I don’t think I’ve ever met a person who believes he or she doesn’t work hard. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at your friend’s Facebook posts. If you talk to anyone at the end of their 8 hour shift or their 12 hour day, they will inevitably tell you how exhausted they are. They will understandably tell you about all the hours of selfless sacrifice that so often goes unnoticed.

We get to work early and we stay late. We believe working hard is a dominant part of our DNA. It is who we are. It is what we do. We all believe. Rather, we all know that we work hard. Wait a second! How can that be possible? How can we all work hard all of the time? Well, there is a simple answer. We don’t.

You may think that you are the hardest working person in showbiz, but the truth is that none of us really works as hard as we could. At the end of our day, we usually have something left in the tank. Let’s be honest. The luxury of our first world rarely requires us to work all that hard. Although there are a few, most of us aren’t digging ditches for a living. I am not afraid to say it, we are rather soft.

Sorry to burst your bubble. Working hard isn’t clicking a mouse. It isn’t typing on a keyboard. It isn’t sitting in a chair. Even as I write this blog, which is vaguely interpreted as work, I am sitting comfortably contemplating what snack I want to eat next. It can’t be hard work if I can gain weight doing it.

I’m sorry if I have offended some of you. I’m sorry if somehow I have discredited your version of hard work. I just want all of us to remember how good we have it. Most of us don’t dig ditches for a living in 100 degree heat. Most of us don’t hunt for our dinner, catch fish for the entire village or toil for 18 hours a day for pennies.

Compared to the rest of the world, we probably get paid more than we deserve for doing what we do. That’s not our fault. We aren’t to blame. We shouldn’t apologize for where we live or how fortunate we are. However, we shouldn’t walk around with our noses in the air bragging about how hard we work.

We may work harder than the schmuck in the next cubicle. But, in the larger scheme of humankind, our hard work may not be that hard at all. Hard work is relative. It is relative to whom we compare ourselves to. We should be careful about declaring ourselves hard work superstars, without understanding what hard work really is.

Slightly different,

doc mu