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「工作狂英语演讲稿」Whatever Happened to the People Who Work
【工作狂英语演讲稿】Whatever Happened to the People Who Work
VectorJ
[Greetings.]
Today, the topic I wanna discuss is about workaholics.
There is a story on my textbook, unit 2, The Company Man, which starts like this:
He worked himself to death, finally and precisely, at 3 am. Sunday morning.
When I first read this story, indeed, it scared me. But what scared me most, just a few seconds later, was that I realized that, once upon a time, I, myself, used to be a workaholic.
And if I kept walking down that path, maybe one day, I’d end up like that company man who died alone at a time when most people usually do not die.
So, I began to wonder, why did I do what I did?
Or, why do people become workaholics?
Even, why do we choose to work?
After my painful deliberation, （I mean, thinking is always suffering,） here I wanna share two different answers with you.
Answer No.1 was concluded by myself.
We work because of our deficiency of meaning and purpose.
We human-beings have been suffering from two different kinds of dilemmas, which have threatened our existence for centuries.
Firstly, death. This is the physical end for all of us. We don’t know if there would be anything that comes after death. Therefore, so far, when someone has died, we say he has been completely removed, or erased, from this world and this reality.
Secondly, the possible meaninglessness of life itself. This may be the kind of truth we are not happy to confront, but we have to admit that there could be a great chance that a man’s life is created by accident and, also, full of uncertainty. This is why we have the Nihilism theory. Think about what the Romanian philosopher Emil once said, “I’m simply an accident. Why take any of this seriously?”
Faced with these two insurmountable problems, firstly death, secondly the possible meaninglessness of life itself, the sense of self-realization brought by hard working could be the only solution towards a truly happy and meaningful life.
Next, answer No.2.
Workaholic is actually a global phenomenon because we all are surrounded by snobs.
This was derived from an English author named Alain de Botton, from one of his speeches on TED.
From his opinion, in this society, we have nothing in the center that is non-human. We are the first society where we don’t worship anything other than ourselves. It is all about human. No more gods. Our heroes are human heroes. Why not? Hey, think about this. We even started sending people into the space.
So under this atmosphere, a huge number of people have become snobs.
And what is a snob?
A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are.
And the dominant snobbery nowadays is job snobbery.
For example, just as Botton said in his speech, the first question you tend to ask when you meet somebody at a party is “what do you do”.
In this case, our work, our jobs are so closely related to our self image, even our social status. We so desperately care about our image and the way others treat us, which compels us to work harder and harder.
This was supposed to be the end of my speech. However, I wanna leave this more encouraging, less depressing. So I began to think what if I could say something to other workaholics, or myself in the past. It was a piece of advice from Neil Gaiman, one of my favorite freelancers, from his speech at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
He said, “I learned to write by writing. I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work, which meant that life did not feel like work.”
[The end.]
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