I remember the work addiction culture well, but I assumed it had all but faded away

One of the real pleasures of the work I do is being asked to hand out awards at annual industry celebrations to bright-faced, unsuspecting employees — often young, often women — at big dinners at large city hotels.

They are wonderful moments, as the shriek goes up from Table 11 and a dazzled winner, tugging at her dress to ensure it's in the right place, comes to the stage and takes her prize. As she speaks, thanking the organisation and those who encouraged her, I stand by her, waiting and wondering if I'm going to hear what I have to come to consider one of the key indicators of the health of the particular industry I'm with, and I am never not amazed to hear it again and again: an unselfconscious, genuine passion and gratitude towards the team the winner says she is lucky enough to work with.

You can spot the authenticity a mile off. Equally, you can tell when they are just politely going through the motions. There may be some humour in the nervous, halting words but that all falls away when the winner gets to the main part: how fortunate she feels to work with the people she does, and how proud she is of her company, her industry, and the work they do together.

If they are managers coming up to the microphone, you know the good ones immediately: their speech is all about the team they lead, with meaningful detail about the people they glow with pride over. I know it sounds hokey — but I just love these events, and I think you can tell a lot about an industry by the calibre of people who come to the flood-lit stage and either diffidently or happily receive their statue.

What happens when passion for work goes bad

These are the functional workplaces I hope are more prevalent than the alternative kind I've been reading about this week, but they all sit on the same continuum: when you are fortunate enough to work at a company or with a team of people you like and respect, or if your work is something that absorbs you with passion and even fervour — perhaps your own business, designed by your own hand — what's hard work or even too much work, in a situation as fortunate as that?

The data I've been looking at shows what happens when this passion goes bad, and according to the research it's more prevalent than you think, and it's a major problem.

The preliminary results of a global study conducted by Polish academics on work addiction of 34,000 people worldwide has found that the "universal problem" was more likely to affect women than men.

In Australia, about 24 per cent of the more than 1,300 research participants reported being addicted to work, the study found.

Work addiction is defined as the compulsive need to work or engage in work over a long period of time.

The preliminary results — which have not yet been peer reviewed — found Australia had the second-highest prevalence of occupational depression at 11 per cent, and that prevalence in Australia was among the highest from all cultures investigated.

Yes, my head is spinning too — because these conclusions are, to me, counter-intuitive to the point of disbelief.

In late 2024, three years post-pandemic, with businesses struggling to find workers, workers quiet quitting, demanding their right to disconnect and working from home — how can work addiction be "one of the most important challenges in organisational psychology and public health in the 21st century"?

How can it be such a big issue here?

Where exactly is this happening?

Work-addicted — or work-enslaved?

I remember these cultures well, but I had assumed they had all faded away. My formative experiences as a worker were in places where, if you listened hard enough, you could actually hear the sound of marriages breaking under the strain of the work-addicted culture. The reporter who "lived at the office" was someone to admire; the journalist staying at their desk past 8, 9, 10 o'clock was the one who would turn out to be something. If you had to leave work before 7pm, I learned to leave a jacket on the back of my chair in an attempt at deception.

Conversely, I remember work often feeling like the safest refuge I had. If other aspects of my life were confronting or distressing, I'd go to the office of my newspaper: the luxury of a long Sunday working away quietly at my article while the stuff I didn't want to confront boiled away outside.

Now, I can't think of single person I know who is work addicted. They might be work-enslaved: unhappily locked into a heavy burden of work that they wish they could reduce. Or is that the same thing? Is this inability to distinguish between what is and isn't in our control actually the work-addicted problem? Put that way, maybe I do know a few work-addicts, and maybe it is a bigger problem than we think.

You only find the heart of these fascinating findings once you combine them with the other documented realities of the contemporary work economy — the disaffection, withdrawal and disconnection I mention above — and the picture that emerges from that combination is of a profoundly unsatisfying work culture. That is a reality that stares us in the face and will remain until there is a genuine incentive to improve that culture. I'll pay even closer attention at those awards dinners from now on: the enthusiastic and dedicated young faces are the best indicator I have of what good working life should look like.

This weekend you can read more about this international dataset, amid bubble tea, famous gardens and snakes.

Also, for the fellow Gen Xers out there who grew up with a diet culture that normalised days on cabbage soup and clothes that were only "slimming", here's a bit of me with Holly Wainwright, on reclaiming a joyous relationship with food. It's never too late.

Have a safe and happy weekend, and in honour of a rather well-loved band that's cutting a swathe across the country right now, and in celebration of very well-written pop music that may just turn out to be eternal, turn off the work clock and switch on this one instead. The time should be all yours. Go well.

Virginia Trioli is presenter of Creative Types and a former co-host of ABC News Breakfast and Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne.