Just came across this one, an excellent article. Working a 996 schedule has nothing to do with productivity, and everything to do with control and the accumulation of wealth … for a select few. Anyone who has ever worked an 80+ hour work week knows, deep down on a physical and spiritual level, that it is a soul-sucking experience. I worked it for 3 1/2 years and came away exhausted, disillusioned and convinced, that half of any given week was spent fixing the mistakes and errors from the previous one. It’s about greed, plain and simple. Calling it anything else, trying to glamorize it in some way or position it as a “spiritual” journey, is just horse shit. We don’t exist in a vacuum; we cannot separate our working lives from our sleeping lives and our family lives as if they are all independent of one another and claim one does not affect another. After 8 or 9 hours at the same task, we begin to fade. Our attention capacity dwindles, our ability to spot problems and solve them lessens dramatically. That guy staring off into space at 8:54 pm is not lost in creative thought, his brain is so fogged over, he’s trying desperately to keep it together so he can remember how to get home. We tried 996 before, don’t you remember?! It was called the Industrial Revolution. That period created remarkable productivity and incredible wealth. Eventually, it also created the five-day work week, over time pay, vacations and the prohibition of employing eight year-olds for 12 hour shifts. We tried it. We learned from it. We corrected it. What’s the point in unlearning what we already know?