But with time, cracks in a nation’s most cherished ideological foundations—that hard work is rewarded, that the best succeed, that education is paramount, that things will work out—grow and become unwieldy. In America, we’ve attempted to fill those cracks with the quick fix of more work: more emails, more kids’ activities, more social media posts. We keep going, past the point of exhaustion, because what would happen if we didn’t?
