Why Elite Overwork is Unproductive and Unnecessary

How often in everyday conversation at Duke—even with close friends—do you feel pressured to prove that you are more scheduled, more stretched-thin, more tied-down by meetings, assignments, and obligations than your peer?

It feels only natural to tell others how busy we are, instead of telling them: “I’m doing well/not well, and here’s why.” The words come more easily: they feel like what we’re supposed to say. We want people to know how busy we are, not what emotions we’re experiencing, especially if those emotions reveal any kind of personal struggle. We actually want people to know we have no time for anything but work. It is not embarrassing to admit that we struggle to find time for hobbies or personal pursuits: on the contrary, it’s the ultimate flex.

The short answer to why this is might just be, “we live in competitive times, and we go to a competitive university.” But I think there’s a deeper reason: one that gets to the heart of what doing valuable work and living a meaningful life looks like in the world today.

After years of thinking about this issue (and getting really frustrated by it!), I’ve come to believe that the most sought-after status in elite American life is that of being busy. At Duke, we are all victims of an elite culture (and if you’re here, you are an elite, no matter your upbringing) that prizes being busy over all else. This culture is preventing us from being happy. It is a culture of competition, powered by the narcissism of small differences—one which incentivizes us to prove that we are busier than our neighbor, because being busier than everyone else means being better, smarter, and, eventually, richer than everyone else. But my-house-is-bigger-than-yours materialism really only tells a very small part of the story—our warped value system is not just about conventional, material markers of status. Value paradigms, of course, are shaped by the nature of institutions and culture: and if you look at those in our elite society, the obsession with being busy makes sense. Some of the leading institutions in corporate America, and possibly all of elite American life, are lucrative professional services firms like consultancies and investment banks. In the public imagination, these firms are practically defined by cultures of overwork. This perception is accurate: for instance, excessive work pressure at investment banks has been linked to elevated rates of anxiety and depression. Attempts at internal reform have been unsurprisingly piecemeal, and have been met with backlash (there have been no successful efforts at workplace regulation, partially due to the deference with which our government treats these firms’ operational preferences).

Overwork culture is built on a broken value-and-incentive system. Those who toil long hours at investment banking and hedge fund jobs are the most well-compensated people in white-collar America, and among the most envied. We believe that their contributions to financial capitalism drive us forward (contrary to most histories and theories of how progress works, by the way). We believe they have it all figured out. And so we aspire to be like them: we orient our lives around the pursuit of busyness, these social leaders’ most outwardly distinguishing quality. 

The fervor with which we have subscribed to this new vision of value has become religious. Colleges have become four-year ministries in evangelizing the gospel of overwork, and many acolytes are initiated even earlier. This is all idolatrous. Our worship at the Golden Calf of overscheduledness is obscuring our perception of how to live a meaningful life. It has prevented us from pursuing work that makes us happy and creates value for the world around us. Overwork in sectors of client-facing analytics, increasingly impossible to describe to outsiders, is starving us of meaning and connection. “Time famine” prevents us from living well-rounded, intellectually and emotionally complete lives. I’ve observed this “I’m busier than you” paradigm at Duke for four years. I’ve come to see it as a much larger problem than just the death of the art of the stop-and-chat. 

 It’s one of the most frustrating and dangerous concepts in elite American life. Elite overwork is the least-documented, but perhaps most devastating, source of the high rates of depression and spiritual emptiness in the least material troubled echelons of society.

Welp. This probably all sounds very scary. By the end of this article I will hope to have showed you a possible way out of this trap. But before we explore the problem in more depth, we should recognize that today’s elites’ work-life values stand in tragically ironic relief against the backdrop of American social history.

After all, it hasn’t always been this way. 

History: Why does our society ascribe so much value to “being busy”?

The “Leisure Class” used to run America. That’s what economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen called the rich Gilded Age elites who flaunted their wealth through public enjoyment of newly available urban amenities. Think Central Park carriage rides (Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption”). 

