There's an indie game called Deep Sixed that felt this way for me. The plot is that you're a prisoner and your cell is a spaceship that gets moved around for various reasons, and to stay alive you have to constantly fix your spaceship while also battling incoming baddies. It sounded like fun but when I played it I had a genuine stress response. It felt a lot like fixing broken servers while being screamed at on Twitter. I haven't been able to make myself play it since.
MMORPGs can also give you this stress, especially ones where you are invested heavily into the experience. Spent some time on a MUD with actual roleplay and permadeath where people were crazy to the point where some would do all-nighters for intelligence stakeouts, battles, and other events. Many of the team leaders also set up a "hot pager" system so they could be quickly reached to assist while they were offline.
In moments when my character was near death I was often panicking and really feeling the tunnel vision of combat stress. The stakes were high in that a character and assets you spent over a year developing could be wiped out in an instant if you lost your focus. Eventually I couldn't take it and stopped playing.
On the other hand, there are games that are just straight up work - EVE is an example (haven't played it myself but do know people who do) and Rimworld if you play with an optimization/perfectionist mindset.
Besides the fact that I now have RSI (maybe not just due to Dota, possibly due to time spent in front of screen, overall), I realized after a while that I was a sort of people manager for 12-18 year olds and maybe I could just do the same thing at $DAYJOB and end up getting paid better :-)
The legendary GDC talk, The Prototype that was Banned from Halfbrick, describes the unpleasant adversarial effects of some multiplayer games like this, and how they can escalate to be really unpleasant experiences for all involved.
>there are games that are just straight up work [...] if you play with an optimization/perfectionist mindset.
Does this apply only to certain (kinds of) games? Does it come from the way the game is structured?
Or does it have more to do with the community around it? For example RuneScape these days seems to be all about optimization, while back in the day it was more about exploration. (I guess for people who are still playing, there's nothing left to explore...)
Satisfactory and Factorio do that for me. Really good games but i can barely bring myself to play them with how quickly they start making me feel like i'm working.
Wish there was an.. easy mode, or something. Something that let me enjoy that feeling of my work - which i love - but with some simplifications to not exercise the same parts of my brain i'm trying to rest after a long days actual work hah.
For Factorio:
1. Turn off biters (or turn on "peaceful mode", which mostly lets you ignore them until you want to start dealing with them)
1a. Dragon's Teeth wall design
2. Grab one of the quick start mods so you start with a backpack of construction robots
3. City blocks
After that it's down (and up) to you. I've been able to play Factorio like it's I'm gardening - where I'm just chilling, poking at the puzzles - and other times I haven't been, even when I've got the biter problem resolved, and I'm doing what you described.
I tried Factorio a few months ago and after my initial shock with the quality of the game being so high, I found myself falling into optimization mode.
And then it quickly turned into a second job. I had to decided whether I wanted to devote time to Factorio optimization problems, or ...anything else in life.
I love both of those games but recently took on Dyson Sphere Program after it was gifted to me. I quickly put in twice as many hours as I had in Factorio. There is no combat, it's beautiful, and the blueprint system makes it less tedious. Most of the complaints I have about it are nit-picks and at $20 on Steam, it is absolutely worth the price of admission.
I used to feel that way, but eventually figured out a set of design principles that took care of the parts of the game that were stressing me out. Turning off biters, building with a main bus, making a mall for yourself, and building with extra space so you can hack easily will go a long way to reducing the "ahh I'm gonna have to redesign this whole thing" stress.
Yes with Satisfactory especially. The hard part for me is keeping track of goals. I'll start playing with the mindset of "I'm going to finish this factory" and then I'll run out of resources. So on the trip to get more resources I find 5 other things starting to go sideways so I have to start fixing that instead.
Something that did work as "fun" for me was Infinifactory, even though thematically the game is all about it being a job, it's puzzle nature is less daunting than being a sheer optimization problem.
That, and the incredible "Create Mod" for Minecraft, which gives you all sorts of mechanical gizmos. I find it more interesting because building a machine that does something is the primary focus, instead of linking machines together optimally, and the fact that your automations help you achieve the other open-ended goals of Minecraft
"'just enjoy it and don't think' is for those who don't understand what a joy it is to think."
If you're the type of person enjoying a game that is like work but without productivity, "fun" and "mindless" are contradictory attributes. Don't fight yourself. The thinking is the enjoyable part.
