Erik Baker

There are all these books now that will offer you a guide for how to detach from your work and chill out a bit.

Of course, all of that's for the best, but there are really deep structural and material forces that are pressing this way of thinking on people.

That pot of gold has been very elusive for a lot of people.

When I was writing the book, I sometimes told people that I was writing the kind of prehistory of the grind set.

I think that's exactly was my motivation for writing this book was to name and to criticize this culture that so many people, you know, myself included, have experienced and find exhausting.

Thanks so much for having me on.

We get this new idea that increasingly emphasizes the importance of not just working hard, but about creating new work for oneself and for others, always being alert to new opportunities, trying to stay one step ahead of the market technological change and

economic developments and things like that.

This kind of set of virtues, increasingly over the course of the 20th century, comes to be described as being entrepreneurial.

This entrepreneurial work ethic becomes dominant.

The idea that even ordinary company workers should be entrepreneurial really takes root in the response to the economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, especially in response to the threat of global competition from

businesses in East Asia.

This sort of leads a lot of the corporate management class to become obsessed with the idea of innovation and this need to sort of perpetually stay one step ahead of the market.

And so, of course, this gets passed down to workers too.

This is a period as well of intense corporate downsizing and restructuring.

Corporations are feeling a profitability squeeze.

So the question becomes, okay, which kind of workers are going to go?

And

this rhetoric emerges that you need to be entrepreneurial in order to prove your value and in order to stay.

Yes, that's all exactly right.