Workoholics vs. Human Universality

In the modern business style, it is quite usual to favor people's devotion to work, so that they could do something 25 hours a day, without feeling any need to stop doing it and to forget about it for a while. This concerns both chiefs and low-level personnel, and the chiefs often encourage their subordinates to work more by working round the clock themselves. Moreover, all the official entertainment they may have in a company (various parties, dancing, camping, tourism etc.) are too well organized to resemble rest, and a by-passer could think that those people do some specific kind of work rather than have fun. People loose the ability to rest, and they have to replace the rest by some substitute, which may grow into perversion.

Since the principal definition of the Subject is universality, full devotion to work is a most dangerous tendency, leading to the complete destruction of the personality. People must relax sometimes, refusing to do anything at all - in addition to mere switching the occupations the other time. This is in no way wasting time - rather, this is the basic mechanism of personal development, and the development of subjectivity as such. When a person cannot have passive rest, when one has to permanently struggle for life, career, money, new impressions or public recognition - one will rapidly degrade as a conscious being, becoming just another animal or inanimate device.

Workoholism is a social disease, like smoking, alcoholism and drug dependence. It has much in common with other cases of the personality's dependence on external stimulation, like hysteria or psychopathies. Such diseases are characterized by the lack of the personality's control over one's motivation, and consequently the lack of self-respect and self-contentment, which one has to disguise by random actions. In a sense, this is the opposite if schizophrenia - and, exactly because of that, it can easily transform into schizophrenia under certain circumstances, preventing one from continuing one's eternal race to nowhere.

Like all the social diseases, workoholism is hard to cure. A therapist can remove one substitute action only to give way for another, and any success can only be temporary, and remission rates are bound to be high, as long as the social cause of the disease is removed. In some cases, therapy can give the patient resolution enough to drastically change one's life - but this is only possible in favorable social environment allowing for some variance in behavior. Thus, if one cannot find a well-paid job to support one's family, the only way to survive would be demonstrating loyalty to the company one is working for, in order to "please" the company's governing board and thus keep the place. Any demonstration of independence would be disastrous for such person, and the conditions for the development of workoholism as a psychological defense are complete.

Workoholism is closely related to the low level of contactivity in one's transaction hierarchy - that is, the dominance of syncretism and formal communication, and consequently lack of synthetic transactions (intimacy). Those, who can find anybody to really care for, and to receive care from, are less apt to fall ill with workoholism. However, such intimate communication is entirely different from mere pastime, in a bunch of companions united only by the similarity of their way to hide their insane social status.