The cult of doing business

Meaning, Love, and Work

• Several commenters react to the article’s line about “treating love as the most important work,” contrasting it with practical needs like rent and mortgages.
• Others counter that mental health and relationships are more foundational than servicing debt; work should follow from those priorities, not replace them.
• Many see value in finding meaning in work, but not in tying one’s entire worth to it. The main risk discussed is making identity and “calling” depend on a job controlled by an employer.

Religion, the Protestant Work Ethic, and Interpretation

• The Protestant work ethic is debated as an explanation for “work-as-virtue.” Critics point to: focus on money over service, glorification of the rich, and tension with Biblical warnings about wealth.
• Calvinism and American evangelicalism are cited as having shaped a harsh, money-centered work culture, including prosperity gospel.
• There’s extended discussion of biblical literalism vs. tradition (e.g., Catholic notion of scripture plus tradition vs. sola/prima scriptura) and how this allows almost any work ideology to be retrofitted to Christianity.

Attitudes Toward Work, Suffering, and Privilege

• One subthread posits a “spiritual divide” between people who love life/work and those for whom everything is suffering; others strongly push back as reductive and unempathetic.
• Disagreement over whether people trapped in boring or exploitative jobs can realistically “just change jobs,” with some emphasizing structural constraints and others insisting mindset and agency matter more.
• Retirement is discussed: people who “retire to something” (creative or volunteer pursuits) seem to fare better than those who only “retire from” work.

Exploitation, Corporate ‘Family,’ and Surplus

• Commenters highlight how employers exploit desires for recognition, belonging, and “family” to extract extra labor without commensurate pay.
• This is linked to broader trends: low-hanging productivity gains gone, so profits increasingly come from exploiting human psychology and regulatory loopholes.
• Another thread frames the “cult of business” as a misguided response to civilizational surplus: instead of using surplus for humane ends, elites channel it into endless accumulation.

American Wealth Culture and Entrepreneurial Ideology

• Obsession with individual wealth is seen as particularly American, historically observed (e.g., Tocqueville) and now amplified by social media and tech culture.
• Modern “microfeudalism” is mentioned: Naval-style threads, startup essays, and hustle literature turning wealth-seeking into a quasi-spiritual project.
• Some see books like “Zero to One” as clarifying a cold, monopoly-focused business logic; others dismiss them as trivial once stripped of celebrity aura.

Academia, Hypocrisy, and Critique

• A few commenters attack the academic reviewer as a comfortably tenured critic dependent on the very system he condemns.
• Others respond that even if academics embody “work-as-identity” themselves, their critique of the entrepreneurial/management cult can still be valid.