Karoshi

May 17, 2021 6:16 AM

Long working hours are killing hundreds of thousands of people a year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The first global study of its kind showed 745,000 people died in 2016 from stroke and heart disease due to long hours. (CW: heart attack)

Five weeks ago, a post on LinkedIn from 45-year-old Jonathan Frostick gained widespread publicity as he described how he'd had a wake-up call over long working hours :-

So I had a heart attack...

This is not how I planned my Sunday. It was pretty standard up to 4pm. Morning coffee, a trip to the local country park, a shopping trip and late lunch.

I sat down at my desk at 4pm to prep for this weeks work. And then I couldn’t really breathe. My chest felt constrained, I had what I can only describe as surges in my left arm, my neck, my ears were popping.

I didn’t get a flash of light, my life race through my mind. Instead I had:

1. Fuck I needed to meet with my manager tomorrow, this isn’t convenient
2. How do I secure the funding for X (work stuff)
3. Shit I haven’t updated my will
4. I hope my wife doesn’t find me dead

I got to the bedroom so I could lie down, and got the attention of my wife who phoned 999.

I’ve since made the following decisions whilst I’ve laid here, on the basis I don’t die:

1. I’m not spending all day on zoom anymore
2. I’m restructuring my approach to work
3. I’m really not going to be putting up with any s#%t at work ever again - life literally is too short
4. I’m losing 15kg
5. I want every day to count for something at work else I’m changing my role
6. I want to spend more time with my family

And that, so far, is what near death has taught me.

#heartattack #hsbc #decisionmaking #leadershiplessons

The Japanese have a word for this: karoshi (過労死).

(Some people seem to think it's funny.)

posted by Cardinal Fang (16 comments total)

Like millions of people, I have hypertension. I only just discovered that fact relatively recently. I am not alone in the US or elsewhere. Thanks to a question on AskMe, I am now on medication and taking other steps to become healthier. The most painful steps thus far have been saying no to two different projects over the past 8 weeks.

I needed to say no because I understood the deadlines involved and the scope would make both projects super stressful (and I already deal with a fair amount of stress for other reasons). So passed up real money because I truly, no kidding want to stay alive for awhile longer and be as healthy as possible. Saying no is not easy but it has become easier now that it feels like a "your money or life?" question. Thanks for the post, Cardinal Fang.
posted by Bella Donna at 7:23 AM on May 17, 2021 [3 favorites]

My job paid well but it gave me: IBS, TMJ, hypertension, sleep disorders, depression, and anxiety. I prefer not to think of what it did to my lifespan.
posted by tommasz at 7:32 AM on May 17, 2021 [6 favorites]

I didn't understand why the Japanese scored so low on global happiness indices then I read this:

Japan's suicide rate falls by a fifth during coronavirus pandemic as workers spend less time with bullying bosses

(I lived/worked in Japan in the 90s but floated through society on a far-from-typical career path)
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 7:46 AM on May 17, 2021 [11 favorites]

I say this in every thread on this subject, but...I don't make as much money as a lot of people I know but I work 35 hours a week and not a minute more, with four (soon to be five) weeks of paid vacation a year, all of which I consider part of my compensation package. My parents had 9-5/5-days-a-week jobs too, which I naively assumed was the regular state of affairs until I entered the work force. I understand why people are driven to maximize their earnings and I understand why people are also motivated to work long hours for status and/or (in rarer cases) love of their work, but what I've never understood is the culture in which being overworked is held up (by the workers themselves) as some sort of point of pride. The company doesn't give a shit about how hard or how long you work, aside from it being a measure of how much profit they can wring out of you. Maybe you're getting paid, but you're never getting those hours back. None of that applies, of course, to people who are forced to work long hours for low wages just to keep a roof over their heads.
posted by The Card Cheat at 7:58 AM on May 17, 2021 [16 favorites]

I have seen this in advertising and marketing communications, where people can be very successful, but sacrifice their health, family life, and nearly everything else to do it. If you work in client service, you have to literally turn yourself inside-out for several years in order to get recognized. It takes a huge toll on both your physical and mental states. The lucky ones are the people who are successful enough to eventually get out of the industry with enough money to do what they want.