I felt this way about an indie game that was actually very well received (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_Metro_(video_game)), and it was fun for a while, but it quickly grew old: the graphics are rudimentary (not expecting AAA-level stuff of course, but still, simple monochrome vector graphics get boring pretty fast), the gameplay is wildly unrealistic (stations popping up out of nowhere that you have to connect to lines which you can instantly change, even erase and rebuild everything, ad infinitum, trains that can be instantly teleported to a completely different line when needed etc.), and every game inevitably gives you a sense of failure, because sooner or later your network is swamped with passengers and collapses. So not really realistic, but the need to constantly optimize the network while the game keeps throwing spanners in your works quickly felt like drudgery. For some time I kept coming back because of the daily challenges and other stuff designed to keep things interesting, but after about one month I decided enough is enough and uninstalled it.
I enjoyed the game for a short while too, I was taking it as having some resemblance of urban planning for the real cities, and getting to redesign some of the terribly inefficient system of cities that I've lived in and others that I greatly admire and try to emulate. Later I just found this is almost random and has not much to do with the actual traffic flow of those cities, it just became an optimization game with increasing difficulty level. That's when I started feeling the "work" element and never went back.
I enjoyed both Metro and the newer Motorways. But inevitably I uninstall them when you realize that at some point at your skill level it just becomes luck as to what items pop out where. With great luck you can easily double the score on a bad luck map.
Do you think your age and life (work) experience did that for you? I have noticed myself feeling considerably differently towards different games too. Games I used to enjoy (like Starcraft) back in the days, I enjoy a lot less as an older guy now and having worked for almost 2 decades. It takes a lot of mental effort to keep up and do well (macro-ing and managing my econ, also micro-ing my army, etc.). Whereas if I play some Fortnite with friends (as a 40 year-old...) it's just pretty relaxing overall and I still enjoy gaming that way.
I feel the same. Starcraft used to be what I would consider a 'light' game. As a teen I got big into the grognard strategy wargames, the kind with over 1000 units and >300 page rule books and very detailed simulation of everything. That and 4X games like Civilization and Alpha Centauri. So much planning and managing and problem-solving through epically long and large games.
Nowadays, in my 40s, it's things like Fortnite (my current favorite), Subnautica, and European/American Truck Simulator. Games where I can just relax and play and not have to do much thinking.
That's a great question. It was work experiences that transformed a challenge into a stressful slog. There are some things in my work history that elicit a PTSD-like response. For example, right now I'm thinking of a software product that I used to have to administer on about 60 servers, and I can feel myself tightening up and almost feeling nauseous. This isn't related to my original comment but answers your question I think. My work experience definitely informed my preference toward games. I like problem solving and expressing creativity. But doing so under pressure is the opposite of fun for me, which is why that game was no-go for this greying geek.
That's an interesting comment. I loved Starcraft as a kid. Played many hours every day. I'm now 33 and never got into Starcraft 2. Nowadays the idea is utterly unappealing. I just play the occasional Call of Duty Warzone (similar to Fortnite) and it's fun.
In a life imitates art moment, I watched the story from the trailer for that game (the character ends up in the cell after being held criminally liable for a mistake at work due to complacency), and then saw this headline in another open browser tab:
My wife (who is an experienced nurse) told me about that case this morning. She has mixed feelings, but is not terribly sympathetic. This person should not be working in the profession, that seems clear. In jail, I don't know. Is there such a thing as "criminally incompetent"?
> While you're busy putting out fires, please don't forget to buy new parts, to continue your assigned mission and if you could also take care of those aliens attacking the lower ring that would be lovely.
Lost Ark was recently released into the US market by Amazon / Smilegate and is getting some negative feedback due to the casino-like elements to the game. Some people just don't want a slot machine simulator, but if you're the publisher who wants to extract maximum revenue from players, then Skinner boxes are apparently the way to go. The player can buy their way past randomness by either purchasing material that increases their chances of winning, or gives them more chances to play. So despite complaints I doubt that mechanic will go anywhere.
My experience with an all-stress game is Papers, Please. Between the pressures of the government bureaucracy, the time stressor and the plight of the poor people you have to crush... it's exhausting.
