Married to the Job: Why We Live to Work and What We Can Do About It

Work is not “life,” we tell ourselves. Yet too many of us stay at work till midnight and hunger for our bosses’ approval. We socialize with colleagues and supervisors. We might even wear the company’s logo and make its slogan our mantra. And when something goes wrong–when we’re laid off, transferred, or simply chewed out–ourworlds fall apart.

We are a nation obsessed with work.

In this provocative and chilling book, clinical psychologist Ilene Philipson explores the idea of the overworked American from a startlingly new perspective. She doesn’t believe, as some social commentators have suggested, that we work to buy fancy toys and to keep up with the Joneses. She’s convinced that, more and more, life outside work seems colorless and unfulfilling, and that it is our jobs that generate feeling of self-worth and the sense that we’re connected to something larger than ourselves. For too many of us, work has become the closest thing to family and religion we have–the core of our emotional and spiritual lives.