Veblen observed that the elites of his day showed their superiority to other elites by performing leisure. More than property even, the mark of wealth and superiority during that period was time off: if you were a manager at a major industrial corporation, a Park Avenue heiress, a banker, or even a political figure, you showed your social equals that you had “made it” by advertising your freedom to pursue hitherto unavailable leisure and luxuries. You maximized time spent out of the office: being at the top meant having the freedom to do nothing. 

Indeed, many of these elites did nothing, or at least very little, to reach this point in the first place. Gilded Age elites often cultivated enormous fortunes while working very little, although the idleness of the era is sometimes overstated. After all, even after stripping away the layers of myth, the Gilded Age’s striving Horatio Alger entrepreneurs—and their managerial assistants—in the steel, railroad, electricity, and financial industries still represented the apotheosis of Max Weber’s theory of the capitalism-driving “Protestant Ethic” (Weber was a contemporary of Veblen’s). Those robber barons didn’t see themselves as part of the Leisure Class.

But even for those “self-made” elites, life in the Gilded Age was never just about working hard: it was also about (conspicuous) enjoyment of the fruits of one’s labor. Having status, simply put, was signaling status. It was all about social performance, a concept we know very well in the 21st century, even if we’re performing the exact opposite values.

The Gilded Age was not a paradise, and the pursuit of leisure is not an ideal North Star for a society. After all, idle aristocrats throughout history have done more damage to the world than perhaps any other class. I’m not saying that they are what we should be striving for. The stark economic inequality of the Gilded Age is not to be admired, or remembered with fondness. The values of that society disserved not only striving immigrant industrial labors but the elites, too—the era had its own sources of social pressure which engendered friction and alienation among the well-to-do (often to do with anxieties about attaining markers of social status, which Veblen categorized as “pecuniary emulation”).

But we are not better off by substituting overwork for leisure. Sure, Gilded Age elites worked less than elites today, but the sad fact is that, in terms of social value, they didn’t work any less productively. The social value of work is derived not just from its profitability, but from the (perhaps utilitarian) benefits it provides for society as a whole. Veblen correctly observes that “productive work,” i.e. socially valuable work, was viewed with “odium” during the Gilded Age: the most exalted figures of the time sucked from society, rather than blow life into it. Contemporary elites are very comfortable with this idea, partially because they see it as safely the stuff of history: they prefer to think that the lounging aristocrats of the American past were a different breed altogether, not like them, the “disruptors” and drivers of social progress at the top of the ladder today. But that’s not true. Today’s elites do not do socially valuable work. That’s really ironic, and really sad. Even though elites today are busier than ever, what they do with their time spent working still produces stunningly little value for society.

The present: studies on overwork

Today’s elites generally do not recognize that they don’t produce value. That’s the case for a variety of reasons, including the blind faith in meritocracy that still consumes elite society. But it is the “being busy” culture which really prevents contemporary elites from appreciating how similar they are to their idle forebears. Take high finance as a representative example.

Self-delusion about producing value is particularly evident in the world of finance, although not exclusive to it. The Wall Street wizards and “Masters of the Universe” most exalted by our socioeconomic value system actually produce very, very little value for society (there are many studies that indicate that a lot of finance destroys value and, at the very least, the report card is mixed), even though they work brutally long hours, often much more than factory and service workers.

I am writing my senior thesis on the history of financial capitalism, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the link between financialization and the production of value. I feel confident enough to assert that there have been few periods in history—if any—in which finance was more removed from the creation of economic and social value than the present. But ask a modern finance bro why he deserves his salary and he’ll provide some vague answer about “efficient allocation of capital” and “long-term capital finance.” 

I’m studying the history of financial capitalism partially to poke holes in those flimsy arguments—yes, financial instruments often drive economic growth in capitalism, but almost never in the ways we think (for instance, it was actually public and semi-private securities which animated growth in English financial markets in the lead-up to the Industrial Revolution). 

And while there has never been a time in capitalist history when finance was of less significance to the production of value than today, financiers are the most exalted, conspicuously “hard-working” figures in elite society (although many Americans might be more inclined to think of “salt-of-the-earth” farmers and small business owners as harder-working—there’s plenty of political mythmaking behind that paradigm, too). 