I feel this way about a lot of games, to be honest. There's so much side-quest filler that feels like work to me (a first play through of one of the Far Cry games had me crafting a wallet or some such nonsense) that it's become quite off-putting. As a teenager with nothing but time, I probably wouldn't have cared, but as a grown man with a full time job and little time to spend on video games, the last thing I want to do is feel like I'm working.
Somewhat related, I remember Space Colony, where you had to manage an eponymous Space Colony, which not only involved assigning jobs to people, but also looking after their mental health.
I work in the web hosting industry. At one point in my career I was answering social media and taking the technical lead in fixing minor server issues. There's a reason I call Twitter "The Little Blue Bird of Hate."
I disagree with a statement in the article: "As a tech employee, if you can’t bear overtime, you can pivot to other industries. But the social problem is not going to be solved because you quit."
Quitting is the most powerful signal a worker can send. It pushes up the price of that work and is the strongest-possible declaration that something is wrong.
Source: Have quit from a field that I love deeply because the environment became intolerable. Furthermore, I've now signed on to a new line of work precisely because the environment is so supportive.
Yeah, I'm a tech worker in China, I quit a 6AM - 11 PM, 6 days a week job (that I loved, a global startup, blah blah) to work as ... exactly doing the same thing in an investment bank and be paid double for 9am-7pm
You know what we bemoaned the most in my previous startup, when hiring ? We couldn't compete with the banks :D You bet, at 9000 USD a month for 50 hours weeks, feels like the post office :D
Everyone knows, btw, that it's a problem, but it's not going to be solved as long as clients expect China to be cheaper, and when it stops, this expectation, we aren't gonna be able to compete because we're not any better quality-wise than the rest. I think India already is the new China and us we're stuck with robot employees that demand more and more money without really giving clients something in exchange :s And our internal market isn't developing fast enough: in fact, the population even decreases so :s
Unless the field is small with very inelastic supply demand curves it won't change much for a small percentage of workers to leave. The forces that got those that would leave the position in the first place often still exist. People will train for a role, even a bad one if it puts food on the table.
Personally, I've found the western tech industry treats employees extremely well, compared to any other job I've had.
Flexible hours and dress code, excellent pay, light supervision, hundreds of employers, air-conditioned offices, great safety record, interesting and meaningful work for those that want it - and it barely needs a college degree. It's not perfect, but it's better than 95% of jobs out there.
(Of course, the games programming industry is to be avoided at all costs)
I believe those fields are where there's high demand but not enough supply.
China tech can treat people like shit because there's always someone to replace them. I think the stats were more engineers graduate from China come out than the entire history of USA engineers each year.
When there's high demand, then any place that systematically treats people like shit would not retain workers and die off. Of course, exceptions exist for places that pay shit tons of money.
I absolutely respect and appreciate that the game wasn't trying to be "fun"; it was trying to communicate a message. And I firmly believe that not all games should be fun.
But at the same time... well, I have enough work to do in my life. There has to be a balance. Not every movie is "fun" but even art house films are generally "pleasant" to watch on some level.
Interesting. I didn't feel that way about Papers Please, because it has a story and it's more like a short puzzle.
It's not endless. It's basically a sequence of puzzles (with a story and some choices thrown in), where each stage introduces a variation on the puzzle. There is a very limited number of stages, after which the game ends.
Compare this to something like Factorio, which is essentially endless (and you're programming, so basically it's job #2).
I tried getting into Factorio and bowed out for this reason. It had kind of the same complexities as programming, except now instead of making my arrangements directly I now had to control a little animated sprite to walk around and place things. The spaceman as a character holds no compelling interest.
I suppose there's probably some "pure design" mode that skips that tedium, but then the game feels shallow. You're design a bunch of dataflow pipelines organized on a 2D grid. Also the graphics feel washed out and grainy, and the whole alien species attacks thing was distracting.
Playing factorio just makes me want to reimplement factorio. Not that I have the time or inclination.
I don’t know how far you got into it, but I will underscore it does have a story and an ending (multiple, even). You won’t be in an infinite daily grind to finish, and your actions have consequences.
I'll throw light on another linked article from the same website https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1006391/how-one-obscure-word-... . Reading it is just blowing my mind, as someone from SouthEast Asia (not China) the conversation on competition and societal pressure rings very true.
> Therefore, the winners demand the losers to admit that they are a failure: Not only that they have less money and fewer material possessions; they must bow down morally and admit that they’re useless and have failed. If you don’t admit it and simply quietly walk away from the competition, you’ll face a lot of criticism. It’s not allowed.
