Dehumanization, money, and modern work
The Quiet Ache of the Modern Desk
Key Takeaways
- Prioritizing money can lead to "mechanistic self-dehumanization," making us feel colder, more robotic, and socially distant.
- Modern "hustle culture" fuels this dehumanization, but the "Great Resignation" signals a mass rejection of this ethos in favor of well-being.
- Historical thinkers like Marx and Weber warned of this alienation, describing it as being a "cog in the machine" or trapped in an "iron cage" of rationality.
- The antidote is "defiant humanism"—consciously cultivating our human nature (empathy, connection, meaning) to re-prioritize our values and build a more humane capitalism.
Article Contents
Part 1 The Quiet Ache of the Modern Desk
There is a particular quiet that settles over the modern workplace, a hum of focused energy that can feel both productive and profoundly lonely. You see it in the airport lounge, where rows of travelers sit illuminated by the blue light of their laptops, fingers tapping out emails and reports, their faces etched with a placid, professional concentration. You see it in the sprawling open-plan offices and minimalist co-working spaces, where the only sounds are the gentle click of keyboards and the hiss of the espresso machine. It is an atmosphere of immense, atomized effort. Each person is a node of productivity, a self-contained unit of human capital diligently optimizing their workflow. Yet, in these moments of observation, one can’t help but feel a certain melancholy, a sense of a shared solitude. It is the feeling David Foster Wallace captured in his fiction, a quiet desperation humming just beneath the surface of American life.
This is not merely the fatigue of a long work week. It is a deeper, more spiritual malaise. It is the creeping suspicion that in our relentless pursuit of success—of deadlines met, of promotions secured, of a net worth that inches steadily upward—we are becoming something other than human. We speak of our lives in the language of the market: we invest in ourselves, we seek a return on our educational expenditures, we manage our personal brands, we talk of our emotional "bandwidth." This vocabulary, borrowed from economics and systems engineering, is efficient. But it is also subtly corrosive. It reframes the messy, beautiful, and often irrational business of being a person into a series of transactions to be optimized. We begin to feel less like the protagonists of our own stories and more like resources to be managed, cogs in a machine of our own making.
This sensation is a symptom of what might be called a vast emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis unfolding across our society. It is a crisis of connection, alienation, and distrust, where the very bonds that form a cohesive community seem to be fraying. We live in an era of unprecedented individual liberation—from the old bonds of class, religion, and geography—yet this freedom has come at a cost. It has left many of us feeling atomized and adrift, searching for a sense of purpose in a culture that often offers only economic achievement as a measure of a life well-lived. The problem, then, is not simply overwork; it is a crisis of metaphor. When our dominant metaphor for life becomes the market, and our ideal self becomes the efficient machine, it is no surprise that we begin to feel the cold, metallic touch of the automaton in our own souls. The quiet ache of the modern desk is the sound of our own humanity being gently, methodically, erased.
Part 2 A Whisper from the Laboratory: The Science of Self-Erasure
This feeling of being a "productivity unit" is no longer just the domain of poets and sociologists. It has found its way into the sterile, controlled environment of the psychology lab. In a compelling series of studies published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, researchers Rachel Ruttan and Brian Lucas provided empirical weight to this quiet ache, exploring the unsettling connection between prioritizing money and the tendency to dehumanize ourselves. Their work suggests that when we orient our lives around the accumulation of wealth, we begin to see ourselves not as flawed, feeling, and complex beings, but as cold, calculating instruments.
To understand their findings, one must first grasp the psychological framework they employ. The concept of "dehumanization" is often associated with the most horrific chapters of human history—genocide, slavery, and violent conflict. However, social psychologists like Nick Haslam have argued that dehumanization is a more common, subtle phenomenon that occurs in everyday life. Haslam’s influential Dual Model of Dehumanization proposes that we deny humanness in two distinct ways, because we hold two distinct concepts of what it means to be human.
The first concept is Human Uniqueness (UH), which encompasses the traits that separate us from animals: civility, rationality, moral sensibility, and refinement. To deny these traits in someone is to engage in animalistic dehumanization, seeing them as coarse, irrational, and beast-like. This is the language of racial slurs and ethnic hatred.