This obvious gap between productivity and the perception of value creation is hard to understand. Part of the answer is that our woeful misunderstanding of meritocracy blinds us to the unproductive social outputs of elites. But the more powerful explanation is that most people don’t acknowledge this gap exists. Why don’t they acknowledge it? Because busyness has a value, or currency, of its own in elite circles.

But this is heresy, you say: how can I claim that people who work twelve hours a day in mentally demanding jobs don’t have anything to show for themselves? It’s because the “I’m busier than you” value culture has obscured the difference between hard work and overwork (or, in cat-poster parlance, working harder versus working “smarter”). The reason that we have a culture of “hard work” is not because we have a lot of essential hard work that needs to be done and can only be done by elites. Many major corporations, Big Law, and financial services firms expect long hours from their employees, not because the work they do is so challenging to produce, but because of “cultural expectations of 24/7 availability,” as described in a Harvard Business Review study on overwork. Quite simply, the culture exists because it is a culture. ESSEC Business School economists Ioana Lupu and Shanming Liu, authors of that study, posited the existence of an “entrainment cycle,” which “emotionally and physically synchronizes [workers] with their organization’s relentless tempo,” trapping them in a culture which confers excessive value on the time spent on work, and provides extra points for personal sacrifices made in the name of work (often literally, in the form of meticulous performance evaluation systems). Lupu and Liu offer compelling evidence that smarter and shorter schedules and shifts in organizational expectations will create happier and more productive workplace cultures. Broad adoption of these proposals would chip away at the influence of “I’m so busy” values in American work culture.

Similarities between leisure and anti-leisure class

Cultures of overwork don’t make contemporary elites—no matter how busy they are—more socially productive than the idle aristocrats of the Gilded Age. Large organizational dynamics predicated on overwork often result in lower long-term innovation, productivity, and creativity and come to be replaced by cultures of burnout. The reality is that elite “overworkers” who consistently miss out on opportunities for personal growth and fulfillment become less effective workers. And then there’s the fact that much of the work actually being done in major professional services firms—the ones most likely to have “overwork” cultures—has become increasingly abstract and diversified to the point of dilution in terms of real-world impact. This means that increases in absolute hours spent on work in those prestigious firms don’t necessarily lead to outputs that marginally increase in social value. Yale Law professor and scholar of meritocracy Daniel Markovits stresses this argument. The way to convince today’s elites that they’ve got it wrong, Markovits told me, is not to argue that they benefit from “unearned advantage.” It’s more effective, and more truthful, Markovits argues, “to convince the rich that all their work isn’t actually paying off.”

So here’s me making that argument. We would be much happier if we abandoned the rat race. If we got off the treadmill. Here’s a positive vision of a happy elite life without overwork. 

You come home to your apartment—and, after a few years, hopefully your home—with time to talk to your significant other, or your roommates. You have time to sit, decompress, and think for thirty minutes to an hour before maybe going out to meet someone for dinner or a fun activity, or having a restful night in, watching a great new show you actually have time to keep up with. You might look at a few work emails or plan out some things for the next day, or work a little bit on ongoing projects (actually you might have more mental space for long-term projects, because you will have the breathing space to see the big picture at your job, to think more about where you want to be in six months, a year, five years—not just getting through the week). That sounds like a pretty good life to me.

And this is the great and sad irony. Veblen’s theory of idle “leisure class” elites applies remarkably well, mutatis mutandis, to contemporary elites, people who might like to consider themselves members of a sort of “anti-leisure class.” In fact, many similarities between the two classes are superficially obvious: conspicuous consumption remains fashionable, and with social media, greater access to international travel, and the importance of cultivating relationships with clients in financial services, it’s arguably even worse than it once was. Emulation of social superiors remains an animating force toward lifestyle conformity, from checkout-lane People magazines to subreddits on retail investing. And then there are the restrictive norms. Veblen said of the Leisure Class that “the range of employments open to them is rigidly defined.” That sounds an awful lot like the experience of Busyness Class Duke students in 2025—tech, consulting, and finance accounted for the post-graduation employment of 43% of the Class of 2024, the most recent class for which we have data from the Career Center.

