It's Time to Stop Living the American Scam
Excellent article by Tim Kreider, worth the read.
I guess a lot of other people had been thinking the same thing. For a few days, that essay was the thing everyone linked to, reposted and emailed. Other writers got paid to write responses to it. Someone even “debunked” it, as though it were a fake Bigfoot film. Entrepreneurial self-help gurus cited it and invited me to conferences. “The Colbert Report” even called, but I was unreachable in the Idaho panhandle at my friend Carolyn’s anniversary party, for which my agent has never really forgiven me. (Meg, I am sorry; Carolyn, I blame you; Mr. Colbert, I am still available.)
A decade later, people aren’t trying to sell busyness as a virtue anymore, not even to themselves. A new generation has grown to adulthood that’s never known capitalism as a functioning economic system. My generation, X, was the first postwar cohort to be downwardly mobile, but millennials were the first to know it going in. Our country’s oligarchs forgot to maintain the crucial Horatio Alger fiction that anyone can get ahead with hard work — or maybe they just dropped it, figuring we no longer had any choice. Through the internet, we could peer enviously at our neighbors in civilized countries, who get monthlong vacations, don’t have to devote decades to paying for their college degrees, and aren’t terrified of going broke if they get sick. To young people, America seems less like a country than an inescapable web of scams, and “hard work” less like a virtue than a propaganda slogan, inane as “Just say no.”
The pandemic was the bomb cyclone of our discontents; it not only gave all us nonessential workers an experience of mandatory sloth — which, for many, turned out to be not altogether unpleasant — but also dredged up a lakeful of long-submerged truths. It turns out that millions of people never actually needed to waste days of their lives sitting in traffic or pantomime “work” under managerial scrutiny eight hours a day. We learned that nurses, cashiers, truckers and delivery people (who’ve always been too busy to brag about it) actually ran the world and the rest of us were mostly useless supernumeraries. The brutal hierarchies of work shifted, for the first time in recent memory, in favor of labor, and the outraged whines of former social Darwinists were a pleasure to savor.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/07/opinion/work-busy-trap-millennials.html?campaign_id=39&emc=edit_ty_20220709&instance_id=66092&nl=opinion-today®i_id=144275770&segment_id=98081&te=1&user_id=9300c9e86795a856411ac8bf084cff8b
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but most of the boomers I know are struggling and have been for many years. There was a time when my parents' generation was the elderly one and as a group they were wealthier than their children and grandchildren. 
You really are lucky to have such an understanding employer. It feels like that is pretty rare these days. 
when someone is on vacation on the other shift, I work the entire seven nights which turns it into eleven nights straight, or eighteen nights straight if it's a two week thing 
It does seem to be a real case of American exceptionalism. I recall an anecdote from an American working for a German firm. He came in early, stayed late, and worked through his lunch hour. Eventually his boss came to him, full of concern, and wondered if they were giving him more work than he could handle, since he couldn't do it all during normal work hours. 
In the US, everyone works their asses off, which doesn't explain why there are so many assholes around.
It doesn't matter how hard you work, the important thing is to be perceived as working hard. That's how Robert Morse made it in "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying." Presumably, results do matter somewhat, but considering CEOs can drive their company into bankruptcy and still receive millions of dollars in bonuses, there must be more to it than mere results.
I once took a management lesson that told us, among other things, that if a subordinate finished his work too quickly, or did noticeably more than expected, he was probably cutting corners and should be watched to make sure he was sufficiently attentive.
-- Mal