The second concept is Human Nature (HN), which includes the traits we consider core to our species, separating us from inanimate objects or machines. These are qualities like emotionality, warmth, curiosity, sociability, and openness—the messy, feeling, connected stuff. To deny these traits is to engage in mechanistic dehumanization, seeing someone (or oneself) as cold, rigid, inert, and robotic. This is the language of the clinic that treats the patient as a case number, or the bureaucracy that treats the citizen as a data point.
| Feature | Mechanistic Dehumanization | Animalistic Dehumanization |
|---|---|---|
| Denied Humanness | Human Nature (HN) | Uniquely Human (UH) |
| Implicit Contrast | Automaton / Object | Animal |
| Core Traits Denied | Warmth, emotionality, curiosity, openness, sociability | Reason, morality, civility, refinement, self-control |
| Associated Emotion | Indifference / Detachment | Contempt / Disgust |
Ruttan and Lucas’s central hypothesis was that the relentless prioritization of money would trigger this second, mechanistic form of dehumanization—not toward others, but toward the self. They theorized that the values associated with chasing money—what psychologist Shalom Schwartz calls "self-enhancement" values like power, achievement, and status—are fundamentally antagonistic to the "self-transcendence" values of benevolence, connection, and emotionality that align with our core human nature. Our minds, it seems, cannot easily hold both sets of values in high esteem simultaneously.
Across six studies, their prediction was largely confirmed. When participants were prompted to think about the importance of money, they subsequently rated themselves as having fewer "human nature" traits. They saw themselves as colder, more robotic, and less emotional. They did not, for the most part, see themselves as less uniquely human (i.e., less intelligent or civilized), but specifically as less like a person and more like a machine. They were, in effect, inflicting a mild case of mechanistic self-dehumanization upon themselves.
Perhaps the most alarming finding was a downstream consequence of this self-perception. In one study, participants who were led to prioritize money, and thus felt more self-dehumanized, subsequently chose to maintain greater social distance from a potential coworker. The feeling of being a cog doesn't just stay inside our heads; it alters our behavior. It makes us pull away from the very social connections that are a hallmark of our human nature, creating a vicious cycle of isolation and instrumentalization.
Yet, within this bleak diagnosis lies a seed of hope. The researchers discovered the relationship is reciprocal. Just as focusing on money erodes our sense of humanity, actively connecting with our human nature seems to act as a psychological buffer against the siren song of materialism. When participants were first prompted to reflect on their human nature—their emotional side, their curiosity, their connections to others—they subsequently placed less importance on prioritizing money. It is as if reminding ourselves of who we are, in the deepest sense, recalibrates our values and puts economic goals back in their proper, subordinate place. This whisper from the laboratory does more than just diagnose a problem; it points toward a powerful, humanistic antidote.
Part 3 From the Iron Cage to the Open Office
The anxiety that Ruttan and Lucas measured with modern psychological tools is not a new affliction. It is a ghost that has haunted the machine of industrial capitalism for more than 150 years. The feeling of being reduced to an instrument, of one’s essential humanity being stripped away in the service of economic logic, is the central theme of some of the most powerful critiques of modern life. To understand our current predicament, we must listen to the echoes of these earlier diagnoses.
One cannot hear the phrase "cog in the machine" without thinking of Karl Marx. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx developed his theory of alienation (Entfremdung), which described the profound estrangement of the worker in a capitalist society. For Marx, this alienation occurred across four dimensions. First, workers are alienated from the product of their labor; the things they create do not belong to them but instead become alien objects that dominate their lives. Second, they are alienated from the activity of production itself; work is not a free expression of their creativity but a coerced, repetitive, and psychologically draining means of survival. Third, and most profoundly, they are alienated from their Gattungswesen, or "species-being"—the intrinsic human capacity for free, conscious, creative, and social activity. Instead of fulfilling their human potential, their life is reduced to a mechanistic function. Finally, this competition-based system alienates workers from each other, turning relationships of cooperation into relationships of conflict.
