They say money makes the world go round. This is only partially true. What does make our world go round is the millions of overworked Americans who toil in their 5-by-5 foot, cramped cubicles for long, arduous hours that far exceed their designated 8-hour work shift. With the advent of increased globalization and more efficient technology, the notion of time zones and distance are things of the past; employees working for multinationals can be found in their offices as late as 3am making international phone calls and attempting to stay ahead in international markets. Earlier, people worked in order to sustain their lives. Yet, now it seems that we only live to work.

In America, 83% of workers confess to being victims of work-related stress, 50% further identifying this stress as the cause of their sleeping problems. The genesis of this problem is rooted in the notion that work is no longer restricted to the office space: it follows employees home. 60% of workers claim they use technology like smartphones to continue checking in on their work at home.

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Work has even perforated family life. Not only do stock-trading, email-checking husbands engrossed in their work appear aloof and disengaged to their lonely, household-managing wives but even working women who are mothers or wives face the Herculean task of having to raise children and a family whilst being emotionally unavailable due to the cut-throat nature of their job. Writer Brigid Schulte elaborates on this phenomenon in her book Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time.

Young children with overworked, highly stressed parents are statistically more likely to place less trust in themselves and their setting, bearing part of the burden of their environmental tension. The most notable impact of this occurrence is that couples are beginning to abandon the idea of having children in general, especially in Asian countries where maternity leave is less flexible. This has huge economic ramifications in terms of the nature of the future workforce and its efficiency: without children to sustain the businesses people are working for now, the question of whether tech overwork culture is perpetuating its own destruction arises. At the same time, it casts the stability of jobs for working mothers into doubt- job security is not always assured when there are a slew of fresh-faced, younger graduates ready to replace older employees whose work-life imbalance negatively impacts their productivity.

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In his post entitled "Work Hard, Live Well", co-founder of Facebook Dustin Moskovitz states "beyond 40-50 hours per week, the marginal returns from additional work decrease rapidly and quickly become negative." Therefore, the American overwork trend seems to possess another inherent contradiction: the additional expended labor that was initially meant to increase output actually decreases it. The concept is akin to that of the overcrowding of labor and diminishing marginal returns.

This notion is further amplified by the fact that people are not even financially rewarded for their overtime. Without any fiscal incentive to give people a reason to remain in their jobs, there could be a large outflow of employees from the current working population over short periods of time that render the labor market extremely volatile. Moreover, workers need the additional overtime pay to finance the very health issues they glean as a product of that overtime: without it, they would in fact be losing money spent on hospital bills and therapeutic measures.

While U.S work culture has transformed into a malicious and negative entity, the problem lies in the fact that it is still extremely necessary with regards to the global economy. Only time will tell when it will collapse on itself.