Quote · TED Talks Daily
Does working hard really make you a good person? | Azim Shariff (re-release)
Where this was said
Effort Theater: The Fake Late-Night Emails and 'Effort Porn'
At 12:07 · chapter starts 12:00
Shariff turns the lens on his own lab with a story that lands with uncomfortable precision. Because being a professor let him keep adolescent sleep habits well into his 30s, he sent emails at all hours of the night. A graduate student noticed — and, rather than actually working those hours, used a scheduling app to make his replies appear at 1–2 AM, manufacturing the impression of round-the-clock industriousness. [1] — Azim Shariff "A graduate student used an app to delay his emails to arrive at 1–2 AM, mimicking his professor's insomniac schedule to appear more industr…" 12:34 Shariff had sent entirely the wrong cultural signal, and his student's response was rational within that culture: perform effort rather than produce work. Shariff calls it 'literally bullshit work.' He had to actively rebuild his lab's culture around actual output. He also names the broader cultural phenomenon as 'effort porn' — the tendency to admire visible struggle for its own sake. Even he admits you can't simply learn to resist this bias; it's too deeply ingrained. But you can learn to notice it, and notice when it's making your decisions for you.
A graduate student used an app to schedule emails to appear sent at 1–2 AM to signal he was working all hours, exemplifying performative effort — 'literally bullshit work.'
A graduate student used an app to delay his emails to arrive at 1–2 AM, mimicking his professor's insomniac schedule to appear more industrious. His professor had to actively dismantle his lab's culture of effort performance.
You probably can't unlearn the mental circuit that links effort to morality. But awareness is enough: notice the bias, and you can stop it from running your important decisions on autopilot.
British colonists in Delhi offered a bounty for cobra skins to reduce snake populations, but Indians began breeding cobras to collect the reward — the classic 'cobra effect' of perverse incentives.
A bounty for dead cobras in colonial Delhi accidentally made the snake problem worse — and Shariff argues we've done something eerily similar with work culture. By rewarding effort rather than meaning, we've flooded the world with performative labor.