While Marx’s critique was aimed at the soot-stained factories of the 19th century, its psychological core resonates with the experience of the modern knowledge worker. The feeling of being a "mechanistic part of a social class," directed by goals and activities dictated by others to extract maximum value, is a precise description of the self-dehumanization Ruttan and Lucas observed.
However, an even more precise metaphor for our current condition may come from Marx’s contemporary, the sociologist Max Weber. Weber was less concerned with the economic exploitation of a specific class and more with a broader, more insidious force: the relentless march of rationalization across all spheres of life. He argued that Western society was increasingly dominated by a logic of efficiency, calculability, and control, best embodied by the bureaucracy. While this rational system was incredibly effective at achieving its goals, it came at a terrible price. It trapped individuals in what he famously called an "stahlhartes Gehäuse," a "shell as hard as steel," which his translator Talcott Parsons rendered as the "iron cage".
Weber saw this cage as a great paradox. The Protestant ethic, with its ascetic devotion to a worldly "calling," had helped build the massive cosmos of the modern economic order. But this order, now bound to the technical conditions of machine production, no longer needed its religious scaffolding. What began as a "light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment," had, in Weber's haunting words, become an iron cage. Inside this cage, individuals lose their autonomy and individuality, becoming specialized cogs in a vast, impersonal machine. Their worth is dictated by others, and their lives are governed by a single set of rigid, dehumanizing rules.
This is the crucial distinction. While Marx saw alienation as a product of class-based economic relations, Weber saw the trap of rationality as something that ensnares everyone, from the line worker to the CEO. The modern, well-compensated professional may not be exploited in the classic Marxist sense, but they are very much a prisoner of the iron cage. Their life is governed by Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), quarterly reports, and the endless optimization of process. Their creativity and intellect are not stolen, but instrumentalized—channeled into the narrow, pre-defined goals of the bureaucratic system.
The findings of Ruttan and Lucas can thus be seen as the micro-psychological evidence for the macro-sociological anxiety that Weber diagnosed. The "mechanistic self-dehumanization" they measured is the subjective, felt experience of living inside the iron cage. The enemy is not a specific capitalist class, but a pervasive ethos of rationalization that has become its own justification. It is the prioritization of money and efficiency, not as a means to an end, but as the ultimate end in itself. The ghost in the modern machine is the spirit of a cold, calculating rationality that, in its quest for order and profit, slowly and methodically grinds away at the human soul.
Part 4 Our Age of Anxious Achievement
The laboratory findings and historical theories are not abstract concerns. They are playing out in real-time, at a societal scale, in what can only be described as our age of anxious achievement. The cultural logic that prioritizes money and efficiency above all else has a name: "hustle culture." It is the ideology of the grind, the gospel of "workism," which preaches that our professional striving is the very center of our identity and the primary source of our life's meaning. It is a culture that wears burnout as a badge of honor and treats rest as a sign of weakness.
This ethos, amplified by social media gurus and the perceived precarity of the modern economy, has become the engine driving the very money-prioritization mindset that Ruttan and Lucas studied. It tells us to work 15-hour days, to monetize our hobbies, to build our "online empire," and to feel guilty for any moment spent not being productive. One person, reflecting on their experience, captured the toxic nature of this mindset: "I never enjoyed life. I could never go on a day trip with friends and just enjoy my life. I always felt guilty. In the end I didn't achieve anything. Not a single goal. Nothing". This is the personal testimony of a life lived under the shadow of self-imposed, mechanistic demands.
For a time, it seemed this culture was invincible. But then came a collective breaking point. The phenomenon dubbed the "Great Resignation" was not just a statistical anomaly; it was a mass societal rebellion against the tenets of hustle culture. The numbers are staggering. In 2021 alone, a record 47.4 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs. The quit rate, which had hovered around 2.4% before 2021, surged to a high of 3.0%. This was not a temporary blip; even as the market has shifted, quit rates have remained consistently above pre-pandemic levels, signaling a durable change in the workforce's psyche.
