996 in Disguise: Why We Shouldn’t Celebrate the Grind

I never worked the official 996 schedule. Not the regimented 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, that has become infamous in parts of Asia.

But I did something close.

For more than a decade in big tech, my days began at 7:30 in the morning and ended around 6. Then came dinner, a pause, before logging back on at 9. Another two hours, sometimes more. Weekends blurred into weekdays, with “just a few hours” of work expected here and there.

It was not exactly 996. In some ways, it was worse. Because it was hidden. Not written into contracts or plastered on slogans. It lived in the culture. A quiet expectation that seeped into everything.

Now I see people celebrating the arrival of 996 in the United States. Applauding it as if importing it were progress. But progress toward what, exactly?

The Case for the Grind

The defenders of 996 have a ready list of arguments.

Speed. If you push harder, you solve problems faster. Time to market. First to launch, first to win. Discipline. You do not know your limits until you break them. And then the generational advice: Your 20s should be for burnout. Only then will you know how to avoid it later.

There is a kind of logic to this. After all, we are living in a moment where every new AI model feels like an influencer drop. Blink, and you are obsolete. The pressure is real.

But urgency is not the same as inevitability. Sprints have always mattered. What 996 does is normalize the sprint as the marathon. And that is where the reasoning collapses.

Research shows that once you work past 50 hours a week, productivity per hour declines. Past 70, it disappears altogether. You are working, but not producing. You are sprinting in place.

So the promise of 996, that more time means more output, does not hold up. What it produces is not brilliance, but exhaustion.

What Are We Enduring For?

I read a LinkedIn post that said your 20s should be about grind, and it made me wonder: why do we cling to the idea that hardship is the only way to prove worth?

Generations before us carried the same stories. Boomers stayed late in fluorescent-lit offices, convinced that paying dues was proof of character. Gen X grew up cynical after watching their parents laid off during “restructurings,” yet found themselves tethered to laptops and Blackberries all the same. Millennials were told to follow their passion, only to discover that passion was just another name for unpaid internships and endless side gigs. And now Gen Z is told that burnout is a rite of passage. Push yourself until you break, so you will know what it feels like.

But why must trauma be passed down like an heirloom?

Deloitte’s 2024 survey found that nearly half of Millennials and Gen Z feel burned out most of the time. The World Health Organization now classifies burnout as a workplace condition. We know the costs, and yet we repeat the pattern.

Meanwhile, other societies show it is not inevitable. In Denmark and Norway, the average workweek is 37 hours, and productivity remains among the highest in the world. In Sweden, some companies cut to six-hour days and saw employees become more focused, not less.

If rest creates better results, why do we insist on equating suffering with success?

When Did We Stop Being People?

If you are always in work mode, when do you get to be a person?

The person sitting next to you on the bus, the parent reading a bedtime story, the friend across the dinner table. Work without limit shrinks these other selves until only one identity remains: worker.

It is the premise of the Apple TV show Severance, exaggerated into science fiction: the split between your work self and your personal self. In the show, the two versions of you never meet, never exchange memories, never integrate. One self lives only to labor, the other only to consume the scraps of life left over. The tragedy, of course, is that neither gets to be whole.

And yet without surgical implants or dystopian corporations, many of us already live a softer version of that split.

The U.S. Surgeon General has called loneliness an epidemic, with health risks comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. And yet we continue to engineer lives where connection and stillness are treated as luxuries.

The Greeks once said the highest achievement was to know yourself. The Buddha began his search for enlightenment with himself. Both required stillness, not a calendar blocked from dawn to midnight.

When work takes the center, it eclipses the very pursuits that make life meaningful.

Founders vs. Followers of 996

As a founder, I work all the time. Even when I am offline in the wilderness, I am sketching ideas in my mind, running scenarios, planning approaches. But there is a difference. It is my choice. It is tied to my vision. The grind is not healthy, but it is mine.

What I cannot understand is the celebration, and worse, the enforcement of 996 by those who do not share in the vision or the upside. Employees with little equity, no voice in the direction, applauding a culture designed not to create but to extract. It has the same energy as shouting “pick me” in a game that was never designed for you to win.

If anything, the role of a founder should be the opposite: to shield their teams from unnecessary burnout. Because burned-out teams do not invent, they comply. And compliance is the enemy of creativity.

Perhaps that is the blind spot. Some founders convince themselves they are the “inventor-in-chief,” the sole source of breakthrough. No wonder more than 90% of startups fail. When you grind down the very people who might have sparked the next idea, all you are left with is the echo of your own.

Rest Is Not the Opposite of Work

996 misses one of the most basic truths of human creativity. Rest is not wasted time. It is the condition for insight.

Neuroscience tells us that our brains connect ideas in the “default mode,” when we daydream, walk, or simply sit still. Einstein imagined relativity not at his desk but by wandering along a river.

Creativity does not come from mass production. It requires silence, space, even boredom.

Without that, we may produce more, but we imagine less.

The Work We Were Never Meant to Do

So perhaps the question is not whether 996 works.

The real question is: what kind of world do we create when we celebrate it?

Do we want a society that produces faster but emptier, or one that rests enough to imagine something better?

When did work become the story we tell about why we exist? When did innovation shift from being the means to a better life into the meaning of life itself?

Time has always been the rarest currency. To give it away unquestioningly to the grind is not ambition. It is betrayal.

Betrayal of the person we might have become if we had the chance to wander, to explore, to sit quietly with ourselves. Betrayal of the neighbor on the bus who only ever meets our exhausted shell. Betrayal of the parent who reads the bedtime story but whose mind is still stuck in Slack. Betrayal of the friend across the dinner table who deserves presence, not a body tethered to work emails.

Every hour we surrender without question is not just lost productivity, it is lost possibility.

And so maybe the choice is simpler than we think. What is worth more: the promise of stock options, or the experience of lying in the grass on a warm afternoon, the sun on your face, the world asking nothing of you? Perhaps as a founder, I am the last person who should be writing this blog. I know the compulsions that come with building, the constant pull of the next task, the next idea. But before founder, I am human.

I want to ride the bus and be the neighbor who notices, who shares a small moment of connection. I want to be the friend who listens at dinner instead of vanishing into an email. I want a life with enough space for the pauses, the quiet, the stories that give our days meaning.