Snippet

Ambition

Change

Digital

Economics

Work

27 January 2025

4 min read

Don’t just hustle or quietly quit. Work hard at rest

Here’s what BrewDog's CEO doesn't get about work-life balance.

Callum Elwood

Callum is a pastor, based on a barge, in London's Docklands.

A man lies asleep on a closed lap top on a desk.

Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash.

Is work-life balance just an excuse for people who hate their jobs? James Watt, the CEO of BrewDog, seems to think so. But is his vision of work-life integration the solution - or a recipe for burnout? Recently, Watt faced criticism for claiming that work-life balance was "invented by people who don’t like their job." Instead, he advocated for work-life integration, arguing that if you enjoy your work and want to achieve, it won’t feel burdensome to be constantly "switched on."

Watt is correct in some respects: extraordinary achievements often require extraordinary focus. Hard work can be immensely satisfying, providing purpose, goals, and rewards. However, Watt’s perspective lacks nuance and risks promoting a culture of overwork.

Work-life integration, as portrayed by Watt and his fiancée, Georgia Toffolo, revolves around relentless focus on achieving goals, coupled with a willingness to make significant sacrifices. It means finding a partner who champions your ambitions while relentlessly pursuing their own. For Watt and Toffolo, this appears to work—they seem to thrive as part of the privileged minority who genuinely enjoy every aspect of their work. But when viewed realistically, their vision of work-life integration paints a bleak picture. It involves checking emails during family meals, taking calls while driving, scheduling loved ones around work, and sacrificing whatever doesn’t fit. As Watt illustrated in his social media post, referencing figures like Sir Tom Hunter visiting sports stores with his children or Sam Walton working in his warehouse on Saturdays, this isn’t about integrating work into life - it’s about subordinating life to work.

In many ways, the hustle culture that Watt embodies mirrors modern unrealistic beauty standards. Just as social media often promotes unattainable images of physical perfection, Watt’s idealised version of work-life integration advocates a way of life that leaves little room for other forms of hard work - relationships, parenting, creativity, or rest.

The backlash against Watt was swift, and Gen Z’s ‘quiet quitting’ movement has been lauded as a counterpoint to this culture of overwork. By prioritising mental well-being and relationships, quiet quitters resist the idea that their entire identity should be tied to their job. However, they too risk missing the point. A reactionary disengagement from work, while understandable, does not offer a holistic vision of life where every area - work, rest, relationships - receives the effort and attention it deserves.

Work - life balance isn’t about doing the bare minimum at your job or resenting periods of intense work. It’s about recognising that work is one part of life, and other areas - relationships, hobbies, rest - demand hard work too. The challenge, then, is not to reject work but to embrace the harder, more deliberate work of rest.

A radical alternative: working hard at rest

What could a meaningful alternative look like? It might involve working hard at work, yes, but also working hard at rest.

As a vicar in Canary Wharf, one of London’s financial hubs, I regularly see young professionals wrestling with the tension between ambition and rest. They understand the demands of their careers and the effort required to achieve extraordinary goals. But they also grapple with the reality of burnout and the importance of mental health. Watt’s vision of work, without clear boundaries, poses a danger: the mental load of being "always on" accelerates burnout and diminishes the joy of achievement.

The biblical concept of Sabbath offers an ancient yet powerful antidote to the demands of both overwork and disengagement. It reminds us that work is good, but so is rest. By intentionally organising and prioritising rest, we resist the cultural pull of constant hustle and grind. Taking one day each week to step away from work entirely—no emails, no calls, no productivity—becomes an act of resistance.

Sabbath rest allows us to engage deeply with other areas of life. It provides the space to focus on relationships, creativity, and renewal without the constant demands of work encroaching on every moment. This doesn’t mean filling the day with endless activities—brunches, housewarmings, and run clubs are good, but Sabbath also requires intentional space for rest and reflection. In ancient farming societies, Sabbath for the land meant leaving fields unplanted, allowing them to regenerate naturally. The same principle applies to us: regular rhythms of rest make us healthier, more focused, and more productive when we return to work.

Seeking balance while recognising that work is part of life isn’t a sign of weakness—it’s wisdom. Sabbath rest isn’t a retreat from ambition but a way to ensure our goals don’t overshadow the rest of life. Success isn’t just about professional achievements; it’s about thriving in every area - work, relationships, creativity, and rest.

What if rest wasn’t a sign of weakness but a declaration of what truly matters? What if success meant working hard, not just at our jobs, but also at rest, relationships, and the things that bring us joy?

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Article

Culture

Economics

Ethics

1 May 2025

6 min read

The rights and wrongs of making money with meme coins

When does investing become speculating, or even addictive gambling?

Laurence Fletcher

Laurence is a journalist at the Financial Times.

A montage shows Trump with a raised fist against other images of him and the phrase 'fight fight fight'.

$Trump coin marketing image.

gettrumpmemes.com,

Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs may have driven sharp swings in global financial markets, but his actions in markets a few months earlier were in some ways even more peculiar.

On the Friday before his inauguration as the 47th US President in January, the Republican surprised many with the launch of the $TRUMP memecoin, described by its website as “the only official Trump meme”. The cryptocurrency token, in which Trump’s family business owned a stake, initially soared in value to more than $14bn over that following weekend.

Then, on the Sunday, Trump’s wife Melania launched her own memecoin, $MELANIA, which reached a value of $8.5bn. Even the pastor who spoke at the president’s inauguration subsequently launched his own memecoin.

For those wondering what exactly a memecoin is, you are not alone. In short, they are a form of cryptocurrency - an asset class that itself has attracted plenty of questions about its substance and purpose - representing online viral moments. They have no fundamental value or business model and, according to the US securities regulator, “typically have limited or no use or functionality”.

