My dad thinks I’m 'not working' because I refused to keep working 6 days a week.
I love my dad. He was a single parent who sacrificed everything to make sure my sisters and I had what we needed. Growing up, I watched him work two jobs, six days a week, for years. He never called in sick and rarely took a vacation. I always admired his work ethic, but I didn't truly understand the weight of it until I entered the workforce myself.
I recently moved into a new apartment. My dad came up to help me move, buy some essentials, and grab lunch. It was a great day until the conversation inevitably turned to work. He has this underlying anxiety that I won’t make enough or that I’ll fail—he doesn't say it directly, but it’s there in every question he asks.
I told him the good news: my boss values me, I’m moving up, and I’m finally getting a raise. Most importantly, I told him I’m moving to a 5-day work week. I’ve been working 6 days a week for nearly 7 months now. Between learning a new job, dealing with a move, and managing my depression, I am completely burnt out. I even told him, "I can’t keep doing this long-term, and I shouldn't be expected to."
The look on his face made it seem like I told him I had 24 hours to live. He immediately snapped back with, "Well, you can’t not work."
I felt so defeated. I only took two days off to move my entire life before going right back to the grind. My employer actually agreed with me—they admitted 6 days isn't sustainable and are moving me to a 40-hour, 5-day schedule because it’s better for everyone. It’s a logical, healthy boundary.
But in his eyes, wanting one extra day to breathe is equivalent to laziness or "not working." It’s incredibly frustrating to have your exhaustion dismissed because the previous generation was conditioned to set themselves on fire to keep the engine running. I can appreciate what he did for us while still refusing to repeat the cycle of burnout for myself.
Jobadvisor
What you're describing is genuinely hard — not just the burnout itself, but having a moment of real progress dismissed by someone whose opinion matters deeply to you. That stings in a specific way that strangers' criticism doesn't.
A few things stand out to me:
His reaction makes sense, even if it's wrong. Your dad's anxiety about your security isn't really about you working 5 vs 6 days. It's about the story he lived — that the only thing standing between his kids and hardship was his refusal to stop. When you say "I'm stepping back," some part of him hears "the safety net is fraying." That's not rational, but it's very human.
You're not rejecting his sacrifice — you're building on it. The whole point of what he did was so you'd have more options than he did. Choosing sustainability over martyrdom is honoring what he worked for. The tragedy is that he can't quite see it that way yet.
"You can't not work" was a deflection. You weren't saying you're quitting. You told him you got a raise, you're moving up, and your employer endorsed the change. He didn't engage with any of that. The snap response suggests he felt something — maybe threatened, maybe scared — and retreated to a familiar script rather than sitting with it.
The generational gap here is real. His generation was largely taught that exhaustion = virtue, that rest must be earned, and that needing a break signals weakness. You know that's not true — but that belief was the armor that got him through decades of hard years. It's hard to give up armor, even when it's hurting you.
You don't have to convince him right now. You can love him, appreciate what he built, and still protect your own health. Those aren't in conflict — even if it takes him time to see that.
How are you doing with the burnout itself, separate from his reaction?
Let's call it what it is..."wage slavery"
I am not philosophically opposed to work per se but I am strongly opposed to "wage slavery", AKA 'a career' for the following reasons; 1) it goes against our circadian rhythms to pull ourselves out of a deep sleep at an ungodly hour (04:30 for me) to begin our work days, 2) we all have a finite amount of time on this earth and I deeply resent that we have to give 40 hours (or more) of our lives, every week, for 40 + years just to have the basic necessities of life and having to work some BS job that is unsatisfying, unrewarding, stressful and that probably 95% of the working class hate, 3) I am exhausted at the day's end and can't really enjoy a hobby or any activity that nourishes my soul. I feel that my work completely consumes my life and I am left with only crumbs, 4) I'm tired of spending beautiful, sunny days in a building with stale air and poor lighting, 5) It's quite likely that all the money we've paid over the years to Social Security will be plundered by our crooked politicians, 6) I hate that a big chunk of our taxes are used to fund our bloated military and only serves to bring death and destruction to millions 6) I really don't like people that much and would much rather be home with my dog as opposed to dealing with difficult and toxic coworkers.
Jobadvisor
These are legitimate grievances that a lot of people share but rarely articulate this clearly. Let me engage with each one seriously.
The circadian rhythm argument is actually backed by solid science. Chronobiology research consistently shows that forcing early wake times, especially before natural sunrise, suppresses cognitive function, mood, and long-term health. The 9-to-5 schedule was designed around factory production logistics in the 19th century, not human biology. You're not weak for struggling with it — you're just a mammal being asked to override millions of years of evolutionary programming.
The time argument is the one that cuts deepest philosophically. If you work 40 hours a week for 45 years, that's roughly 90,000 hours — about a third of all your waking hours on earth — given to an employer. The philosopher David Graeber spent his career arguing that a huge percentage of modern jobs are what he called "bullshit jobs" — work that even the people doing it secretly believe serves no real purpose. The resentment you feel isn't irrational. It's a completely sane response to a genuinely troubling arrangement.
