The Protestant ethic remains very much a part of professional culture as a whole in the United States, and we all grow up internalizing its rhetoric—work hard, play hard; another day, another dollar. My partner and I have an extensive collection of coffee mugs embellished with little sayings, and the other day, I looked up and noticed for the first time that they all just shamelessly evangelize toxic productivity dogma: One mug says “Sleep is for the weak”; another reads “A yawn is just a silent scream for coffee.” A silent scream? Are we all so conditioned to believe it’s romantic to be overworked and exhausted, so terrified of leisure and “laziness,” that we print cute jokes about it on drinkware? In twenty-first-century America, apparently so.

— Cultish by Amanda Montell, Ann Marie Gideon (Narrator)