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Idiom: Work your fingers to the bone
You work your fingers to the bone and then retire.
Does that sound like the story of your life so far?
There’s no shame in hard work.
Most societies value hard work and honour it as an example for others to follow.
Canada, the United States, Australia, Japan and China all have stories of famous people and average Joes working their fingers to the bone.
Historically, the people on my home island of Newfoundland worked their fingers to the bone year after year in the cod fishery to put food on the table and a roof over their families’ heads.
Japan arose out of the rubble of World War II to build the second-strongest economy in the world because each person worked their fingers to the bone in hopes of a brighter future.
We, their descendants, should have much respect and gratitude for their sacrifice and achievements.
When you work your fingers to the bone, you work incredibly long and hard on something.
We now know there is a price to pay for working too long and hard.
A person’s health begins to deteriorate, family life suffers, and the meaning of life becomes work instead of enjoyment.
Now, we must admit that work is a joy for some people.
There’s nothing else they’d rather do.
But for the rest of us, work is what we do to find enjoyment in life.
Work is a means to an end.
In this modern era, we believe in work/life balance.
It is no longer acceptable to work your fingers to the bone for decades on end.
We want more than that and believe we deserve more than that.
We still work our fingers to the bone in 2018.
The difference between now and then is that we do so for shorter periods and do it with work/life balance in mind.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 76.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.