Everyone Is Overworked
From office workers to delivery drivers to comedians, we all have way too much to do
Have you ever been to a Sweetgreen between the hours of noon and 2pm? It’s madness.
There’s a line of office workers snaking through the store like a TSA checkpoint. They have their eyes down and thumbs flicking across the screens of their phones while Sweetgreen employees frantically scramble behind the counter to make them their salads and warm grain bowls.
Meanwhile, across the store, a horde of other office workers who had the foresight to order ahead on the Sweetgreen app stand shoulder to shoulder, waiting for a harried employee to roll out the cart that carries their food. These salads and warm grain bowls are made in an unseen kitchen somewhere in the back of the Sweetgreen with what I can only assume is a level of frenetic intensity that would make The Bear look like Ted Lasso by comparison.
Milling about are five foot tall immigrants from the Global South, all wearing bike helmets and giant thermally insulated backpacks the size of their entire torsos that could probably transport vital organs and life saving medical supplies in a war zone, but instead are used to carry fast casual food that has been ordered on an app. They are picking up salads and warm grain bowls for the office workers who couldn’t even be bothered to leave their desks and set foot in a physical Sweetgreen location. These office workers always have extremely important Zoom calls to attend and Slacks that must be answered immediately, so they must resort to third party delivery apps to have any hope of eating lunch.
In front of the To-Go shelves where the Sweetgreen employee drops off orders meant for the office worker horde and five foot tall immigrants from the Global South, there’s a partition. This partition is like any other retractable belt strung between two poles that you would see in a retail setting where lines form, except the lycra fabric of the belt is the perfect shade of Sweetgreen green (Sweet Green?), a choice I’m sure was the result of numerous Zoom calls and a massive Slack thread with a word count that would make Tolstoy blush. The worst thing about this partition is not that it’s there, it’s that it’s necessary. Without it, the office worker horde and the five-foot-tall immigrants from the Global South, all desperate to grab their orders and get the hell out of there, would crowd the To-Go shelves. This would prevent the Sweetgreen employee, who’s probably exhausted beyond comprehension before the clock strikes half past noon, from placing the salads and warm grain bowls on the To-Go shelves in a timely manner, at which point the whole system would collapse and the entire Sweetgreen location would descend into anarchy.
All of this just to get lunch during the middle of a typical workday. And unfortunately, the issues at play here extend far beyond the realm of fast casual dining.
When I’m in Sweetgreen and waiting on my To-Go warm grain bowl (For I am one of the office worker horde who has ordered ahead on the app), I look around and I see the same face on everyone. It doesn’t matter if they’re getting a salad, making one, or picking one up to deliver to somebody else. Every single person in that Sweetgreen location is completely burnt out.
The office workers are worried about the emails and Slacks they’re missing while away from their desks, so they feel compelled to check their phones while waiting. They need to stay informed about the amount of work they’re going to be responsible for that afternoon.
The Sweetgreen employees are ground down by the monotony of making the same salads and warm grain bowls all day, every day, not to mention the class and racial tensions present when a low-wage and predominantly minority staff are serving a salaried and predominantly white customer base.
The delivery drivers are tired from riding their bikes all over the city, bringing food to people who view them more as extensions of an app than as actual human beings. They have it the worst of all. We take for granted how much easier they make our lives, but we’d freak out if they suddenly disappeared. They’re like air conditioning on the subway.
How in the hell did we get to this point? Why does every single person in Sweetgreen, from the top of the economic ladder all the way down to the very bottom, have that same distressed look on their face? In short, the answer is COVID. COVID was an accelerant. It took things that were already happening and made them happen faster. Blaming everything on COVID might be cliche at this point, but just because something is cliche doesn’t mean it’s not absolutely, bone-crushingly true. To me, it’s completely obvious. Everything progressed in a totally logical manner, and this end result was practically inevitable.
In March of 2020, when the country started shutting down, office workers were told to stay home and do our work in pajamas. We thought this sounded great. We could sleep in, skip our commutes, and send our emails without having to get dressed up for anybody. We figured it would be incredibly easy, almost like a little vacation. But it wasn’t easy at all. Because the time that was previously spent getting ready for work, commuting, and chatting about the weekend with coworkers was now being used to do more work.
