Something has gone wrong with the way we work.

A recent survey by Wondr Health found that most American workers suffer from “time poverty.” Psychologist Mark Travers defines “time poverty” as “experiencing a lack of sufficient time to fulfill responsibilities, pursue interests or engage in activities that contribute to one’s well-being due to various demands on [one’s] time.” Increasingly, Americans’ careers are eating up so much of their life that they have little time and energy for anything else.

The Wondr Health survey revealed that 62% of workers don’t take time off and let one-third of their vacation days expire, fearing the ramifications of taking time away.

Time-poverty negatively affects physical and mental health and overall quality of life. Ron Goetzel, a Johns Hopkins scientist, told Newseek that time poverty “takes a toll on individuals, businesses and the larger society,” going on to say,

Although all of us are given 24 hours in a day, people feel they need to cram in as much activity into that time as possible—without sitting back and asking whether the activity enhances their quality of life, happiness and a sense of accomplishment, or not.

Many modern workplaces exert pressure on employees to avoid vacations, work long hours, and be ready to hop-to at a moment’s notice. Overworking and perpetual engagement with one’s job gets rewarded, whereas taking a break might get you slapped with a “lazy” label, even if you’re contractually entitled to vacation.

Working from home doesn’t necessarily reduce the pressure, either. In fact, remote work – for all the flexibility and autonomy it affords – has given rise to a troubling new phenomenon: the erosion of the 9-5 work schedule, replaced with the “infinite workday.” A June 2025 report from Microsoft showed that many knowledge workers remain hooked up to work communications all the time – from the first sliver of dawn to the last echo of evening – answering emails and Teams messages well before and after the sun’s appearance.

The irony is that companies’ obsessive focus on productivity, profit, and employee performance may be undercutting their own success. According to Newsweek’s coverage, time poverty among employees leads to lower productivity and higher rates of burnout and turnover – none of which ultimately achieves corporate goals or helps the bottom line. Inundating employees with meetings and checklists rarely leads to improved efficiency and profit, either.

Time-poverty and the infinite workday are symptoms of how Americans’ work lives have encroached so much on family and personal life that the latter is in danger of being swallowed by the former. Technology and communication channels have only exacerbated the problem because they enable employers to have constant access to employees – even outside normal working hours. Work-from-homers are also more likely to feel pressure to demonstrate their productivity and engagement by remaining “tuned-in” past 5 p.m., and sometimes before 5 a.m.

I experienced the infinite workday briefly while working remotely for a nonprofit. The constant cannonade of text messages, emails, phone calls, Zooms, and Teams messages dazed and befuddled my mind. I struggled to complete projects due to the perpetual interruptions. Even when the workday was officially over, calls from my boss weren’t uncommon – which meant revisions, corrections, and “emergency” projects dragging on late into the evening, pushing aside family time and simple relaxation. It didn’t take me long to realize this just wasn’t sustainable.

Is work supposed to be like this? Economic pressures coupled with the American emphasis on the “dream” of financial success have driven us further away from genuine work-life balance. Many of us get sucked into a vortex of living to work instead of working to live. We dazedly and somewhat desperately trade away any hope of true leisure, slow living, or family time in exchange for some rather vague idea of career achievement.

“But,” some might object, “I have to work like a dog just to make ends meet.” Unfortunately, that’s increasingly true in our economy of inflation on track to become so expansive the whole economic system just floats away like a balloon.

At the same time, American society has adopted an absurdly plush standard of living. Does the average American family really need brand new cars? Does every family member need their own cell phone? Does the family need a sprawling McMansion when, just a few generations ago, our forebears happily raised larger families in much smaller and more modest accommodations? Is it worth being wealthy on paper yet destitute when it comes to the most valuable and non-renewable resource: time? These are questions worth asking.

Of course, nice things aren’t bad in themselves. But we must consider them at their real value. Owning all these things yet not owning our own lives seems like a poor exchange.

That’s on the side of the employees. But it’s the employers who bear greater blame for this problem. Employers must build a work culture that puts people first. Treating human beings like machines whose only function is to complete tasks in exchange for money leads to the degradation of labor and laborers alike. Man is a spiritual being, whose deepest aspirations and most enduring forms of fulfillment aren’t economic, whatever he might tell himself. Aristotle saw this clearly over 2,300 years ago, explaining human happiness and life’s ultimate goal in the “Nicomachean Ethics.” He succinctly declares that the goal cannot be wealth:

As for the life of money-making, it is one of constraint, and wealth manifestly is not the good we are seeking, because it is for use, that is, for the sake of something further.

Aristotle reasons that the ultimate good of life must be something we desire for its own sake. But money we desire for the sake of something else (what it can buy us or the happiness it can bring). Therefore, it’s not the ultimate good.

Modern employers and employees would do well to meditate on this simple but profound point from Aristotle.

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image Credit: Freerange Stock