好英语网午夜，一封来自老板的最后通牒邮件
Have you ever gotten an email at midnight from the boss with an ominous subject line like “a fork in the road”? Granted, email etiquette today says we’re not supposed to get midnight emails from bosses at all. But Elon Musk is no ordinary boss, and it’s safe to assume he didn’t get the memo on empathetic leadership. So, true to form, as chief executive of Twitter, after laying off nearly half of his staff, bringing a sink to work and proclaiming he would be sleeping at the office “until the org is fixed,” Mr. Musk recently issued this late-night ultimatum to his remaining employees: From this point forward, Twitter was going to be “extremely hard core.” Were they ready to be hard core? They could select “yes” — or opt for three months of severance pay.
你是否曾在午夜收到老板发来的邮件，邮件的标题是“人生的岔路口”这样不祥的字眼？当然，如今的电子邮件礼仪规定，我们根本不应该在午夜收到老板的电子邮件。但伊隆·马斯克不是一个普通的老板，可以肯定的是，他没有收到过关于同理心领导的备忘录。因此，一如既往，作为Twitter的首席执行官，在解雇了近一半员工、带了一个洗手池来上班、并宣布他会睡在办公室里“直到解决这里的问题”后，马斯克最近又在深夜向剩下的员工发出了这条最后通牒：从今以后，Twitter将会“极端硬核”。他们准备好硬核了吗？他们可以选择“是的”，也可以选择领取三个月的遣散费。
To Mr. Musk, “hard core” meant “long hours at high intensity,” a workplace where only the most “exceptional performance” would be accepted and a culture in which midnight emails would be just fine. I’d wager that more than a few workaholics, bosses or otherwise, weren’t entirely turned off by the philosophy behind that statement, and yet it immediately conjured images of sweaty Wall Street bankers collapsing at their desks, Silicon Valley wunderkinds sleeping under theirs and the high-intensity, bro-boss cultures of companies like Uber and WeWork, with their accompanying slogans about doing what you love and sleeping when you’re dead. It’s a prepandemic mind-set that, sure, some bosses may long for but many more employees are determined never to go back to.
对马斯克来说，“硬核”意味着“高强度长时间工作”，意味着只有最“出色的表现”才会被接受的工作场所，意味着可以在午夜发邮件的文化。我敢打赌，不少工作狂，不管是老板还是其他人，并没有完全被这句话背后的哲学所吓倒，但它立刻让人联想到汗流浃背的华尔街银行家倒在办公桌前，硅谷神才们睡在办公桌底下，以及Uber和WeWork等公司的高强度、爷们老板文化，以及他们的口号：做你热爱的事，死了以后再睡觉。这是大流行之前的一种思维模式，当然，一些老板可能渴望这种思维模式，但更多的员工决心永远不要回到这种心态中去。
But Mr. Musk, with his union-busting record and his ruthless firing of those who disagree with him, is like a boss on steroids about this stuff, and his embrace of “extremely hard core” isn’t just out of step with the national mood; it’s revealing about an old model of leadership we’re trying to move on from. Twitter employees seemed to say as much: Some 1,200 of them, or nearly half of the company’s remaining work force, opted not to sign his “hard core” pledge, raising questions about whether Twitter would survive at all. Mr. Musk already faces at least one lawsuit over “hard core” — filed by disabled employees who believed the policy would result in discrimination against them.
但是马斯克有破坏工会的记录，还无情地解雇了那些与他意见相左的人，这方面他属于打了鸡血的老板，他对“极端硬核”的信奉与这个国家的心境状态不一致；它还揭示了我们正在努力摆脱一种旧的领导模式。Twitter的员工似乎也是这么说的：他们当中约有1200人，也就是该公司剩余员工的近一半，选择不签署他的“硬核”承诺，这引发了人们对Twitter能否生存下去的疑问。马斯克已经面临着至少一起关于“硬核”的诉讼——由残障员工提出——他们认为该政策会导致对他们的歧视。
“Hard core” may be a term more often associated with graphic pornography, mosh pits or, when used as a noun, people resistant to change, but it’s a linguistic favorite of Mr. Musk’s. He’s used it to refer to his SpaceX efforts and employees’ need to work harder to control costs at Tesla (another company he famously slept on the floor of) and as part of a recruitment effort for corporate litigators — er, “hardcore street fighters.” But most of these, of course, were in the hard-core days of our pre-Covid lives, back when “girlboss” was still a compliment and the idea that “nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week” — another Muskism — was (mostly) applauded.
“硬核”这个词可能更多地与色情图片、音乐会冲撞舞联系在一起，或者，当它用作名词时，是指抵制改变的人，但它是马斯克最喜欢用的词。他用这个词来形容他在SpaceX的努力，以及特斯拉（另一家他曾睡在地上的公司）的员工需要更努力地控制成本，并把它用在招聘公司诉讼律师的启事里——呃，“硬核街头斗士”。但是，当然，这些大多发生在我们新冠疫情之前的硬核时期，那时“女孩老板”仍是一种赞美，而且“没有人能靠每周40小时改变世界”——另一条马斯克主义格言——的想法得到了（大部分人的）赞扬。
How quickly the mood can change.
人们的心境变化如此之快。
Even before the pandemic, many white-collar Americans were starting to rethink their relationships to work. Persistent income inequality, enduring racial and gender discrimination, disillusionment with the capitalist promise — “hustle culture” was a catchy slogan, but was any of this really worth it?