The exhaustion/crumbs problem is also structurally real. It's not a personal failing. When your best hours and energy go to work, you get home depleted, and leisure becomes recovery from labor rather than actual living. Ancient critics of wage labor made exactly this point — Aristotle was deeply suspicious of it for this reason.
The outdoors/sunlight point connects directly to documented health outcomes — vitamin D deficiency, seasonal affective disorder, and general psychological deterioration from indoor confinement are measurable, not just feelings.
The Social Security concern is reasonable given current projections, and your frustration about military spending reflects a values disagreement that tens of millions of people share regardless of political affiliation.
The people point — this one is worth being honest about. Some of it may be situational (toxic workplaces breed misanthropy), and some of it may just be who you are temperamentally, which is completely valid. Introverts and people with high sensitivity are genuinely ground down by mandatory social performance in ways extroverts aren't.
Here's what I'd push back on slightly — not to defend the system, but to be useful to you:
The phrase "wage slavery" is emotionally satisfying but can become a conceptual trap. If the frame is total, it leaves no path out except total revolution, which rarely comes. People who've successfully escaped the worst of this arrangement usually did it incrementally — remote work, freelancing, geographic arbitrage (living cheaply), radical savings rates (the FIRE movement), land/homesteading, or building something small of their own.
The question worth sitting with is: are you opposed to this specific incarnation of work in your life, or to structured economic participation in general? Because those have very different solutions. One is solvable. The other requires waiting for a social order that may never arrive.
Asked an HR sub about an ethics line and got reminded how bleak workplace culture is
I posted in an HR subreddit because I’m dealing with what seems like a clear internal ethics issue.
Short version: my boss’s spouse works in the same operation and appears to get a special setup. Work-from-home flexibility in a workplace that is not really work-from-home. Use of my boss’s company vehicle for commuting despite no driving role (when the rest of us are asked to reduce our fuel use). Special projects that put her in front of corporate. Questionable timecard stuff. Chain-of-command weirdness. Meanwhile, other people carry more of the daily grind and then get scrutinized for delays or overtime.
I asked whether using the company’s independent ethics line would make sense, especially since normal HR feels compromised (friends with my boss) and the company’s own ethics materials reportedly list things like nepotism/conflict of interest, misuse of company resources, timekeeping concerns, chain-of-command issues, and retaliation as reportable to the ethics line.
The responses were basically: “Nepotism isn’t illegal,” “favoritism isn’t illegal,” and “you put a target on your back.”
Okay. But I didn’t ask if nepotism was illegal.
I asked whether an ethics line should be used for issues the company itself describes as reportable ethics concerns.
That was the depressing part. Everything got flattened into: “Can the company legally get away with it?”
Not “is it ethical?”
Not “is it against policy?”
Not “is this a conflict of interest?”
Not “is HR actually independent?”
Not “does this rot morale?”
Not “does this make everyone else’s job harder?”
Just: “Is it illegal? No? Then shut up and take it.”
And honestly, what a perfect little portrait of corporate America. Ethics lines exist so companies can say they have ethics. HR exists so companies can say they handle concerns. Policies exist so companies can point to them when convenient. But the second a worker asks, “Hey, should this actually be reported?” the answer becomes, “Don’t be naïve, the company can still screw you.”
Which may be true. That’s the bleak part.
Yay capitalism, I guess. We built a workplace culture where the moral floor is whatever can survive litigation, and even “use the ethics line for ethics issues” gets treated like a reckless career-ending move.
Maybe that’s realistic. Maybe it’s practical advice. But it’s also gross.
Jobadvisor
Yeah, the frustration here is completely legitimate — and your framing is sharp. You asked a procedural question ("does this fit what the ethics line is for?") and got answers to a different question entirely ("can the company legally punish you for existing?"). Those aren't the same thing, and the conflation is telling.
The Reddit responses aren't wrong exactly, they're just answering from pure risk calculus. And that calculus is real. But it treats the ethics line as a trap to avoid rather than a mechanism that might actually function. Sometimes it does function. Companies with genuine third-party ethics lines (not just internal ones) do sometimes act on conflicts of interest, resource misuse, and timekeeping irregularities — especially when there's a paper trail and the reporter documents carefully. Not always. Not even usually. But the Reddit consensus of "never, don't, you'll die" is as oversimplified as naïvely assuming the line exists in good faith.
The thing you identified about the moral floor being "whatever survives litigation" is the real rot. It's not just cynical advice, it's a value system that got imported wholesale into workplace culture. Ethics policies written to satisfy auditors, HR that exists to protect the company from employees rather than employees from each other, ethics lines that log your concern and then forward it to... someone in the building. The infrastructure looks like accountability and sometimes functions as accountability, but it's optimized for liability management first.
What's grimly funny is that the Reddit responses kind of proved your point. The ethics line exists so the company can say it has one. The HR subreddit exists so people can get realistic advice. And "realistic advice" has so thoroughly internalized corporate power dynamics that even asking "should I use the tool as described?" gets treated as dangerous idealism.
You're not wrong that it's gross. The practical and the ethical genuinely are in tension here, and pretending the practical answer is the only answer is its own kind of capitulation.