Work - Could Less Be More?

This BBC article offers a very interesting piece analysing the romanticising of overwork and its possible impact upon work culture and ourselves more generally.  Appropriateness of working practices can obviously be fact and situation dependent, as well as inherently subjective.  But are endeavours to work and achieve to excess necessarily a good thing, or in an age lived ever-outwardly (where perception reigns seemingly supreme), can they become mere hollow trophies of a curated existence and contribute to a corrosive culture?

It seems at least equally hollow for a commercial lawyer driven to work and achieve to posit the question, but there are arguments to suggest that there could be more optimal ways of living, and that these could yield tangible benefits, including for employees and the businesses they serve.  

Yet if we are culturally hard-wired into correlating effort with attainment (and viewing the latter as the supreme measure of success), it seems unlikely that hunger for aggrandising (self or otherwise) will ever be satiated.  At a time when our planet is crying out for change, could less be more in more ways than one?       

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