Why do we think hard work is virtuous? Max Weber's Protestant Ethic gives a sharp answer

"We are familiar with this type of thing. Elon Musk once claimed "nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week", apparently unaware that people from Archimedes to Nobel laureate Sir Alexander Fleming managed just fine on a normal schedule If Musk turned overwork into public theatre (he even said he slept on Tesla's factory floor), the biographies of Microsoft founder Bill Gates had already given us a prototype."

"Gates would stretch out under his terminal like a secular Buddha, waiting not for enlightenment, but for executable code. Whether you find these stories inspiring or slightly deranged, the point is the same: today, overwork is one of the few politically neutral ways to show virtue. We don't just work to live; we work to prove we deserve to. These values aren't written in the stars, or in our DNA, or in the logic of history."

"One of the sharper answers came from German sociologist Max Weber. His book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) has become a classic - though we need to be careful about what "classic" means here. Like the Bible or Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, The Protestant Ethic is widely bought, regularly invoked, and rarely read. Weber's book is not quite a history of economics, nor is it what we would label "religious history". It borrows from both, but is stranger than either."

People sometimes treat extreme labor as a badge of honor, boasting of physical collapse as proof of virtue. High-profile entrepreneurs and tech figures turn overwork into public spectacle, framing long hours and sleep deprivation as signs of commitment. Overwork operates as a politically neutral way to demonstrate moral worth and deservingness. These values are socially constructed rather than innate or inevitable. A German sociologist traced how certain Protestant religious ideas helped shape the mindset underpinning modern capitalist work habits. That analysis has become widely known and frequently invoked, even if many engage with its reputation more than its content.

Read at The Conversation