Alone and Anxious: Addiction to Work as an Adaptation to Postmodern Dislocation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The majority of Canadians work upwards of forty-five hours a week, and nearly a third of Canadians identify themselves as addicted to work (Duxbury & Higgins, 2013, p. 6; Keown, 2008, p. 28). This essay investigates the question: to what extent does the concept of addiction to work shed light on society’s anxieties? By examining values underpinning the free market economy and how they affect the daily rythym of human life, I argue that the pressures of postmodern life dislocate individuals within their social context. In a need to alleviate the anxieties stemming from this instability, individuals often work excessively to establish a sense of identity and security. An unbalanced amount of work, however, exacerbates not only a person’s fears but their compulsivity to work, multiplying the detrimental effects to their daily lives. In sum, because workaholism further distances us from social rootedness, it is crucial to question cultural acceptance of excessive focus and time spent on work.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".