Donald and Melania Trump’s coins subsequently plunged in price, but still have a value of around $2.5bn and $214mn respectively, according to website CoinMarketCap.

There are plenty of others in existence. PEPE, based on a comic frog, has a value of around $3.6bn; BONK, a cartoon dog, has a market cap of $1.5bn; and PNUT, a reference to a squirrel euthanised by authorities in New York and about which Trump was allegedly “fired up” (although doubt has since been cast on the president’s involvement in the matter), is still valued at around $174mn, despite having fallen sharply in price.

Dogecoin, seen as the world’s first memecoin and originally created as a joke, boasts a market value of around $25bn. (There are other memecoins which may not be suitable for these pages).

Some people’s willingness to buy an “asset” with no use or fundamental value may seem strange to more traditional investors. But it can be viewed as just one manifestation of the speculative investor behaviour evident since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and, indeed, at times throughout history.

The price of Bitcoin recently rose above $100,000, despite many investors still viewing it as having little or no value (in 2023 the UK’s Treasury select committee described cryptocurrencies as having “no intrinsic value, huge price volatility and no discernible social good”). In early 2021, shares in GameStop - a loss-making US video games retailer that some hedge funds were betting against - rocketed as much as 2,400 per cent, as retail investors piled in, many with the aim of inflicting pain on the hedge fund short sellers (in that respect at least, a highly successful strategy that became the subject of the film Dumb Money). The huge rise in AI and other tech stocks in recent years - until the recent tariff-driven volatility - has also been described as a bubble by some commentators.

Whether or not such episodes can be compared to infamous bouts of speculative mania in history depends on your point of view (and often can only be judged with the benefit of hindsight) - be it the 17th century Dutch tulip bulb mania, shares in the South Sea Company in the 18th century or the dotcom boom and bust of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

But it does give rise to the question of when investment should start to be described as speculation or even as gambling? And what are the rights and wrongs of any of those activities?

There can be negative effects, for instance if the actions of speculators force businesses in the real economy to change their plans or divert time and resources...

Gambling can be thought of as risking a stake on, for instance, the result of a game of chance or sport in the hope of a bigger payout. While often the result is purely down to chance, in some cases a strategy or an element of research (for instance of a horse or football team’s form) can be used. Investment, in contrast, tends to involve purported economic utility and assets believed to have some sort of underlying value, and holds the hope of future profit (although there are also plenty of bad investments or those that have gone to zero). While an investor must be prepared to lose their entire stake, in some cases such an event is relatively unlikely (for instance, if they buy a fund tracking the performance of a major stock exchange). Speculation is harder to define, but is generally seen as shorter term than investment, with more chance of a bigger gain or loss, and dependent on price fluctuations. Rightly or wrongly, the term has a more negative connotation than investment.

One writer who explored the ethics of these activities was Oswald von Nell-Breuning, a Jesuit theologian and economist who served as an adviser to the Pope and who was banned from publishing under the Nazis.

While he found that “one general definition cannot capture all the nuances” of speculation, he identified two different types of speculative activity - one that was purely trying to make a profit from financial market trading, and one based on trying to create a viable business. (See this article in the Catholic Social Science Review for a fuller explanation of Nell-Breuning’s views on speculation).

As the CSSR article shows, Nell-Breuning found that there can be positive effects from speculation - one might think of better liquidity and price discovery in a market, while, in commodity futures markets, speculators allow producers to hedge risk.

But he also argued that there can be negative effects, for instance if the actions of speculators force businesses in the real economy to change their plans or divert time and resources away from production.

And whereas gambling typically takes place within a circle of players who have chosen to take part, speculation, he wrote, can affect a greater portion of society - for instance, if it affects the price of shares or bonds they hold.

The Bible - on which Nell-Breuning’s faith and analysis was based - does not take a prescriptive approach to such activities. But it does provide some interesting guidance.

An entrepreneurial approach to business and investment is applauded, for instance when the writer of the book of Proverbs (traditionally believed to be King Solomon) praises the virtues of “an excellent wife”. These include investing in a field and using her earnings from business to plant a vineyard, and feeding her family from her gains.

Jesus tells a story of a master who, before going on a journey, gives his property to his servants, each according to their ability. To one he gives five “talents” (a large unit of money), to a second two and to a third servant he gives one.

The first servant trades with his talents and makes five more talents - a 100 per cent profit - and is applauded by the master on his return. The second servant also trades and similarly makes two more talents and is again applauded.

But the third servant, being afraid and believing the master to be “a hard man”, hides the money in a hole in the ground. He is condemned as “wicked and slothful”, and told that he should at least have put the money in the bank.

While Jesus’s story may primarily be about how we view God’s nature, how we use our God-given abilities and whether or not we can take risks in faith for Him, it is also hard not to see investment and indeed wise speculation as being virtuous activities here. Putting the money into a bank account is, in this story anyway, more of a fallback option.

But the Bible also warns us against putting money above all else in our lives. The love of money is, famously, a root of all sorts of evil, while we are also told to be content with what we have, and that “wealth gained hastily will dwindle”.

Nell-Breuning similarly warns that a “get-rich-quick” mindset, when this is placed above all else, can be harmful, and advises caution in situations where the lure of big profits can lead the speculator into market manipulation or fraud.

After all, both gambling and crypto trading have the potential to become dangerous and damaging addictions needing treatment.

Ultimately, Nell-Breuning struggled to come to a simple conclusion on the question of whether speculation, in and of itself, is morally wrong. It is, he wrote, a judgment call for those involved.

When making such decisions ourselves, his - and the Bible’s - warnings may be worth bearing in mind.