I'm a hard worker and love my work. I have felt pulled toward work. And it's a pull I have ferociously had to counter to make room for my family.
Corporate engineers have looked at how women are with each other, borrowing the best tips from female neighborhood culture and then transporting them back into the bosom of capitalism. They've feminized capitalism.
We think we're saving time with microwaves, cell phones, beepers, computers and voice mail, but often these things help us create the illusion of getting somewhere - and they foster a chain of constant activity. We're really just squeezing extra activity into every minute that we gain.
No work-family balance will ever fully take hold if the social conditions that might make it possible - men who are willing to share parenting and housework, communities that value work in the home as highly as work on the job, and policymakers and elected officials who are prepared to demand family-friendly reforms - remain out of reach.
We don't live with the community of yesteryear. And we don't enjoy the public services Europeans do. So we turn to the market. Once we do, we find that service providers raise the standards of personal life, so that we come to feel we need them to live our 'best' personal lives.
Each person's drive to overwork is unique, and doing too much numbs every workaholic's emotions differently. Sometimes overwork numbs depression, sometimes anger, sometimes envy, sometimes sexuality. Or the overworker runs herself ragged in a race for attention.
