Workaholism.

My name is James and I'm a workaholic.
I've been sober (not doing work) for 2hrs whilst I've been doing DoW.

There used to be a point where I used to be proud to say I was a workaholic. A few extra hours won't hurt, hell I'm sure it'll result in possible benefits in the future. But you know when that what was originally a fling with the dark side has turned to something worse. This is when you start lying to people about how much extra work you're doing, and when something that just was an hour or two on the weekend becomes effectively an 80 hr work week.
You start cutting yourself off from things you used to enjoy on the excuse, 'you're no good at it anyway, why waste valuable effort on it'. Important things like trying to find love gets shelved because "you're too busy to have time for a girlfriend and besides you trying will just result in embarrassment". Stupid little excuses for the real truth which is you simply value work over everything else. After all, you work harder, you get rewarded. You try to find a date and its just rejection one after the other.

Then eventually this tower comes crashing down when you realise, that when it comes down to it. Work does NOT value you as much as you value it. And that's also when you realise that you've lost time on something that actually has no value, and you'll never EVER get it back.
//falls sobbing into the arms of the fat female moderator.
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Wow I'm particularly proud of that. I could even believe that was me.
You don't have to look very deep to realise, there is grains of truth, hell entire cereal packets of truth in what I just said and what is my life.

Workaholism is an illness. Its just that simple. People make excuses about pushing your career, but really its a form of OCD. The sad thing is, that person at least in the short term IS more productive and supervisors, management will encourage and potentially reward such behaviour. Management is often myopic and won't realise this behaviour will backfire. And backfire it will. Maybe it'll be a year, maybe it'll be five years, but one day the employee will get the sickening realization that, "I've been wasting my life".

Worse yet, of all the addictions in the world, Workaholism is a socially 'respected' addiction. Hell there have been studies touting that there are 'positive forms' of workaholism. Behaviouralists say 'if people are working hard at what they enjoy, it can't be bad for them'. People think highly of someone who puts in the hard yards at their employment. But really, how is it any different to the other great 'holism', alcoholism. Both are really forms of escapism right? The employee is good at work, and maybe not so good as a father, or husband. So you do what you do best instead. Proven surveys show correlation between martial breakdown, dysfunctional parental relationships, and health deterioration. From a corporate view, it leads to this burst of productivity early on, which is more than completely negated by increased sick days, reduced motivation and turnover.

Yet WHY is it companies don't do anything about this? I know no one ever monitors how much EXCESS work I do or anyone else for that matter. Sure if I slack off for a little while I might get someone commenting, but other than my work friends, not a single manager has ever told that I should perhaps cut back. My mate at the ARL works till 3am to get things right. Do you think any of his bosses say to cut back? Nope, its at best 'thanks for your hard work', or more likely 'we've still got all these fires to put out'

Its a no-brainer to say work more, but it takes courage and insight into really understanding your employees to say 'Hey James, your task today is to go ask that nice receptionist out to a movie and dinner and give a report in the morning'.

If only the workplace was THAT straightforward.