The fundamental principle of Parkinson's Law is that work will expand to fill the time allotted for its completion. You tell yourself that you have an hour to complete a report. It takes an hour, but you could have realistically finished it in thirty minutes. This is a great theory, but it’s incomplete. I prefer a saying I heard from Bronco Mendenhall, one of my favorite college football coaches. “Work expands to the boundaries you set.” This applies not only to your time, but the rest of your life as well. In March of 2020, once we removed the typical boundaries that surrounded the work day, boundaries of both space and time, work began to spill everywhere.
This happened physically and metaphysically. Objectively, more work began to pile up during the day, but there was a subjective shift as well. Suddenly, you couldn’t just sit at the dinner table with your family and enjoy a meal. The vibes were off and your mood was soured because that dinner table was the scene of a bitter contract negotiation earlier in the day. Everything in our homes became tainted by the stench of our jobs. The stress of our emails and Slacks and Zooms lingered long after we closed our laptops, if we closed them at all.
One thing I realized pretty quickly at the onset of this whole experiment, and had confirmed by talking to friends and coworkers, was that this did not feel like the fun little vacation we were planning on. Work did not become an even smaller part of our lives. Without the physical separation provided by our offices, work became omnipresent. How could you have work/life balance when work and life were all jumbled together in the same small space?
Within a short amount of time, office workers (Now working from home) became too busy to complete standard domestic tasks. Luckily, there was a solution. We were now able to offload our grocery shopping, food acquisition, and other assorted errands onto “essential workers.” The term “essential worker” conveyed a certain air of respect, elevating cashiers and delivery drivers to the level of “first responders” and “the troops.” Never mind that this phrase conveniently allowed us to launder our guilt as we made people who didn’t have salaries and health insurance run our errands for us. Considering we were practically ordered to stay indoors for the good of the nation, asking poor people to do our chores felt like a civic duty rather than an act of sloth or an indicator of an unbalanced life.
So the domestic labor of office workers was handed off to a new American underclass, simply because we were too busy to do it ourselves. Our groceries were brought to us via Instacart. Our household goods and other random garbage through Amazon. Our ready-made food through Grubhub or UberEats. It all came to our door, delivered by a human being with a full and complex life who we interacted with for, at most, five seconds. The problem was, everyone did this at the exact same time, so now the essential workers were overworked right alongside the office drones. It felt like nobody was able to catch their breath. And nobody felt like they were being paid enough money for all of their effort either.
Eventually, we were allowed to go back outside, but we had gotten so used to the convenience of having everything brought to us that we decided to keep going with this way of life. These days, when I run out of disposable razors or deodorant, I bristle at the thought of walking down the block to CVS and buying them at the store, especially since rising crime rates have forced CVS to lock up their toiletries in little plastic jail cells, at which point I have to ring a bell to get a beleaguered CVS employee to come over and open it for me, but they’re always too busy because there are other customers at other points throughout the store, ringing different bells to try and get their toiletries and consumer goods freed from their respective plastic jail cells, and the CVS employee is in a never-ending state of motion, bouncing from aisle to aisle, constantly turning a key and handing someone their tampons or shampoo or moisturizer, probably getting ten thousand steps in before their lunch break, so I end up waiting for an amount of time that feels way longer than it actually is, ringing the bell again to make sure the employee knows I’m there while simultaneously feeling guilty for stressing out a low-wage retail worker whose daily level of drudgery outpaces anything I could possibly imagine, and the whole thing becomes so enraging that I always just say, “Fuck it, I’ll order from Amazon,” and the cycle continues.
