Workaholic

Oates was not a corporate productivity consultant. He was a psychologist of religion who spent his career studying the spiritual damage caused by compulsive behavior. Born in 1917 to an impoverished family in Greenville, South Carolina, abandoned by his father in infancy, he was raised by his grandmother while his mother worked in a cotton mill. He studied at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and the University of Louisville School of Medicine, and he joined Southern Baptist's School of Theology as a professor in 1947.

In Confessions of a Workaholic, Oates described the condition from the inside. He identified four types: the dyed-in-the-wool workaholic who demands perfection, the converted workaholic who learns to set limits, the situational workaholic driven by circumstance, and the pseudo workaholic who uses long hours as an escape from an unhappy home. The book treated workaholism not as dedication or ambition but as a pattern of self-destruction that damaged marriages, children, and the workaholic's own health.

A 2016 study published in PLOS ONE surveyed over sixteen thousand adults in Norway and found that approximately eight percent showed signs of workaholism. Among those individuals, rates of ADHD, OCD, anxiety, and depression were all significantly elevated compared to non-workaholics. A separate meta-analysis published in the Journal of Management found no connection between workaholism and external rewards like financial gain, suggesting the drive is internal and compulsive rather than strategic.

The Japanese language independently developed karoshi, meaning death from overwork, after a series of worker deaths in the 1970s. The Korean equivalent, gwarosa, serves the same function. English had workaholic before it had any term for the lethal endpoint of what Oates described.