What was driving this exodus? While some of it can be attributed to a hot labor market, the primary reasons cited by workers point to a deeper dissatisfaction. A study by the Pew Research Center found that the top reasons for quitting were low pay, a lack of opportunities for advancement, and feeling disrespected at work. These are not just economic complaints; they are fundamentally human ones. They speak to a deep-seated need to be valued, to grow, and to be seen as more than just a line item on a budget. The burnout statistics tell a similar story. One survey found that a shocking 89% of employees had experienced burnout over the past year, with 70% stating they would leave their current job for an organization that offered better resources to reduce it. The industries with some of the highest quit rates—accommodation and food services, leisure and hospitality, and retail—were those where frontline workers were pushed to the brink, facing grueling hours and inadequate pay for their well-being.
It would be a mistake to see this as a phenomenon caused solely by the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather, the pandemic acted as a catalyst, a global pause that forced a collective re-evaluation of life's priorities. Faced with mortality and the collapse of the boundary between work and home, millions of people looked at the bargain they had struck with their employers and asked, "Is it worth it?". For many, the answer was a resounding no. The "Great Resignation" is perhaps better understood as the "Great Re-evaluation." It was a mass rejection of the value-clash at the heart of the modern workplace. It was a collective refusal to continue the process of mechanistic self-dehumanization for a paycheck that felt increasingly insufficient to cover the cost to the soul. People were not just quitting jobs; they were quitting an entire philosophy of work that demanded their humanity as the price of admission. They were searching, often without a clear map, for a way to live and work that felt less like being a cog and more like being a person.
Part 5 The Moral Case for What, Exactly?
In the face of this widespread burnout and existential angst, it becomes necessary to ask a fundamental question about the economic system that shapes our lives: What is the moral case for capitalism? For its critics, the answer is simple: there is none. They see a system that inherently promotes greed, exploitation, and the very dehumanizing tendencies we have been exploring. But this is too simplistic a view. The conversation about capitalism must be rescued from both its unthinking champions and its reflexive detractors.
There is, in fact, a powerful moral case to be made for free markets. At its best, capitalism is a system that promotes human dignity and flourishing. By centering on voluntary exchange, it respects the autonomy and sovereignty of the individual. As Adam Smith argued, it channels self-interest into a network of mutual dependency, forcing us to consider what others want and how we can serve their needs. This fosters cooperation and allows people to exercise their vocation, experience the dignity of self-sufficiency, and contribute to the common good. Historically, no other system has been as effective at alleviating poverty and creating the material prosperity that allows for greater health, education, and freedom of choice. The moral case for capitalism is that it trusts people to be free moral agents, capable of directing their own lives.
The problem, then, is not with capitalism itself, but with a particular version of it that has become dominant—a version that has been stripped of its moral and social context. The great scholars of capitalism, from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes, understood that a functioning market depends not on pure greed, but on what Smith called "moral sentiments"—a shared sense of trust, fairness, and social contract between the rich and the rest of society. The notion that morals are irrelevant to finance is, as the economist Jeffrey Sachs has argued, a "disgusting and dangerous" fallacy that has led us into our current fix.
Here we arrive at the heart of the matter. The dehumanizing effect that Ruttan and Lucas measured is not caused by the act of engaging in commerce. It is caused by the prioritization of money as an ultimate value, a mindset where the logic of the market—"What is my return on investment?"—is allowed to colonize every aspect of human life. When this happens, we begin to view ourselves and others not as ends in ourselves, but as instruments to be used, as human capital to be leveraged. This is a betrayal of the true moral foundation of capitalism.
The system's moral legitimacy comes from its capacity to facilitate human cooperation and flourishing. Thinkers like George Gilder, whom I have cited in the past, have gone so far as to argue that "Altruism is the essence of capitalism," because an entrepreneur can only succeed by being sensitive to the needs of others. But the mindset measured in the lab—cold, robotic, and socially distant—is the very antithesis of this cooperative, altruistic spirit. The "hustle culture" that champions the relentless, atomized pursuit of financial gain is not an expression of capitalism's moral core, but a grotesque perversion of it. It takes the tool of the market and elevates it to the status of a god, demanding the sacrifice of our human nature on its altar.