Working in this industry has had an impact on me, psychologically, and on a number of people around me. At the job I worked in before the most recent one (in an advertising research firm) a senior manager killed himself from stress and overwork.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:28 AM on May 17, 2021 [3 favorites]

Yeah...if you could just balance your work and life and keep your, uh, personal health issues from interfering with the commitments we set for you....that would be great.
posted by lon_star at 8:41 AM on May 17, 2021 [15 favorites]

The Card Cheat, in a general sort of way, what kind of job do you have?
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 8:42 AM on May 17, 2021

Related, from Jill Lepore in The New Yorker in January: “What’s Wrong with the Way We Work”

Four in five hourly retail workers in the United States have no reliable schedule from one week to another. Instead, their schedules are often set by algorithms that aim to maximize profits for investors by reducing breaks and pauses in service—the labor equivalent of the just-in-time manufacturing system that was developed in the nineteen-seventies in Japan, a country that coined a word for “death by overwork” but whose average employee today works fewer hours than his American counterpart.

And, in the new issue: “Burnout: Modern Affliction or Human Condition?”

[Burnout] suffers from two confusions: the particular with the general, and the clinical with the vernacular. If burnout is universal and eternal, it’s meaningless. If everyone is burned out, and always has been, burnout is just… the hell of life. But if burnout is a problem of fairly recent vintage—if it began when it was named, in the early nineteen-seventies—then it raises a historical question. What started it?

posted by Going To Maine at 9:51 AM on May 17, 2021 [5 favorites]

I lived/worked in Japan in the 90s but floated through society on a far-from-typical career path

I may have already mentioned that I once did a freelance stint at a Japanese bank. The company culture was that you did not leave the office until all your subordinates had already left. Our (English) manager used to come round and beg us to go home.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 10:16 AM on May 17, 2021 [6 favorites]

Other than the dying part, I have a family friend who fits this article to a tee. Pre-pandemic and working for a large multinational corporation; they got up early for conference calls with Europe, stayed up late for conference calls with Asia, and would often get less than a day's notice that they would be on the next red-eye flight out of the country. They eventually had a heart attack, tried to cut back on working hours, and then of course didn't.

Eventually they were laid off due to medical issues.

On the other side, I've had at least two coworkers die. Employees figured out how to get the work done, people were hired or promoted to fill the position, and the work continued. The actual impact of their death was terrifyingly close to minimal, they may as well just have found a new job. Don't kill yourself for your job, cogs are easily replaceable and you won't be remembered in a month.
posted by meowzilla at 12:51 PM on May 17, 2021 [14 favorites]

Err, to clarify, the person I was describing was laid off due to performance problems caused by medical issues. Even if you don't work yourself to death, you can work yourself into incompetence.
posted by meowzilla at 1:42 PM on May 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

Former advertising person here. Art director for 20 years. Client/account management is tough, but I'd argue the creative side is even tougher. And with the internet and PDFs and email, turnaround on projects had become overwhelmingly brutal.

When I started, a late round of changes could (at least sometimes and very often) be pushed to the next day. But now? There's no "reason" you cannot make changes and have them back to the client the same day (even if it's 11pm or 3am) except for the "reason" that you decide to go home. In 20 years I watched that business go from tough to nearly a 24/7 operation. Every account person, every senior creative, every lowly client—basically everyone involved who ISN'T on the creative team—wants to have their fingerprints on every aspect of every piece of work, to "show" that their input is there and that they were "involved" in making the Thing "better." Every day (into the evening) became a fire drill.

I had a breakdown compounded by anxiety disorder and decades of alcohol and drug abuse (the work fed the addiction, the addiction affected the attitude towards work, circles within circles) and got out. I should have done it long, long ago. Now I'm 50 and I work in a fancy-pants garden center. Best job I've ever had. But there's no benefits, the pay is measly—and I have zero idea what I will be doing for work for the next 20+ years. My situation is not dire, so I'm fortunate. But I realize I'm kinda fucked longer term.

