The “4-Hour Workweek” Is A Scam
Tim Ferriss is a great example of why we should take advice from white, middle-aged men with a grain of salt and intersectionality
In America, we love the narrative of anyone being able to make their dreams true. We glorify individual leaders and CEOs like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, and the media keeps feeding us their morning routines and hustle mindsets. We’re told that being a “self-made man” is the goal, and self-help literature often feeds into these ideas.
Tim Ferriss is an inspirational speaker and author, whose book The 4-Hour Workweek has inspired millions of people all around the globe. Tim Ferriss encourages people to liberate themselves from the 9 to 5 to live anywhere and join the “New Rich”. I was inspired by his advice, but it got me reflecting on the things that we have power over. The author’s ideas seize to forget privileges, disadvantages, and real-life forces that affect our abilities to make drastic changes in our lives.
I read his book and was eager to make changes in my journey. As a white, able-bodied woman, I saw my own potential in achieving what he claims could be possible for anyone. However, it made me think about how his lessons could be made more applicable despite race, gender, age, able-bodiedness, et cetera. While it doesn’t hurt to dream, I find it important to take self-help advice from middle-aged, highly educated, white men with a grain of realism and intersectionality.
The exclusive club of the “New Rich”
In my opinion, The 4-Hour Workweek includes many great pieces of advice for task performance, micromanagement, delegation, automation, and smarter ways of working. However, I also realize that this advice applies to me because of my job position, education level, and opportunities that might not be available to others. While I would love to think that anyone could become anything in this “land of opportunity”, that’s simply not the case.
Americans love a good rags-to-riches story. Sadly, the narrative of America being the country where you can experience the most upward social mobility and achieve your “American dream” is a lie. According to a comparative study about upward social mobility in the US, people in the US were less likely to rise from the bottom to the top of the economic hierarchy than those in other developed nations.
The “New Rich”, as Tim Ferriss calls it, is a status anyone could claim if they just do the work. While the “Yes You Can!” narrative can be inspirational and motivating, it erases experiences and real-life situations that prevent someone from succeeding. Tim Ferriss’ anecdotes of success and wealth imply that failure in accomplishing something comes from a lack of self-discipline or productivity instead of outside forces. These notions are blind to the structures in our society.
Passive income and a minimal workload sound like the ultimate answer to every problem anyone has ever faced, but there are prequalifications that have to be met to make it a possibility. To build your own business, you need to have the knowledge or education to do so. To negotiate terms to become a remote employee, you need to work a job that can allow that. You also need to be high enough on the career ladder to be able to outsource and affect your workload. If you’re at the bottom of the professional hierarchy, as cruel as it sounds, you can be disposable.
Whether we realize it or not — Ferriss clearly didn’t — systemic racism, ableism, and sexism have massive impacts on someone’s possibilities to achieve “liberation”, as Ferris calls it. We can’t simplify as complicated an issue as life trajectory and financial liberation solely into individual choices. We must take into account the multitude of choices, options, opportunities, and disadvantages to paint a realistic picture of possible outcomes. We don’t have the same choices, nor do we exist in the same framework.
No, Tim, not everyone can outsource their life
It’s slightly delusional to state that anyone could achieve what Tim Ferriss has achieved. It’s an impossible statement because his success (like many others’) is rooted in the capitalist system and his many privileges. While it might not be possible to act ethically in our capitalist structures, it’s a different ballgame to announce to the world — whether consciously or subliminally — that one should take advantage of those inequalities.
Ferriss’ advice on outsourcing one’s tasks is great in theory, but automatically excludes the ones doing the outsourcing. Whether it’s people working below you in your firm or your virtual assistant in Bangladesh, he’s simply delegating the issues to people who are hierarchically lower than him. The modern capitalist system claims its wealth by outsourcing. Moving production lines to cheaper places of labor and resources create a greater profit margin. It’s not only factories and robotics that are moving abroad. It’s also call-centers, customer service, and virtual assistants — human resources and intellectual labor.
Tim Ferriss teaches us to take advantage of those cheap opportunities in “developing countries”. He recommends outsourcing all tasks that are standing in the way of your freedom: emails, meetings, birthday cards… Outsourcing all of your undesirable tasks sure frees up your time, but it doesn’t make the tasks go away. It simply means that you deem yourself to be above them. Someone is still doing the work and losing their “liberation” in the process. Outsourcing gives liberties only to the ones at the top of the ladder. The ones on the bottom (of a company or a production line) are still doing the work.
While some of the teachings of Ferriss shifted my mindset about productivity and performance in positive ways, I couldn’t help but scold at his blindness towards situational differences in opportunities and possibilities. His answer to finding financial and geographical liberation is to increase one’s income and automate the process. The optimal result is his 4-hour workweek, where he can manage his workload in a couple of hours a week, remotely, anywhere in the world. It’s the symbol of liberation in one’s occupational and financial lives. A kind of liberation that fails to take into consideration one’s privilege.
In my opinion, Tim Ferriss gives great advice on valuing your time and focusing your energy on the most important things in your life. I wholeheartedly support that message. For some people, it might mean joining the New Rich and buying a one-way ticket to a far-away island. But what it means for all of us, is focusing on the most important things in your life and looking at our lives critically. And empathetically.