This passage was pretty hair-raising. I think the freedom to fail gracefully is something we take for granted in "the west".
There is plenty of this in The West, too. It's often just couched in different terms, or in different ways. The continued dog-pile on the poor or homeless comes to mind.
To quote some dude from The West:
“It is not enough merely to win; others must lose.”
― Gore Vidal
It's funny how I highlighted it as well, along with the guy applying to mcdonald's story. The kind of social pressure and moral shaming it describes is absolutely real
There really needs to be a comparative study between China's internet industry and the U.S.'s. It often seems like horror stories of 996 are like Silicon Valley unpaid overtime burnout culture, ramped up to a new degree.
> “No matter how good you are at the game, the game has only one ending, which is the company being acquired,” Ding said, adding she was sad when she played it for the first time, believing being acquired means failure. “Later, I searched for a job for a period of time, encountered various setbacks, and gradually realized that the process of trying hard is more precious. When I went back and played it again, I accepted the ending, and felt that it was really in line with the current internet age.”
The same market dynamics on both sides of the Pacific.
There was a puzzle game that came out when UML was still a thing people talked about doing and put on their resumes. The puzzle was a graph of nodes and edges and you won when none of the edges crossed.
I had fun with it for about an hour and then got this terrible sense if deja vu. And then it hit my like a ton of bricks. This is flattening a UML diagram but turned into a game. I pushed back from my desk and went to get some air, and that was the last time I played that game. And (coincidentally?) close to the last time I volunteered to do make class diagrams.
I went and found this game again relatively recently. It reminds me so much of decoupling and refactoring software or vice versa. I spent a few years occasionally trying to remember what distant memory of an experience decoupling reminded me of.
I quite enjoy both. Whilst simultaneously kind of hating the process.
Incredible sense of clarity once you've resolved everything that was stepping in the way of understanding. Moments of despair and frustration. Sense of progress combined with feeling this could be never ending. Iteratively trying to step towards something better.
It all seeming worth it in the end. So many parallels.
I once made such a game, but that was more based from how interesting graph theory can be, and how you can visualize graphs and interact with them. The most difficult part was thinking how to create a solvable level, i.e. how to create a planar graph. Oh, and ofcourse actually completing the whole game, which I actually managed to do.
Just greedily generate a planar graph? lay out some points randomly, start adding edges at random and skip adding any new edge that crosses an existing edge? Then randomize the positions of the nodes to give you a game board?
Even modern FPS are like that. In the recent installments of Far Cry, for example, I have found myself spending not a small portion of time collecting stuff, tweaking the possessions, building/fixing things. While still enjoying these otherwise excellent and fun games, I find older games, like the original Doom, Unreal, or early installments of FarCry, more enjoyable and fun - exactly because they feel less like "work."
I really wish there were more tactical games where the battles and armies were predetermined rather than configurable - I absolutely love tweaking army composition and handling resource builds and tech trees and etc. -sometimes- but some days I really just want to be airdropped into a (preferably turn based) fight and left to think my way through winning with the resources I've been given.
(then if I really just want to shoot a virtual bad guy, I go back to replaying the old Wing Commander games since for whatever reason I can climb the learning curves of those more easily than FPSes)
You might enjoy Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, although it's pretty shallow in most areas, you can configure the position and composition of your army's units and then watch the battle play out in real-time.
You might like some of the games at matrixgames.com and slitherine.com because they specialize primarily in turn-based strategy/war games and have a ton of them. However, while some of them are 'pick a scenario and play', others are hugely complex with full production, logistics, research, etc.
The John Tiller's Campaign Series games and Strategic Command games are pretty playable, Harpoon Ultimate if you like naval, and Field Of Glory if you have interest in the ancient/medieval eras.
If you want to play classic games I would suggest Myth: The Fallen Lords series. It's a story told battle by battle, and you are just given the units you are given.
I feel like the workaholic culture defies everything we understand about modern productivity and I am surprised it is so celebrated in other cultures.
I wonder if it is more about not raising quality of living TOO high, as opposed to actual competitive concerns.
For me, I see my work and life as a balance of sharpening the axe and cutting through the tree. I practice mindfulness a lot and am constantly trying to optimize my mood and life to stay efficient and happy.
