Alright, all-nighter, let’s fucking go. I sit down at my desk, most likely after my post-midnight nap, with metal queued up on Spotify to complement my off-brand Redbull and degeneracy. Like most students, I struggled through online schooling during COVID, toss in some MCAT studying, and all-nighters became standard. My grades didn’t slip, so the general consensus from peers and relatives was to stop being dramatic. My unofficial PHQ-9 score from when I screened patients at the doctors office I shadow at paints a different picture. They didn’t see the disfunction and I realized there’s never reason for concern until you stop meeting benchmarks. Benchmarks test performance, and by those standards, I was doing perfectly fine. 

This mindset is concerning and it seems to run deeply in American culture. The idea of the American dream brainwashes many into striving to be self-made workaholics. Hard work is valuable, but I’m arguing the bar is set too high and that you’re expected to sacrifice too much of yourself with so little in return. For example, two of my relatives are managers at different companies and get payed decent salaries. Since they are payed salary, they don’t get payed overtime, but are expected to perform work related duties outside of their regular working hours. Both frequently have meetings during weekends and one of them begins working at 4am and is likely still at their computer until 9pm with meals being their only significant breaks. The worst part is that they pride themselves on how hard working they are and so do their families. This mindset isn’t unique, it applies to every social class, “Slight injuries could represent experience and bravery, as in the case of Iowa trainmen who regarded missing fingers or scarred legs as evidence of maturity. Until a worker had been visibly scarred, fellow workers could consider him unreliable” (Williams-Searle 1999). The goal is to be exploited and we take pride in it.