Why it’s a real addiction

Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction

At some stage in the late 20th Century, the concept of the workaholic crept into our culture, and it has been getting bigger all the time. It is there in all discussions about our old friend, the work-life balance; and our even older friend, the male-female balance.

Because until the late 20th Century, if you devoted all of your physical and emotional and spiritual energies to your work, and none of your energy to your relationships, nobody considered it abnormal — they mightn’t like it, if ‘they’ happened to be the people in those relationships with you, but there were no articles in the paper about it, no mention that such an addiction to work might be seen as, well, an addiction.

Then again, for a long time, an addiction to drink or to anything else was not seen as addiction, as such, it was just an unfortunate part of life, and ideally you would either get on with it, or just pretend that it wasn’t there.

But the workaholism is a really tricky one, because work has more inherent merit than drink or drugs or gambling. It has a high moral value; we even speak of a ‘work ethic’. In many cases, it is essential to the maintenance of human life, body and soul.

Indeed, the soul part was beautifully realised in the recent Oscar-winning documentary, Free Solo, which portrayed the obsession of the rock climber Alex Honnold and his struggle to climb the notorious El Capitan in Yosemite. Into this vision of a man’s total absorption in his work, as it were, came his girlfriend Sanni McCandless, who, as his girlfriend, felt it was important that Honnold develop some kind of an emotional life that didn’t entirely involve climbing a mountain without a rope.

And yet the audience was truly torn, because in this most perfect illustration of the workaholic at work, we could see his point of view as well in this most urgent

way — if he did allow himself to become a more rounded human being, there was a serious chance that this might in some way distract him, or otherwise shift his focus, to the extent that he would lose some tiny amount of the concentration needed for such an unbelievably dangerous pursuit, and then he would fall off the rock and he would die.

To which an obvious solution would be for him simply to stop climbing, for his own sake and that of everyone around him — and yet the viewer also understood that Honnold’s mother was voicing an essential truth when she said that you can’t take such a thing away from a person, when it matters so much to them; in fact, she couldn’t understand why anyone would even want to do that.

And yes, I know that we are talking here about special individuals, about workaholism in its purest form — you might make a similar case about James Joyce, that you shouldn’t get involved with James Joyce in the first place if you’re going to try to persuade him of the benefits of the work-life balance; that there are plenty of people out there for you who aren’t James Joyce.

But to the proverbial insurance salesman or the quantity surveyor, the obsession with the selling of insurance or the surveying of quantities is no less intense than the desire to free-climb El Capitan is to Honnold, or the need to finish off Finnegans Wake was to Joyce.

So, at one level, workaholism is not seen as a ‘real’ form of addiction, just a made-up thing, in which the ‘aholic’ was added to ‘work’ the way that ‘gate’ is added to every kind of minor scandal. And yet, for the victims, it is a harder one to crack than any of the other addictions.

You can tell them they should try living with an ‘actual’ addict — but there are far more treatments for the ‘actual’ stuff, more recognition.

You don’t have to work so hard at it.

“In this perfect illustration of the workaholic at work, we saw his point of view”