甚至在疫情之前，许多美国白领就开始重新思考自己同工作的关系。持续的收入不平等、持续的种族和性别歧视、对资本主义承诺的幻灭——“奋斗文化”是一个吸引人的口号，但这一切真的值得吗？
These days, the rise-and-grind mentality of just a couple of years ago has been replaced by sleeping in. (Rest is resistance — haven’t you heard?) There are regular headlines about our collective revolt against the cult of ambition, and “quiet quitting,” the catchy phrase to describe doing the bare minimum at work (or, you know, just treating it like a job), apparently describes half of the U.S. work force, according to a recent Gallup poll. Young people have meme-ified their own antiwork sentiments, proclaiming that they don’t dream of labor to catchy TikTok tunes or on Reddit, with the motto “Unemployment for all, not just the rich.”
如今，几年前那种起早贪黑的精神已经被睡懒觉所取代。（休息就是抗争——你没听说过吗？）新闻里经常有关于人们集体反抗野心崇拜的报道，还有“躺平”，这是一个诱人的词，用来形容在工作中只做最低限度的事情（或者，你知道，就把它当作一份工作），最近的一项盖洛普调查显示，这个词似乎可以描述美国一半劳动力的情况。年轻人把自己的反工作情绪做成迷因，用朗朗上口的TikTok音乐或Reddit上的口号宣称，他们不梦想劳动，口号是“所有人都不工作，不只是富人”。
And why wouldn’t they? Workplace burnout is a national crisis. According to a recent poll by the research firm Gartner, almost two-thirds of employees said the pandemic had made them question the role work should play in their lives, and the Society for Human Resource Management reports that more than half of American managers leave work feeling exhausted at the end of the day. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that unionization efforts are underway across the country, aiming not only for higher wages but also for better working conditions overall.
为什么不呢？职场倦怠是全国性的危机。根据研究公司高德纳最近的一项调查，近三分之二的员工表示，疫情让他们质疑工作在生活中应该扮演的角色，人力资源管理协会报告称，超过一半的美国企管人士在结束一天的工作后感到精疲力尽。因此，全国各地都在努力组建工会，目标不仅是提高工资，而且是改善整体工作条件，这也许不足为奇。
Kim Kardashian was dragged when she said, “Nobody wants to work these days.” Maybe a better way to put it: Nobody wants to work like that.
金·卡戴珊因为说了句“现在没人想工作了”被群嘲。也许更好的说法是：没人想像“那样”工作了。
Certainly, many of us still have to work. Being able to resign, even with three months of wages, is not an option for most. Still, something is shifting.
当然，我们中的许多人仍然要工作。对于大多数人来说，辞职是不可想象的，即使可以拿三个月工资。不过，有些事情正在发生变化。
As one TikTok user said, in a quote I’ve been laughing about since reading it in an article in Vox last spring: “I don’t want to be a girlboss. I don’t want to hustle. I simply want to live my life slowly and lay down in a bed of moss with my lover and enjoy the rest of my existence reading books, creating art and loving myself and the people in my life.”
去年春天，我在Vox上的一篇文章中看到一名TikTok用户的话，让我笑了很久：“我不想当女孩老板。我不想奋斗。我只想慢慢生活，和爱人躺在一张苔藓的床上，享受余下的生命，读书、创作艺术、爱我自己和我生命中的人。”
Honestly, yes. “Hard core” is a bygone era of management, not to mention a bygone way of living. As it happens, we’ve now got plenty of other, soft-core interests to replace it. How about a workplace modeled on cottagecore, in which we just flutter around in forests and forage for mushrooms instead of hovering over Slack? Or cabincore, in which we huddle in cozy flannel (comfycore) in front of a fireplace instead of being warmed by the glow of our screens? Or craftcore, if you still feel the need to create, which is something those now former Twitter employees will likely have a lot of time to engage in.
坦白地说，是的。“硬核”是一个过时的管理时代，更是一种过时的生活方式。碰巧的是，我们现在有很多其他的软核利益可以取代它。何不打造一个“农庄核”的工作环境，让我们在森林里跑来跑去，寻找蘑菇，而不是来回来去翻看Slack？要不就来个“木屋核”，我们穿着“舒适核”风格的法兰绒衣服，坐在壁炉前，而不是盯着屏幕上的光亮？或者，如果你仍然觉得有创造的必要，那就来点“手艺核”，这是现在的前Twitter员工可能有很多时间参与的事情。
Maybe what we are witnessing with Twitter’s mass exodus — and the general antiwork sentiment in general — is a labor revolt “in real time,” as one Twitter user put it. None of us want a job in which we are overworked or undervalued, responding to fear or ultimatums, but for many people, that’s what work still is. Can’t we do better?
也许我们正在见证的Twitter员工大规模流失——以及普遍的反工作情绪——是一场“实时”的劳工反抗，正如一位Twitter用户所说。我们都不希望过劳，或者工作被低估，并且在恐惧之下，对最后通牒做出回应，但对许多人来说，这就是工作的意义。我们不能做得更好吗？
I was up late the other night thinking about that midnight “hard core” email, which led me down a midnight rabbit hole into the word’s origins. (Mr. Musk would be proud!) I was surprised to learn that one of the oldest uses of “hard core,” as cited in the Oxford English Dictionary, is as a noun to refer to people who are persistently (or hard core) unemployed.
有天晚上，我很晚才睡，一直在思考那封午夜发来的“硬核”邮件，这让我陷入了午夜的兔子洞，思考“硬核”这个词的起源。（马斯克会为我感到骄傲的！）我惊讶地发现，在牛津英语词典中，“硬核”最古老的用法之一是作为名词，指长期（或硬核）失业的人。
Does that actually make Mr. Musk’s now unemployed former workers the most hard core?
这岂不是让马斯克那些失业的前员工成了最硬核的员工吗？