This is my plea: We shouldn’t exchange one unnecessary and unproductive suite of values for another—I don’t admire the idle aristocrats of the Gilded Age, but nor do I admire the eternally toiling elites of the new Gilded Age. Neither group is a force for growth in its society, and both operate with value systems that make their members unhappy. The “I’m busier than you” value poisoning contemporary elites damages relationships, increases alienation and loneliness, and intensifies the most unproductive forms of social competition. And it’s also just really not nice: after all, we are all busy. Suggesting—or outright saying—you are busier than someone else is insulting, immature, and demeaning, particularly in a small-differences university context (we all take classes, we all have internships, we all have extracurriculars).

So how do we fix this? Major changes to the shape of elite society can start with a radical transformation of what we value in early adulthood. We need to reject the overwork culture in college. We should admire our peers who tell us about their idiosyncratic hobbies or the interesting things they do with free time, not those who proudly show us their horror vacui G-cals or the “book time with me” functions in their e-mail signatures. We should push those who tell us eagerly about how busy they are to reveal more about what is actually going on in their lives, and whether they are busy with things that really interest them and make them happy.

And we should stop entering careers that aren’t helping us—or society—out. I am convinced that the oversized influence of cult-like financial and corporate institutions in American professional life is the major driver of our distorted overwork value system (misapprehensions about the nature of entrepreneurship in tech are also part of the problem).  We’re impressionable, and susceptible to gilded—but not golden—narratives of value like that offered by consulting and finance recruiters.

Veblen argued that “pecuniary emulation” was a socially corrupting force in Gilded Age America because it had a trickle-down effect: the conspicuous consumption paradigm of idle elites had a grip on the cultural imagination, and shaped how lower-class Americans oriented their personal value systems, and their approaches to wealth accumulation. The same thing is going on today, except that what we seek to emulate is not the availability of leisure, but its absence, the kind of restless lifestyle on display at investment banks and tech start-ups (whose own link to economic growth and the creation of value is also very much up for debate—side note: please, please don’t misinterpret the work of this year’s Nobel laureates in economics). Today, only once you don’t have any time for life have you truly made it.

Consequences

Our broken busy-obsessed elite value system has political consequences, too. I believe that the evolving and nebulous nature of white-collar work is the most unpopular feature of elite society. While David Brooks and other commentators have focused on the socially disuniting effect of educational status itself, I think that’s diagnosing the symptom as the cause. Nor is the political liberalization of higher-ed the primary problem (certainly at a place like Duke, students are bourgeois busybees, not bourgeois bohemians). Our higher educational institutions respond to trends; they don’t set them (the simple supply problem of “elite overproduction” isn’t helping, but that theory has been blown out of pseudo-intellectual proportion). The reason we have an “I’m busy” culture at Duke is because we have an “I’m busy” culture in Wall Street, Washington, and corporate America. And, as for any problematic value system tied to social institutions, it’s a vicious cycle: the former feeds back into the latter. 

So the hard work—the real hard work—really does start right here, and right now. As much as I hope that the next time you catch yourself telling someone just how busy you are will be a snap-out-of-it moment, I recognize it’s much easier said than done. Being busy is a drug. That Harvard Business Review study explicitly described it as such: “when employees fall out of sync with their companies (for example, during holidays or quiet periods), they often experience negative emotions such as anxiety, boredom, guilt, and even physical withdrawal symptoms.”

It’s hard to kick addictions, and it’s not fun to be preached to about quitting by people who have never experienced the phenomenon themselves. So let me say that I get it. I sometimes feel I am only capable of being happy when I am extremely busy. I haven’t taken as few as four classes in a semester at Duke since I was limited to that number in my freshman fall. I often feel that any day that goes by in which I don’t produce something of value is a day wasted. Working hard fuels me with adrenaline—I’m not an ER doctor working fifteen-hour shifts, but in my own small way, I get the appeal of that rush. In fact, I’ve spent so much time working on this article in the wee hours of many mornings that I’ve lost time for sleep, exercise, and, well, leisure.

But I’m trying to break that feeling—I’m trying to appreciate leisure, without joining the Leisure Class. And, so far, I feel pretty good about it. If I’m busy, you’ll never hear it from me.

by Zachary Partnoy