Work addiction and the enabling culture of it are probably the most prevalent and potentially harmful addiction in our modern society. And it is ignored because it is useful to us and so ingrained in our culture that we can not see it, much like a fish that does not see the water it swims in. 

Work is useful, important and beneficial to us when in balance and serving ourselves, our environment and our society. In today's modern Western societies, we hit a sweet spot of economic growth around the 1970s-1990’s, and individual success was not only possible but probable. But our world leaders and our collective ambition lost sight of what is important. Our enterprising mindset took our expansive ambitions too far, and in the past decades, we have seen such a decline and devolution in our communities that there is little faith left in the systems that brought us the level of success our grandparents enjoyed. 

Now, we work for the sake of work, through necessity and expectation. Beyond the need for effective productivity, at the expense of families and communities. Our culture has become so dependent on the normalisation of work. At the turn of this century, we created jobs and work to keep busy, give us a purpose, and keep our economies moving into an unrealistic exponential growth ideology. We produce to consume more and more. We only have an education system to keep the educators busy; a degree has so little value that we have the most highly qualified menial workers we have ever seen in our recorded history!  

But our usual working habits could be very different. With the rise of the industrial revolution, productivity and the need for human investment have reduced, while our production value has increased. 

This means that as machines were introduced, there could have been a reduction in the hours of the working week in exchange for our wages, while productivity and profit would have remained the same. Instead, competition was added. 

The workforce has doubled as the necessity for an average family to have two adults working, a usual 70-80 hour week, simply to exist. We could have enjoyed healthy, thriving families with part-time working parents and healthy children nurtured by attentive parental supply. Our need to have a work-based culture could have been eradicated many times over. 

Families could have thrived, and our community services could have improved. If we had chosen to allow well-being to replace profit as a marker of economic strength, our focus could have been very different. 

We made the same mistake with the introduction of the digital revolution, and it seems very likely to repeat the same mistake again as AI significantly reduces our workforce, generating further non-human produced profit. 

Instead of shifting our values and developing society to accommodate a new sense of meaning and purpose for humanity, people are still expected to work. Despite there being less and less motivation or reward for doing it!  

Much of our self-worth, self-esteem and value is very often entwined completely in our ability to work, produce and perform. We measure success by our ability to generate profit, work and even allow each other to suffer and struggle if this (what is considered a basic function of life and living) is not completed. 

Even those who are capable of work will give up their entire lives to work, their health, wellbeing, family, friends, community and even their dreams, desires or morality second to the orchestrated need for work to live. We have created a cost of living that far exceeds what could have been produced without profit at the forefront of the economy. 

We allow work to be a measure of society, our success and our growth, yet the measure often falls short of the true success of the people in our communities. For a capitalist system to operate, we need winners and losers. We need people who capitalise on the exploitation of others. 

We also need those who fail to meet the standard and lose, providing an example for the rest of us of what happened as we do not meet the standard price or the required contribution to perform as part of the groups we have created. Hunger, homelessness and many of our social problems could have been solved if the collective vested interest were rooted in well-being over simply productivity and work. 

Profit and work can be used as a crutch instead of our conscience; we use work to define or override our integrity, and even as an excuse to condemn, judge or abuse others. In today's world, having a job is considered essential; the kind of job we have is a measure of our social standing, and our work is entwined in our identity. 

But where does this work addiction and obsession come from, and how did it get so out of control? 

We evolved to work together and support each other in social groups. This mutual contribution was essential to our survival. So, our minds developed so we can better understand what individuals and the group need to survive. 

Our complex thinking, memory capacity and problem-solving minds are the creation of our requirement to work together. The need to recall information, communicate and interact beyond the small groups we were mostly used to is now part of being human. To function and better sustain ourselves and each other through considered thought, learned action and communicative contribution. This is a natural part of our evolution. 

As is our need for leadership, hierarchy and role-taking. To mutually organise and use each person's unique skills to better and strengthen the group. We know traditionally men would most likely hunt, build, fight and protect. While women would cook, raise children, tend the village, and make clothes. Elders would guide the group, make decisions and tend to and pastor the group dynamics. 

We evolved and lived this way in many cultures around the globe. Our minds and language advanced as we became more and more effective in these small social systems. Then, as we developed civilisation and began building bigger and bigger groups, creating armies, expanding into more and more land, both the risk and reward of mutual enterprise and expansion demanded more from us than ever before. 

Most of us know enough about modern history to understand how we developed civilisation. From villages to towns and cities, creating borders and defining territory as separate countries. Creating allies, wars and expanding across continents, learning, growing and developing more and more of the land, leaning into the wider need for resources. 

Work, mutual contribution, pastoring (human personal and spiritual development), expansion and production in order to consume and secure our larger and larger groups became our western development of civilisation. 

Money and power shared through investment in smaller groups was the norm we became used to, with kings, queens, and land owners in positions of authority and wealth passing from generation to generation through certain families. Until we reached the point of industrialisation, mass production, global economy and slavery. 

Where this culture, with its ability to travel further, cross water, was able to take advantage of the groups and cultures' colonisation around the world, passing through many cultures through force and violence or religion, politics and education.  We have created our modern, globalised economy with an expanding westernised, industrial and now digital economy as the workplace expands into several dimensions. 