This is what things are like these days. COVID-era lifestyle quirks are still in place long after the need for them has faded away. But now, instead of safety being the main priority, this is all done in the name of convenience. Except nothing feels more convenient, does it? Instead, everything is happening in the exact same place, at the exact same time, all the time. It’s beyond overwhelming. I recently saw an Instacart commercial that touted the app’s ability to order groceries while the user is at a football game. This was presented as a massive achievement. “Did you forget to pick up groceries because of your obscenely demanding white collar job? Just get on your phone while at a football game with your son and order them! Isn’t this great?” This ad is proudly broadcasting that it’ll decrease your sense of presence in the current moment. There’s even a fun little jingle to go along with it. I was horrified when I saw this commercial for the first time. When I’m at a special event with people I love, the last thing I want to think about is whether or not I need milk.
I see examples of overwork every day. I was in the waiting room at my dentist's office a couple weeks ago, and a frazzled woman came in saying that she had to be in and out in under 45 minutes because she was suddenly double booked with an emergency call at work. She then spent the rest of her time in the waiting room on the phone, talking to a coworker about some problem they were having with a client. Going to the dentist is already stressful. Imagine your busy work day creeping into that time and space? Things didn’t use to be like this. Don Draper wasn’t taking calls in the dentist’s office on Mad Men. He just got his teeth cleaned and drank a few martinis afterwards. But we’ve all been there, blocking off time on our calendars for an important personal appointment, only to have a sudden work obligation that you can’t say no to supersede said appointment. It’s become a standard feature of modern life.
This sense of overwork has also manifested itself within niche industries and careers. Comedy clubs were shut down in 2020 along with everything else. As a result, stand-up comedians, who for years only had to concern themselves with performing in front of live audiences for at least ten minutes at a time, got drafted into the short-form content creation business. They’ve stayed there long after COVID has ended. That is where the attention is now, which means that is where the money is. The life of a comedian has gone from writing and performing live comedy (a very difficult thing to do in the first place) to doing that AND attempting to curate a digital audience via stand-up clips and sketches. You have to know how to tell jokes, and also how to edit subtitles in CapCut. These are two completely different skill sets.
Every non-famous comedian I’ve talked to, aside from the careerist sociopaths, has the same resigned attitude to the whole situation. They all shrug and say “Yeah, I hate it. But it’s what we have to do now.” But what does this mean, “What we have to do now?” It means that pursuing a career in comedy now involves doing ten different things, most of which have nothing to do with being funny. This is a far cry from the careers we all aspired to when we were just starting out. This diversification of focus and priorities within comedy is one of the major reasons I quit pursuing a career in stand-up. I just did not have the desire or the energy to do all of that.
I could keep going with examples, but to what end? Observing and pointing this out is all well and good, but eventually you have to stop and ask, what is the solution here? Honestly, I don’t know if there is one. At least, there isn’t a widespread one. All of the things I’ve mentioned above were already in motion at the end of the 2010s, and COVID just made them happen faster. They were unavoidable.
A lot of people, specifically online leftists, think this is a problem rooted in politics and the perils of late capitalism. There’s some truth to that, but it’s not quite correct. To me, this issue isn’t political or financial. Ultimately, I believe this is an issue of technology. And it can only be solved on the personal level.
The problem of modernity is one of becoming better off materially but worse off spiritually. Advances in technology solve some problems while creating new, unanticipated ones and decreasing our net happiness. There’s a scene in the show 1923 that really illustrates this point.
A salesman is extolling the virtues of newly invented washing machines and refrigerators to the Dutton family. “They’re conveniences,” he tells them. “Their use gives you time to do other things. You can enjoy a more leisurely life.”
“That ain’t more leisurely,” Jack Dutton replies. “Because we gotta work more to pay for all of this stuff.”
The only rebuttal the salesman can offer is “This is the future.” He sounds like a tech bro talking about the promise of AI.
The problems I’ve mentioned throughout this post are all facilitated by technology. Technology softens boundaries or removes them entirely, and nowhere is this more prevalent than with smartphones. We’re so busy at work because we can be reached anywhere, at any time, by multiple people at once. With that comes an expectation to respond and get work done right when it comes in. You won’t be considered a good employee if you don’t go above and beyond, and these days going above and beyond means obliterating any semblance of separation between your work self and your actual self. Sure, employers pay lip service to work/life balance and mental health, but when push comes to shove, you’re expected to get the job done. We do work in business, after all.