One day at a time.
posted by SoberHighland at 3:50 PM on May 17, 2021 [12 favorites]

Yeah, I've just been ASTOUNDED watching boundaries erode over my career and really just dissolve entirely over the last year and a half. I was raised by a workaholic so I think my perception of an appropriate workload and life balance has always been skewed but like...when I started working, not everyone had Blackberries. I didn't even have a laptop at work. Then everyone started being expected to own a smartphone and use it for work, and then everyone was issued laptops. I remember when you used to fly places and reliably have a few unreachable hours to watch a bad movie or take a nap. Now we have nowhere to go and the poor parents have been trying to cram in entire workdays between 7pm and 1am, and so we're all expected to just respond to everything, instantly, all the time. By the time I wake up in the morning, I am already behind. I feel dumber and I either flinch every time my phone buzzes, or I avoid it entirely and ignore both my work and my loved ones alike because they all live in the Hell Screen now. None of this is, uh, ideal.

And yeah, I've seen people flame out or die and everything just promptly moves on without them, but I still can't seem to change things. I care about what I do. I want to do it well. I just feel like everyone needs to drastically lower their collective expectations because everyone I know has a substance problem, a psychological problem, or a stress-induced chronic illness at this point.
posted by bowtiesarecool at 4:14 PM on May 17, 2021 [7 favorites]

The bulk of my work is camp work where I drive/fly to some remote location, work 14-21 10 hour days, then return home for 7 days.

But I'm compensated well, get 6weeks of vacation, extended health benefits, 10% pension contribution, stat pay when I work a stat, etc. And I only work 10 hours. At the end of my day I go home and something has to be on literal fire before I get so much as a text message. And housekeeping and meals are included in camp accomodation.

Still amongst the 95% male 18-65 workers staying in camp the number one cause of death is suicide.
posted by Mitheral at 7:06 PM on May 17, 2021 [5 favorites]

Now we have nowhere to go and the poor parents have been trying to cram in entire workdays between 7pm and 1am, and so we're all expected to just respond to everything, instantly, all the time.

I have spent so much time over the past year explaining patiently that if you hire someone part time as an Independent Contractor you cannot actually expect them to be available on-call to you 24/7 with no notice. You just can't! You can't just call them out of the blue one morning and drop 6 hours of work on them due that night.

You shouldn't expect that from your full-time staff either but that horse is long past out the barn.

If you can't build projects and schedules that have even a day's notice between assignment and due date 1) you suck at being a business 2) you need to staff your shit appropriately.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:58 AM on May 18, 2021 [7 favorites]

I don't think work has to necessarily be stressful, and that volume doesn't necessarily have any relation to stress. As a person, my perspective is limited (a fish doesn't know its wet) - I find work exciting, the same work that seems to stress many people out to the point of quitting or having breakdowns. Managing various teams, I've encountered a wide variety of people and observed firsthand their stress reaction to various stimuli at work, which has been interesting and educational. There's also people who bottle up their stress inside and don't let it show, and there's others who openly talk about their worries to me.

At the risk of becoming a slight derail, I feel structures oriented people (NT) in the MBTI / Kiersey framework typically adjust better to a work environment. A motive oriented person is more likely to orient themselves along the lines of "wow I am being given so much work, but I can't finish it all within 8 hours so I'm a failure / this workplace sucks" while a structure oriented person will usually take a bigger picture view -

- You don't have to outrun the bear, just outrun the slowest guy in the group. If you're the slowest guy in the group maybe you are in the wrong workplace.
- You aren't "selling" the plan: you're the ethical consultant who provides expert advice and lets management decide (look, I can do it all, but the quality will suck, or I can do half and it will be good, or I can skip this other workstream until tomorrow). Basically you have no ego, you might have an opinion on what's best, but you always enthusiastically defer to senior management like the little worker drone you are because, eh, you aren't being paid enough to be accountable for those decisions, or else you'd be the one in the senior role, right?
- You always have a plan B if you quit this job. No big deal.
posted by xdvesper at 2:35 AM on May 19, 2021