The Hidden Work Ethic Driver

I think I found the answer to a puzzle that I've been having for a long time, and that is: why do we work so hard? Why do we work so hard, especially in white collar jobs, when we've had all this technology, all this progress. We've had computers, we've had emails, we've had mobile phones, we've had instant communication. Now we have artificial intelligence to do our work faster and more efficiently. And yet, if you look at organized jobs, especially in countries like the United States where people work very, very hard, or countries where people have a high-paying job and they feel they need to impress people around them and work 50 hours a week or 60 hours a week, or even pretend to be working more than that. Why? That is the mystery, that is the puzzle.

With all the technology that we have, why do we keep working so hard? Why didn't we say: now I can do my work in half the time, so I'll just work four hours a day, or I'll just work two or three days a week, and then I'll spend the rest of my life doing things that I enjoy. Working on my own ideas, on my own projects, spending time with the people that I love, and my family and my friends, and helping other people. Why don't we do that? Why are we so obsessed with working 9 to 5 and then 9 to 6, 7, 8, 9, 9 to 9? Why do we work weekends? Why do we work holidays? Why are we workaholics? Why do we have burnouts? Why are we so obsessed with work?

And I think I found the reason. And that reason is gamification. We've turned a lot of these white collar jobs into games. Targets that we need to reach: we have a little competition. If you think that a video game can be addictive, that you want to better your score, that you forget to eat and to drink, and you are completely focused on the game for hours, that is the same element of gamification we've put into many of our jobs. We have Key Performance Indicators. We want to hit certain targets. We have endless presentations about how we're doing to become better at market share or this or that. We've turned working society, into a large game.

We know that this game drives us. We know that this trigger of needing to have a better score, of comparing ourselves with other people, of getting this dopamine reward when we've done something well, that can really push us. That, to me, is a very good answer because it explains why we do things that are completely unnecessary. We really don't have to work that hard. We have tools and machines that can do it for us. We have found better ways of working, more effective ways of working, sometimes more efficient ways of working, and yet we don't do it.

If this doesn't convince you, let me give you one example. Imagine a trader, somebody who works for an investment bank, and spends all day reading analyses and buying certain stocks or derivatives or bonds or all these things that these people do all day. Imagine that they trade things, they sell this at a better price, they make a bit of money, they discuss it with their colleagues: basically a trader's job. Now imagine they do this for a whole year, and at the end of the year they get their bonus. And then, we find out that their terminal was never connected. That everything they did in that environment, buying and selling, and all the trades that they made were just a simulation. They weren't real. They didn't actually buy anything. The numbers on the screen were just a computer game.

The amazing thing is that it wouldn't have changed anything in their experience of their job. They would've still felt as excited by having a good day. They would've still worried about their positions being exposed. They would've still felt that their bonus was merited or not merited. They would've still had this sense that they're doing something important. They would've walked around the city and the neighborhood feeling I am doing something with my life. And yet, all they did was play a simulation. That tells me that the real effect is the gamification, because whether it's connected to the real world or not doesn't matter. The whole point was the gamification.

The consequence for our societies, as we're moving further into the 21st century, as we are going to be confronted with even more labour-saving devices such as AI models, which are going to take over a lot of the work that we do, we are going to be confronted again and again with this question: why do we work so much? And if it's gamification, if that is the driver, if that is what makes us work so hard, we should try and find that gamification elsewhere. We should be aware of its effect on us. We should see it as a control mechanism, the control mechanism that it is. Why do we work so hard when we don't need to? The answer is gamification.