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Don’t Apologize for Escaping Into Your Work
Edith Wharton called work ‘a blessed drug’ in tough times
Americans love hard workers — until they decide that people are working too hard. Then they fault them for being “workaholics” who don’t know when to quit. It’s often an unfair accusation.
Experts say there’s a difference between working hard and workaholism: Working hard is diving, and workaholism is falling. No matter how hard you work, you’re not a “workaholic” if what you do has meaning and value to you and you choose to do it. You could stop, but you don’t want to, because you know you’re using your time well.
The lives of artists, writers, and composers turn up infinite variations on that idea. Consider Beethoven, who let dirty dishes pile up on his piano. Who would want him to have washed the dinner plates instead of composing the “Ode to Joy” or the “Pastoral Symphony”?
Or consider the Tim O’Brien, a winner of the National Book Award, whom many critics see as the finest novelist of the Vietnam War. He told an interviewer:
“I work on Christmas, I work at New Years, my birthday, my girlfriend’s birthday — it’s all I do. And yet, as monotonous as it might sound to you, it gives me great, great pleasure.”
