Today the word overwork more often evokes the image of laborers toiling in sweatshops in China's Pearl River Delta, or fresh university recruits who are lucky enough to work for western accounting firms in China.

By holding up materially encumbered life as the only kind worth pursuing, Americans are outsourcing their enormous manufacturing capacity to the rest of the world, and starting a global race for high, and higher, standards of living.

In doing so they are also exporting such by-products as overwork, poverty, time poverty, "affluenza," and stress.

But judgment depends on the frame of reference.

As John de Graaf observes in "Take Back Your Time: Fighting Overwork and Time Poverty in America," Americans work longer hours and more days than the citizens of any other Western industrialized country.

Graaf is also co-author of the best-selling book "Affluenza."

He claims that Americans have little choice but to work longer hours for fear they might be replaced by others who work harder, or for less pay.

I believe that Americans can be made to slave willingly at the office or other places because they have been trapped in a life whose worth is measured by consumption only.

Unless you have more clever means to finance your consumption, like American investment bankers, you need to earn your wages to pay for all the symbols of good life.

Failure to keep up with your friends in terms of consumption is the No. 1 fear in this rat race for greater accumulation, even though the majority can only be losers in the end.

Depending on the stage of your "development," the symbols of wealth so eagerly sought can be a new brand of mobile phone, an expensive car, a town house, membership to a club, or a private jet.

As philosophers demonstrated long ago, satisfaction derived from material consumption or sensual pleasures are ephemeral, thus actually owning these symbols of the good life soon lose their allure, unless this possession can be made conspicuous to others.

A status symbol handbag is an ideal example: it is overpriced, and the label can be easily recognized.

This incessant race for more is kept up at considerable social and personal cost.