"Work is a substitute religious experience for many workaholics"
About this Quote
A clean provocation: Daly flips the modern virtue of productivity into a kind of secular piety, and she does it with the cool authority of a theologian calling out a counterfeit sacrament. “Substitute religious experience” isn’t just metaphor. It’s an accusation that work, for the workaholic, functions the way religion once did: it organizes time, supplies identity, promises redemption (promotion, status, “making it”), and offers ritual repetition (inbox liturgies, late-night grind) as proof of worth.
The subtext is sharper than a generic critique of hustle culture. Daly is interested in what gets displaced when transcendence is evacuated from public life. If the sacred is missing, it doesn’t vanish; it reappears dressed as pragmatism. The workaholic isn’t merely ambitious; they’re practicing a devotion that demands sacrifice - health, relationships, rest - and punishes doubt. Even “calling” gets repurposed: vocation becomes job, job becomes moral measure.
Context matters: Daly wrote from a feminist theological tradition suspicious of institutions that sanctify obedience and self-erasure. Read through that lens, workaholism isn’t an individual quirk but a socially rewarded discipline, one that can mirror older religious structures: guilt, penitence, and the anxious need to prove you deserve to exist. The line lands because it punctures a contemporary taboo. We’re allowed to say we’re tired; we’re not supposed to say the exhaustion is the point - that endless work can be a faith, and the god it serves is never satisfied.
The subtext is sharper than a generic critique of hustle culture. Daly is interested in what gets displaced when transcendence is evacuated from public life. If the sacred is missing, it doesn’t vanish; it reappears dressed as pragmatism. The workaholic isn’t merely ambitious; they’re practicing a devotion that demands sacrifice - health, relationships, rest - and punishes doubt. Even “calling” gets repurposed: vocation becomes job, job becomes moral measure.
Context matters: Daly wrote from a feminist theological tradition suspicious of institutions that sanctify obedience and self-erasure. Read through that lens, workaholism isn’t an individual quirk but a socially rewarded discipline, one that can mirror older religious structures: guilt, penitence, and the anxious need to prove you deserve to exist. The line lands because it punctures a contemporary taboo. We’re allowed to say we’re tired; we’re not supposed to say the exhaustion is the point - that endless work can be a faith, and the god it serves is never satisfied.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work |
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