting to work hard when you don’t have a clearly defined problem and externally imposed goals, (unlike school and work) in his essay How To Work Hard.
https://www.paulgraham.com/hwh.html
According to Nicole, the 40 hour workweek is a scam