I take care of myself in my down-time, and during work hours I execute ruthlessly. This has always worked well for me. I consistently receive excellence awards at work, get large promotions and raises, and have never been put on a PIP or fired. A CEO at a company I worked at once said of me "I wish we could clone honkycat 5 times to fill these positions." Not to brag. Just establishing that I perform well at work.
Overall my motto is "4 good hours" of deep work a day will keep me in the green performance-wise.
So what is the reasoning of this culture? Am I just mistaken?
Readit News
https://store.steampowered.com/app/591000/Deep_Sixed/
In moments when my character was near death I was often panicking and really feeling the tunnel vision of combat stress. The stakes were high in that a character and assets you spent over a year developing could be wiped out in an instant if you lost your focus. Eventually I couldn't take it and stopped playing.
On the other hand, there are games that are just straight up work - EVE is an example (haven't played it myself but do know people who do) and Rimworld if you play with an optimization/perfectionist mindset.
Besides the fact that I now have RSI (maybe not just due to Dota, possibly due to time spent in front of screen, overall), I realized after a while that I was a sort of people manager for 12-18 year olds and maybe I could just do the same thing at $DAYJOB and end up getting paid better :-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9WMNuyjm4w
Does this apply only to certain (kinds of) games? Does it come from the way the game is structured?
Or does it have more to do with the community around it? For example RuneScape these days seems to be all about optimization, while back in the day it was more about exploration. (I guess for people who are still playing, there's nothing left to explore...)
I'm getting Victoria 2 flashbacks just reading this sentence...
Wish there was an.. easy mode, or something. Something that let me enjoy that feeling of my work - which i love - but with some simplifications to not exercise the same parts of my brain i'm trying to rest after a long days actual work hah.
Who knows, maybe it would be boring :shrug:
After that it's down (and up) to you. I've been able to play Factorio like it's I'm gardening - where I'm just chilling, poking at the puzzles - and other times I haven't been, even when I've got the biter problem resolved, and I'm doing what you described.
And then it quickly turned into a second job. I had to decided whether I wanted to devote time to Factorio optimization problems, or ...anything else in life.
I chose life :)
[0] https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=13864128...
Something that did work as "fun" for me was Infinifactory, even though thematically the game is all about it being a job, it's puzzle nature is less daunting than being a sheer optimization problem.
That, and the incredible "Create Mod" for Minecraft, which gives you all sorts of mechanical gizmos. I find it more interesting because building a machine that does something is the primary focus, instead of linking machines together optimally, and the fact that your automations help you achieve the other open-ended goals of Minecraft
Now there's always something I want to be doing, but that's another problem.
It's an amazing game. It felt very stimulating the first few hours. Then it became work, and now I don't think I will ever start it anymore.
If you're the type of person enjoying a game that is like work but without productivity, "fun" and "mindless" are contradictory attributes. Don't fight yourself. The thinking is the enjoyable part.
Kind of put me off all Apple Arcade games honestly.
Nowadays, in my 40s, it's things like Fortnite (my current favorite), Subnautica, and European/American Truck Simulator. Games where I can just relax and play and not have to do much thinking.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/03/25/1088902...
Hmm, yeah. I wonder where I’ve heard that before.
Quitting is the most powerful signal a worker can send. It pushes up the price of that work and is the strongest-possible declaration that something is wrong.
Source: Have quit from a field that I love deeply because the environment became intolerable. Furthermore, I've now signed on to a new line of work precisely because the environment is so supportive.
You know what we bemoaned the most in my previous startup, when hiring ? We couldn't compete with the banks :D You bet, at 9000 USD a month for 50 hours weeks, feels like the post office :D
Everyone knows, btw, that it's a problem, but it's not going to be solved as long as clients expect China to be cheaper, and when it stops, this expectation, we aren't gonna be able to compete because we're not any better quality-wise than the rest. I think India already is the new China and us we're stuck with robot employees that demand more and more money without really giving clients something in exchange :s And our internal market isn't developing fast enough: in fact, the population even decreases so :s
And, yet, a worker quitting has close to zero effect on an industry of the scale of the one which is at issue.
That it is the most powerful tool you have does not make it a tool that is effective.
Many workers quitting can change an industry.
