Sabotage

In many places it seems to have become the norm to celebrate overwork, sleep deprivation and chronic stress. Ordinarily if you reveal that you are unhappy, unproductive and causing yourself mental and physical harm, people will be concerned and try to intervene. However, the expected response to this kind of suffering is usually praise. You haven't had a full night's sleep in months? Wow, you are so dedicated! I wish I could sacrifice that much.

I've heard a lot of reasons for this phenomenon. Obviously there's a certain degree of bravado, no different to the initiation rituals found in many other cultures; you show your strength by willingly enduring harsh conditions. There's a kind of cargo-cult signaling: productive people are busy; busy people must be productive; more busy = more productive, and so on. But there's another good reason that I haven't seen mentioned: deliberate self-sabotage.

You see it often enough when people present something. They'll talk it down before showing it to you as a kind of hedge against your opinion. Oh, it's not done yet. The code's a mess. I threw it together in an hour so don't expect much. You sabotage it before someone else can judge it, which gives you safety in lowered expectations. A crappy app can still be a pretty good for a half-finished prototype. Better still, there's a certain degree of clever misdirection; if your work isn't representative of what you could do under better circumstances, then any criticism isn't really criticism of you or your abilities.

But that kind of sabotage has to be done one situation at a time, and only applies to certain things. What if you could sabotage everything you do? Say, if you could be overworked, overtired and just doing the best you can under the circumstances? That would mean everything you do is not reflective of what you're really capable of. And if you make a dumb mistake and screw something up, you can offer a wistful "oh, oops, I must have done that because I'm so tired and busy".

With that said, I think there is some real benefit in having a kind of creative liability shield at times. Much as corporate limited liability encourages innovation and risk-taking, limiting how much the things you make reflect on your qualities as a person can be a powerful tool for creativity (with similar caveats about ethics and responsibility). I've heard it described as the freedom to fail, but I'd extend that to "the freedom to fail without being a failure". And, despite its negative qualities, sleep deprivation does let you fail without being a failure.

I believe that if we had better options for creative liability shields, it would reduce the appeal of self-sabotage. Maybe that wouldn't be enough to stop the culture of glorified overwork on its own, but it'd be a good start.