Front-Load Your Career To Achieve What Europeans Have

We descended the steps to the metro station with fresh espresso and croissants in our bellys.  Our hangovers were already starting to wane as we set off for another day of adventure in Paris. It was a Tuesday morning and as I looked around something suddenly struck me.

I turned to my buddy and said, “Look around dude, it’s Tuesday at 9:45 and these folks aren’t even at work yet.  We’re doing it all wrong at home, what the hell is wrong with us?“

We were surrounded by businessmen and women with briefcases, waiting for their train to go to work – at 9:45.  That means they’d maybe get to work by 10, maybe later.   Whatever.  This was the year 2001 and telework was still mostly not a thing, so they weren’t knocking out emails at home before going in.

At that time in my career I was working 45 – 50 hours a week, and my days started at 7:00.  I didn’t go in every weekend, but I certainly wasn’t a stranger to a Saturday morning in my cubicle.  My travel companion was an architect and probably worked longer hours than I did. 

My buddy and I were front-loading our careers, though we didn’t know that at the time.

During that blessed but too short week-long vacation to Paris and London, we were exposed to a better pace of life.

 

America Vs. Europe

This hilarious tweet says it all:

 

It’s no secret that Americans work longer hours than most Europeans, and take less vacation.  As this report from the Brooking Institution details:

The working time gap between the U.S. and Europe is explained by both a higher number of vacation weeks in Europe and a longer workweek in the U.S. The U.S is the only OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development… i.e. “western”) country with no statutory minimum level of annual leave, and the vacation time offered by many U.S. employers falls below the minimum level of leave offered in many other countries. Many Scandinavian and Western European countries have obtained shorter standard workweeks through legislation or collective bargaining.

This chart shows a sampling of those differences in workweeks over time

While the long arc of work hours clearly shows a decrease for all countries in the 20th Century, the decline in the the United States stops around 1982 then actually rises a bit.  Meanwhile our western European counterparts kept declining during that time. 

As for paid holidays and vacation, America is once again the big loser.

 

France adopted a 35 hour workweek in 2000.  And in 2017 they gave workers the right to disconnect from work email.  Imagine trying that in America! 

Most of Western Europe is famous for basically taking off work for all of August every summer.  If you’ve ever traveled there in August you’ve experienced it. 

Try pulling into a smaller town in Spain and finding anything open in the afternoon.  Depending on where you are many or most businesses and stores shut down every day for a few hours, a practice called siesta.  They’re too busy napping and keeping low stress levels.  It’s also very common in Italy, they call it “riposo”. 

Many European countries enjoy 2 or even 3 hour lunchbreaks as a standard.  Iceland recently completed two trial periods of 4-day workweeks for thousands of employees, with huge success.

In a nutshell, most Europeans work fewer hours than we Americans and take way more vacation.  I’m not trying to foment discord between my American and European readers. 

And I’m absolutely not interested in getting into the politics of capitalism, social safety nets, the differences in taxes, or labor laws.  Those issues are extremely complex and usually lead to volatile discourse these days. 

The purpose of this post is to expose the ramifications of the differences in these work cultures. 

 

Stress

One of the first posts ever on this blog was about stress and how it kills, and I was lucky enough to have it featured on Rockstar Finance when that site was the juggernaut in the financial independence space. 

Bottom line, stress kills.  I don’t need to give proof of that science here, there’s no argument and it’s not even remotely controversial.  And because of our jobs, we Americans are far more stressed than our European friends. 

One Gallup Poll found:

U.S. and Canadian workforces experienced the highest levels of daily stress globally in 2020. Employees in these countries reported stress levels of 57%, while in Western Europe, stress declined to 39% from 46% in 2019.

If you think this might have an affect on physical and mental heath, you’d be correct.  Rates of depression are higher in America than most European countries, but Europe isn’t doing great in that metric either. 

The United States had the 31st highest suicide rate of 183 countries in the world in 2019, and not a single Western European country ranked higher (only the Eastern European countries of Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, and Montenegro ranked higher). 

The data get worse but I’ll stop there, I think you get it.  We Americans are working ourselves to death. 

 

Front-Load, Then Escape

Look, I get it, American culture emphasizes work.  The American work ethic has a complex and nuanced history.  But make no mistake, it’s alive and well in 2021. 

Given that fact, if you’re hoping to achieve financial independence and possibly retire early from your day job, try to front-load your career.  By that I mean work extra hard – and save extra hard – in your 20’s and 30’s, because that’s when you can handle it the best. 

That’s when you’re young, presumably healthier, and new to the workforce.  Burnout and cynicism haven’t set in yet.  Plus compounding interest works best when you start early.

I’ve written about how I front-loaded my career heavily.  It worked wonders for me.  I moved up pretty fast at my job and was saving money by the bucket loads.

But beware dear reader – know what you’re getting into.  As you work your tail off and move up, the tractor beam power of American workaholism will get stronger and stronger. 

If you create an expensive lifestyle and fail on the save part of the deal, you might be doomed.  You could find yourself trapped in an expensive life that’ll require stress-filled 50 hour weeks until you’re 65.  And the stress will kill you.

But if you play your cards right you can slow things down and maybe even get out before the stress chips too much of your health away.  Then you can experience the pleasures of life like the Europeans do – the ones outside of the office – while you’re still young enough to enjoy them.