We know the horrors of what happened in the age of slavery and how slavery helped develop our modern, multicultural, capitalist culture, both at home through workhouses, factory production and farming and abroad on plantations and the like. 

A huge shock to our collective humanity, a mass trauma and both group and individual violation of our humanity, which has been perpetuated to this day, despite the premise of democratic freedom, the neccessilty of work in exchange to cover our “cost of living” demands we perform to the capitalist agenda or face what is considered social suicide and face extreme exlusion or living challenges. Even in our developed world. 

Slavery culture established an unavoidable, violently enforced, mass production, global economic culture. Slaves were forced to work, and those who did not work died. Those who did not do well were tortured; even those who did well in the system were expected to die young and broken. 

Individuality, spirit and humanity were ignored, dismissed and reduced to profit in the most brutal of ways. 

Even outside of plantation slavery and the slave trade, the land lords and industry masters of the past demanded human effort in exchange for living conditions barely habitable to sustain worker lives and the working practice. People worked hard and for others, weren't always paid well and operated under unfit conditions at times, and individuals or families benefited or suffered within that. 

Whether slave or master, the spiritual, ethical and moral cost of slavery on the soul, body, mind and nervous system was high, radically changing our interactions, responses and culture. 

Slavery was a long time ago now, but much like the aftershock or matured realisation of abuse, violence, neglect or trauma, it is only now that we are becoming aware of and feeling the repercussions of the full extent of the long-term damage caused. 

As we have produced such advanced cultures and working conditions, with the introduction of automation, AI, and robotics beyond even production machinery, the need for balanced manual human productivity and contribution is fading fast. More and more people are considered expendable.   

Western populations are mentally ill, chronically ill, disordered, disconnected, addicted, and lonely. Our political systems offer us leaders who are corrupted by the need to sustain the current economic status quo and seek to control, manipulate, and exploit all in the name of normal expectation and profit. While developing countries are exploited to sustain these systems, strip mined for resources, as the funds from the expeditions rarely reach the communities supplying the exploited working populations. 

Naturally, our collective and individual anger, contempt and confusion are rife as we seek understanding, relief, and reconnection while also fearing and resenting each other and our part in the whole affair. Huge arguments and ferocious debates around issues that define our class, identity, value in the work world, and relief from its demands have erupted in almost every area of social life. Gender, race, ability, and age are all used as both weapons for attack or defence of one another as we grapple for some sort of status and justice. 

Like personal trauma, any other addiction recovery and chronic health relief, there is only one way to heal...to move through it. To acknowledge the pain and its causes. To feel the effects, pay attention to the problems, consider the solutions and respond in a way that is relevant and honest. 

As a collective in pain, processing our past with the constant change and expanding development in our present, fearing and not knowing what our future might bring, it is natural for anxiety to be high at this stage of our evolution. We know more than ever, are connected globally as workers, yet are disconnected from nature and our humanity in ways we have never experienced before due to technology and its development. 

It seems to me likely we need to accept both the benefits and the harm of our evolved culture from slavery, the depth of the violence and the mutual riches gained at the expense of capitalism, and find a way to reconsider what our future may be as our technological advances make our economic status quo obsolete. 

All this growth, uncertainty and change mirrors the evolution cycle we can observe in our own lives and in nature. It is clearer to see and accept the instability we face when we can zoom out and see that we are on the forefront of a huge collective shift. A drastic change is inevitable, one way or another. The more we can stay focused on what matters, collective well-being, personal freedom and a shift in how we qualify success, the more likely we are to align with an outcome that serves us.  

We can navigate this challenging time with our natural intelligence. It will require us to use love, understanding and truth to support our individual and collective healing from both work addiction and slavery sickness. 

Our individual and collective efforts to recover are unlikely to follow the same patterns and needs as our detached communities respond to the changes that emerge in each society. Perhaps steering back toward what we once considered the usual human lifestyle in many ways, an interconnected, global, tribal system may well be possible.

A process of authentic connection to self, nature and our sacred existence to bring balance and honesty back to the forefront of our existence could be the solution we are being guided toward. 

Additional Support

If you have been affected by or struggle with work addiction or the unfolding realisation of generational trauma and slavery sickness and its effect in your life, you might find our other blog posts helpful.

Browse our categories:

• Money & Recovery

• Work Addiction & Rest

Finding ways to align with wellness as we recover and use our energy in new ways can be helpful when recovering from work addiction.

The Quick Wins! Recovery Protocol offers daily guidance and support as you explore holistic recovery and create a foundation of wellness through a life design process. The process helps you create a balanced lifestyle with a focus on self-exploration, health and connecting with nature.

The process is specially designed for beginners and is an introduction to natural, holistic recovery.

Our Energetic Alignment Masterclass can help you understand this process of recovery through conscious alignment.

Our Recovery By Design Bundle can also be used to design a strategy for lifestyle change and through the process of recovery.

Using life design tools and a holistic approach to recovery, considering all aspects of life with an ecosystem mindset.

For personalised support, The Art of Enough Mentorship programmes offer one-to-one sessions and are designed to support you through this delicate process of deep healing and recovery.