“Americans work too hard.”
Take your pick from any one of the eight European countries I have been to, and you would be correct in guessing that it is the location where I have heard that statement.
I lived in Germany with a family for a month after graduating high school. The father, who works often with American companies, told me he doesn’t understand why Americans live to work. Germans, and most Europeans, work to live.
The things in our lives outside of work are much more important to us, he said. Considering he and his friends and family were among the most content people I’ve ever met, it was hard to argue with him.
One of my dad’s brothers has lived in Scandinavia for over 20 years with his Swedish wife. I get the sense he might like to return to the U.S. someday, but my aunt, a doctor, wouldn’t have it. She works set shifts that bring her home by 5 or 6 pm every day. She rides her bike to work. She is appalled by how hard my parents – both doctors – work every day. Eighty-hour weeks and weekends with two hours of sleep per night are common. My mother recently went nearly a month and a half without more than two days off.
I don’t blame my aunt.
The land of opportunity is wringing every last drop of energy and drive that it can out of its workers, and Americans take it like champs. But a new Pew Research Center study, published today, found that only 13 percent of Americans say being wealthy is very important, whereas 67 percent place “having enough time to do the things you want to do” at the top of their priority list.
As Pew senior editor Richard Morin points out: “These survey findings cannot answer whether most Americans genuinely place a medium-to-low value on wealth, or whether they accept the fact that they’ll never be rich, or whether they’re reluctant to admit that money matters a lot to them.”
Much more can be inferred from the study. We might have to work harder and longer to sustain a living. Or, we might just think we do and need to work that hard to pay off what we buy on credit, because we believe that an iPod, a Coach purse, a flat-screen TV and a gas-guzzling car are necessities just like food and rent. But the study could also mean that Americans are secretly miserable working 12-hour days, leaving and arriving home in the dark, lacking any and all freedom to have much of a personal life, especially if one has to raise a family.
But we persevere anyway. With gas at or nearing $4 per gallon, we have to.
