> If a parent says, “my family is my life,” you don’t typically look down on them or think they have some sort of unhealthy obsession they can’t break out of. Their children bring immense meaning to their life, and you respect them for it. But if someone says, “my work is my life,” we treat it differently. Why?

Saying "my ____ is my life" and meaning it, means living disproportionately for the benefit of that blank over your own benefit.

Living disproportionately for the benefit of your family is, depending on your role in your society, at worst expected and at best compassionate. "Their children" — or their spouse, or their parents, or whatever they define as a family — "bring immense meaning to their life"? No. They love their family. That family inherently brings nothing, not meaning nor value nor anything remotely resembling a return on investment, that each member of the family itself doesn't choose to bring to it.

Doing that as an employee of a for-profit company, which most workers are, is at best mockably foolish and at worst literally suicidal. Even when you're healthy and content, it's self-sabotage. You are giving most of yourself to an entity that, if you were instantly vaporized, would only do something that approximates caring about you if you had generated a significant amount of its revenue and could not be readily replaced. Since everyone can be replaced in a company, a company cannot care about you.

Working for yourself, for a cause other than profit, or for or with a group of people who genuinely care for each other, is different — hopefully, obviously so — but also rarer and not what people tend to mock when they mock an obsession with work. Obsession with a craft, or work toward a common good, or a creative venture is more often seen as virtuous, or at least an aspirational goal, than a personal failing.

When someone overworks themselves for a venture like that and falls apart, communities rally around them.

When someone overworks themselves caring for a family and falls apart, people raise funds and rally to support them.

But when someone overworks themselves for a massive company and falls apart, that's — whether or not fairly assessed — the obvious consequences of a personal decision to prioritize someone else's wealth-generation apparatus over your own life.

> We can get a clue for how it becomes a problem by thinking about when the Family focused person becomes concerning. If they have no hobbies, no friends, no creative outlet, or poor health, then we might be worried that they are overly focused on their family.

No, because a family is emphatically not an employer, no matter how much work it requires. A family is not a bucket into which one pours their labor in return for specific value.

A family is other people. A family is a group where almost every person in it is, on some level, capable of focusing on everyone else in it.

If a person puts that much effort into their family and few or no others in that family can or will help that person, then that person is being abused — if not by the family itself then by societal forces like a lack of fundamental security or caretaking support — both of which typically require those people to do what to survive in modern society? Extensive, and one might even mistaken it for obsessive, employee labor in exchange for currency.

> We can say the same for work.

In the majority of cases we literally can't, because most workers put their effort into a company's shared goal and intentionally receive less value than what they put into it. It's an exchange of labor for currency, and most of those exchanges are at a rate that benefits specific other people at the company more.

A company, and especially the people who derive the most financial benefit from the company, does not care if you are overwhelmed — arguably, it does not care if you live or die — beyond how much your state affects how much monetary value you can provide to it.

It's a fundamentally different exchange in every way. Oranges and apples have vastly more in common than familial caretaking and employee labor.

The closest thing one can even reach for as something common between a person overwhelmed by their family and a person overwhelmed by their employer, is that their societies have failed them both.