A workaholic is a person addicted to work. This addiction may be pleasurable to the victim or it may be burdensome and troubling. Addiction is a compulsion to repeat a behaviour regardless of its consequences. ...

Workaholism is believed by some to be a disease, akin to obsessive compulsive disorder. The problem is that workaholics believe that if they don't work, their world will collapse. Workaholics do not necessarily love their work or try to excel in their work. If a person thinks he or she is the only person capable of performing their work, he/she is most likely a workaholic. Although most workaholism is associated with a paying job, it can also be associated with people who excessively practice sports, music, art, blogging, wiki editing, etc. For other things named OCD, see OCD (disambiguation). ... A weblog (usually shortened to blog, but occasionally spelled web log or weblog) is a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles, most often in reverse chronological order. ... The term wiki is a shorter form of wiki wiki (weekie, weekie) which is from the native language of Hawaii (Hawaiian), where it is commonly used as an adjective to denote something quick or fast (Hawaiian dictionary). ...

The term is often used inaccurately to describe an energetic person who devotes a lot of time to work despite having good relations with co-workers, taking pleasure in other non-remunerative activities, being well rested, and attending properly to family and social life.

The condition is more accurately described when it becomes recognized by the victim or by others to be detrimental to family life or social relations within or outside of work. This may be due to the victim's fatigue, poor relationships with non-addicted co-workers, or lack of time and energy devoted to family life, friends, hobbies, and other activities.

The word itself is a play on "alcoholism," created via back-formation. The term was first coined in 1971 by Wayne Oats in his book, Confessions of a Workaholic. It gained more widespread use in the 1990s, as the result of a wave of the self-help movement that centered around addiction, analogizing harmful social behaviors such as overwork to drug addiction, including addiction to alcohol. Alcoholism is a powerful craving for alcohol which often results in the compulsive consumption of alcohol. ... In etymology, the process of back-formation is the creation of a neologism by reinterpreting an earlier word as a compound and removing the spuriously supposed affixes. ... 1971 (MCMLXXI) was a common year starting on Friday (the link is to a full 1971 calendar). ... The 1990s decade refers to the years from 1990 to 1999, inclusive. ... Though the term self-help can refer to any case whereby an individual or a group betters themselves economically, intellectually or emotionally, the connotations of the phrase have come to apply particularly to psychological or psychotherapeutic nostrums, often purveyed through the popular genre of the self-help book. ... Addiction is a compulsion to repeat a behaviour regardless of its consequences. ... Drug addiction, or dependency is the compulsive use of drugs, to the point where the user has no effective choice but to continue use. ... In chemistry, an alcohol is any organic compound in which a hydroxyl group (-OH) is bound to a carbon atom of an alkyl or substituted alkyl group. ...

Japan is often portrayed as having a workaholic culture. Several Japanese workers die each year from overwork. The Japanese term for death by overwork is karoshi. In cases where it can be proven that the cause of death was overwork, the family can seek compensation from the employer for its failure to intervene in the employee's self-destructive behavior. Karōshi (過労死) (pronounced /karo:Si/), which can be translated quite literally from the Japanese as death from overwork, is occupational sudden death. ...

People who believe work [more precisely, overtime work] equals "social status".

External links

• Workaholics Anonymous