Flexible hours and dress code, excellent pay, light supervision, hundreds of employers, air-conditioned offices, great safety record, interesting and meaningful work for those that want it - and it barely needs a college degree. It's not perfect, but it's better than 95% of jobs out there.
(Of course, the games programming industry is to be avoided at all costs)
Our team and adjoining teams are hiring for Business Analysts, Data Engineers, Software Engineers, and more in the US and EU.
https://www.rover.com/careers/search/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30533028
The company takes its values seriously.
https://www.rover.com/careers/core-values/
China tech can treat people like shit because there's always someone to replace them. I think the stats were more engineers graduate from China come out than the entire history of USA engineers each year.
When there's high demand, then any place that systematically treats people like shit would not retain workers and die off. Of course, exceptions exist for places that pay shit tons of money.
I absolutely respect and appreciate that the game wasn't trying to be "fun"; it was trying to communicate a message. And I firmly believe that not all games should be fun.
But at the same time... well, I have enough work to do in my life. There has to be a balance. Not every movie is "fun" but even art house films are generally "pleasant" to watch on some level.
It's not endless. It's basically a sequence of puzzles (with a story and some choices thrown in), where each stage introduces a variation on the puzzle. There is a very limited number of stages, after which the game ends.
Compare this to something like Factorio, which is essentially endless (and you're programming, so basically it's job #2).
I suppose there's probably some "pure design" mode that skips that tedium, but then the game feels shallow. You're design a bunch of dataflow pipelines organized on a 2D grid. Also the graphics feel washed out and grainy, and the whole alien species attacks thing was distracting.
Playing factorio just makes me want to reimplement factorio. Not that I have the time or inclination.
This passage was pretty hair-raising. I think the freedom to fail gracefully is something we take for granted in "the west".
To quote some dude from The West:
“It is not enough merely to win; others must lose.” ― Gore Vidal
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26027673
> “No matter how good you are at the game, the game has only one ending, which is the company being acquired,” Ding said, adding she was sad when she played it for the first time, believing being acquired means failure. “Later, I searched for a job for a period of time, encountered various setbacks, and gradually realized that the process of trying hard is more precious. When I went back and played it again, I accepted the ending, and felt that it was really in line with the current internet age.”
The same market dynamics on both sides of the Pacific.
I had fun with it for about an hour and then got this terrible sense if deja vu. And then it hit my like a ton of bricks. This is flattening a UML diagram but turned into a game. I pushed back from my desk and went to get some air, and that was the last time I played that game. And (coincidentally?) close to the last time I volunteered to do make class diagrams.
I went and found this game again relatively recently. It reminds me so much of decoupling and refactoring software or vice versa. I spent a few years occasionally trying to remember what distant memory of an experience decoupling reminded me of.
I quite enjoy both. Whilst simultaneously kind of hating the process.
Incredible sense of clarity once you've resolved everything that was stepping in the way of understanding. Moments of despair and frustration. Sense of progress combined with feeling this could be never ending. Iteratively trying to step towards something better. It all seeming worth it in the end. So many parallels.
The other game I can lose time in is Universal Paperclips[1], I looped through it 100 times before quitting.
1 - https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
Or is there a simpler way?
(then if I really just want to shoot a virtual bad guy, I go back to replaying the old Wing Commander games since for whatever reason I can climb the learning curves of those more easily than FPSes)
The John Tiller's Campaign Series games and Strategic Command games are pretty playable, Harpoon Ultimate if you like naval, and Field Of Glory if you have interest in the ancient/medieval eras.
Very iconic game, loved it growing up.
There’s often a couple different ways to victory and there’s already enough built out to put plans into action immediately.
Also, a lot of TRPGS tend to be hellishly difficult.
I wonder if it is more about not raising quality of living TOO high, as opposed to actual competitive concerns.
For me, I see my work and life as a balance of sharpening the axe and cutting through the tree. I practice mindfulness a lot and am constantly trying to optimize my mood and life to stay efficient and happy.
I take care of myself in my down-time, and during work hours I execute ruthlessly. This has always worked well for me. I consistently receive excellence awards at work, get large promotions and raises, and have never been put on a PIP or fired. A CEO at a company I worked at once said of me "I wish we could clone honkycat 5 times to fill these positions." Not to brag. Just establishing that I perform well at work.
Overall my motto is "4 good hours" of deep work a day will keep me in the green performance-wise.
So what is the reasoning of this culture? Am I just mistaken?