Things have only been this way for a short time. When my dad got his first job out of college in 1980, he didn’t have a cell phone. Hell, I don’t think he even had a desktop computer. That also means he didn’t have email, text messages, Slack, Zoom, or any of the other numerous ways someone can reach you at all hours of the day. When I try to imagine what his job was like back then, I can’t help but wonder, what exactly did he do all day? I think he spent a lot of time calling people on the phone, an act that would make a Gen Z office worker recoil in horror. But I’m nearly certain that the volume of work was lower than what a recent college graduate has in 2024, simply due to the limits of the technology available at the time.
The insane workload of delivery drivers and retail workers has been brought about by technology as well. I wouldn’t see Amazon drivers lugging giant wagons filled with cardboard boxes all over New York City if it wasn’t so easy to pull out your phone and order whatever nonsense you think you need at any given moment. And the employees at Chipotle or Cava or Dig Inn (Or wherever else it is us office workers get our lunches served to us in pale gray styrofoam bowls) wouldn’t be so busy if food was only able to be ordered face to face. Something must be done about this.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any potential solutions to offer the delivery drivers and fast casual dining cashiers. I don’t live in their world, and I can’t speak to their experience. But I can speak to the experience of the office workers, the so-called managerial class that is victimized by this feeling of overwork and perpetuates it at the same time.
The way I’ve personally been able to solve this problem, or solve it the best that I can, is to get very, very clear on what limits I’m willing to set and maintain with my technology. That, to me, is an absolute necessity. This stuff is so manipulative and easy to use that you have to make a concerted effort to control the technology in your life, or else it will end up controlling you. So, what does this look like for me on a practical level?
It looks like this. I have Outlook and Slack on my phone, but I always have the notifications for them turned off. This prevents work from getting to me when I’m away from my desk, but allows me to check in on things if I need to. I don’t look at email or Slack after I get home, unless there’s an ongoing emergency that requires me to stay updated. I try to keep my work life confined to work hours. This is a big one for me. If I’m sitting at home with my wife and dog, and a work notification pops up on my phone, I’m no longer at home. I’m now back in the mental headspace of work, and my time at home has been compromised. In my experience, there’s rarely anything that happens during these hours that can’t wait until tomorrow. So I block it off completely. Conversely, I only work on creative projects outside of work hours, even on days when I’m working from home and there’s no one looking over my shoulder. I feel like this separation helps me be better at both things. Mixing them together just causes problems.
I also try to do as little ordering on my phone as I possibly can. Sure, sometimes I’ll be truly pressed for time and I’ll need to order lunch off of an app, or buy something on Amazon. But most of the time, if I think about it, I can spare the extra ten to fifteen minutes it takes to go out into the real world and get what I need instead of waiting for someone to bring it to me. This also gives me an excuse to step away from my laptop, walk around outside, and get the mental break I need during times when work becomes overwhelming. Even though I hate CVS and their little plastic jail cells, I’ve recently been making more of an effort to walk over there and ring the bell for my deodorants and razors instead of getting them from Amazon.
These aren’t major steps. In fact, you could even call them the bare minimum, but they help me guard against slipping into the lifestyle I’ve been describing for the last 3,000+ words. They also help me feel more content overall. Doing things in person just feels subjectively better, even if it’s objectively less convenient. Because convenience always comes with a price. Convenience generates more free time which generates more work which generates the need for more convenience, and the snake goes on eating its own tail.
This is a societal problem, but it can only be solved at the individual level. We all must do an internal cost/benefit analysis of what conveniences we truly need, and which ones aren’t worth it. This will involve small, intentional choices, remade and reinforced on a daily basis. It’s simple, but it sure as hell isn’t easy. Luckily, a lot of things that aren’t easy end up being worth it in the end.
It’s incredibly difficult to keep this mindset going, but you have to try. Because there are no solutions doing it the other way, just more problems. You won’t have more free time if you buy the washing machine. Work expands to the boundaries you set. So the only answer is to think long and hard about the boundaries you want, set them, and then fight like hell to enforce them. Otherwise, you’re going to waste half of your life checking emails while waiting for someone to make you a salad.
