Link cos im not a lib, well, maybe a little bit of a lib because i haven’t archived it yet https://fortune.com/2025/03/09/40-hours-workweek-gen-z-google-sergey-brin-sweetspot/
(Edit: in the context of the article it’s mostly clear it’s probably a typo… but… you can’t be too sure it is…)
Anytime you see a dude advocate for or brag about working 60+ hours a week, it’s either because their work is their entire identity, or it’s because they have servants. Servants come in many forms (nannys, housewives, gardeners), but it’s always a mini exploitation racket within their own household. Social reproduction is only barely possible with a standard 40 hour work week, any more and you’re just annihilating your society.
They also don’t actually work sixty hours. They might be at work for sixty hours but they don’t work for sixty hours. People actually working sixty hours a week is how we got early 20th century labor unrest.
no way in hell are these people at work for sixty hours even, it’s just that once you get high enough into management or just an owner you just consider everything work. yeah this haircut is work related, I gotta do public appearances and look nice. this podcast is work, maybe I learn something from Joe Rogan reads the cliff notes of the abridged version of the art of war. The 3 hours I do rockclimbing with some friends? Guess what, they’re important people, this is networking!
When I was working at the bug farm it would take up 11-12 hours of my day. 8 on the clock, 1 hour lunch, 1 hour carpooling plus 1 hour of carpool arbitrarily getting there way too early, or 1.5 hour on the bus and 1.5 hours of waiting for the bus. That’s 55-60 hours a week, not including any hours I would work at a restaurant job at the same time.
It wasn’t great, and for me it definitely wasn’t tenabke for more than 2 years. And my carpool wasn’t the only one who got there more than 20 minutes early, maybe around 10% of people did. By and large these were people who had no sense of valuing their time outside work.
one of the c-level-people at a job many moons ago considered his near-daily 3 hour wine drunken e-mail rants to coworkers to be work on account that they were kind of, technically in some sense, about work. obviously by the end of any given timeframe it was near incoherent and nobody ever took anything that they said after 8pm seriously
But like, imagine this bullshit for anyone else. Me and 5 coworkers, absolutely sloshed at midnight, voice texting Harry from Floor 11 about how he’s a ginormous [expletive] and then submitting like 5 hours on the timesheet because we started at 7.