We do not need to abandon the market, but we desperately need to rescue it from its most reductive and materialistic ideologues. The task is to re-embed our economic life within a larger framework of social and moral values, to build what some have called a "Human Culture" to replace the toxic "Hustle Culture". This is not a call for socialism; it is a call for a more humane capitalism, one that remembers that the purpose of an economy is to serve life, not the other way around.
Conclusion Tending to the Human Ledger
We return, finally, to the solitary figure at the modern desk, illuminated by the glow of a screen. We see this person now not merely as tired or overworked, but as the focal point of a profound moral and psychological drama. They are caught in the crosscurrents of a culture that celebrates financial success while demanding a quiet sacrifice of the self. They are living within the paradox of an economic system that offers unprecedented freedom and prosperity, yet fosters an ethos that can lead to an inner sense of being a cold, lifeless instrument.
It is as if we are all tasked with keeping two distinct ledgers in our lives. The first is the financial ledger. It is concrete and quantifiable, tracking our income, our assets, our debts, and our net worth. Our culture urges us to tend to this ledger with obsessive diligence. We celebrate its growth, we fear its decline, and we often measure our success and the success of others by its bottom line.
But there is a second, more essential ledger. This is the human ledger. It is less easily quantified, but far more consequential. This ledger tracks the qualities of our character and the depth of our soul. It measures our warmth, our capacity for empathy, our curiosity, our emotional vitality, and the quality of our attention. It records our acts of kindness and our moments of connection. It tracks the very "human nature" traits that, as the research shows, are systematically eroded by a single-minded focus on the first ledger. This human ledger is the ultimate record of a life well-lived.
The great moral challenge of our time is not to choose between these two ledgers—we must, after all, make a living. The challenge is to remember which one truly matters. A life defined by a positive balance in the financial ledger at the cost of a deep deficit in the human ledger is a form of spiritual bankruptcy. It is the tragic bargain of the person who gains the world but loses their own soul.
The work of a good life, then, is the work of tending to this second ledger. It is a daily practice of moral accounting, of choosing connection over transaction, meaning over metrics, and defiant humanism over mechanistic efficiency. It is in the quality of our conversations, the depth of our relationships, and the generosity of our spirit that we make our most important deposits. It is here that true wealth is accumulated. And so, we are left with the quiet, urgent question that each of us must answer for ourselves: Which ledger are you tending to?
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is mechanistic self-dehumanization?
- Mechanistic self-dehumanization is a psychological phenomenon where individuals begin to see themselves as cold, robotic, and machine-like, lacking core human traits like warmth, emotionality, and openness. Research suggests this is triggered by an intense focus on money and efficiency, where people adopt the language of the market to describe themselves (e.g., as 'human capital').
- How does 'hustle culture' contribute to burnout?
- 'Hustle culture' promotes the idea that professional striving should be the center of one's identity, glorifying long hours and constant productivity. This ethos drives the money-prioritization mindset that leads to self-dehumanization and burnout. It creates guilt for resting and monetizes hobbies, leading to a state where individuals feel like they are resources to be managed rather than people living their lives.
- What is the 'iron cage' and how does it relate to modern work?
- Coined by sociologist Max Weber, the 'iron cage' is a metaphor for the trap of rationalization in modern society. It describes a system where efficiency, calculability, and control become ends in themselves, trapping individuals (from CEOs to interns) in a rigid, impersonal bureaucracy. This relates to modern work where KPIs and process optimization can stifle creativity and autonomy, making people feel like cogs in a machine.
- What is the antidote to the dehumanizing effects of modern work culture?
- The antidote is a 'defiant humanism'—the conscious cultivation of our own human nature. Research shows that just as focusing on money erodes our humanity, actively focusing on our human traits (like empathy, connection, and curiosity) diminishes the priority we place on money. This involves personal renewal through better listening and connection, and civic renewal by building stronger moral communities in our workplaces and neighborhoods.
