Earlier this year, Reuters reported that Norwegian doctors noticed “an increase in the number of young Internet consultants seeking help for depression, mood swings, chronic pains, and insomnia.”

“It’s scary to see people as young as 20 get stress-related illnesses which usually only strike people around 40 and 50 years old,” Bjoern Gillhagen, a doctor at Volvat Private Hospital in Oslo, told the news agency.

While it maybe true that Oslo's dot com workers are feeling particularly beleaguered these days, the broader implication of the article—that Internet start-ups, with their “long hours and tough deadlines,” have somehow taken the definition of hard work to new extremes—is mildly absurd.

Much has been made of the torrid pace of work in the New Economy. The image of the bleary-eyed engineer sleeping under his desk has come to signify the expected level of industriousness and commitment from a dot com worker. As it is understood that we operate on “Internet time” (a phrase we invoke with a wince), everything needs to be completed with alarming speed. Product cycles are abbreviated and Internet companies, which often project more style than substance, must create the constant impression that they are evolving and improving.

So, sure, life at an Internet start-up can be physically and emotionally taxing. The long hours can lead to sleepless nights, petty bursts of rage, and 20 unwanted pounds around the mid-riff. But have dot com workers really re-defined the meaning of hard work? Are they subject to a new and unprecedented set of rigors? For instance, is life at a dot com more taxing than, say, working in a coal mine?

According to a site devoted to the history of mining in Great Britain, it would seem that coal miners probably have a more legitimate claim to ailments like chronic pain and depression than dot com workers. For example, the site houses a database of 70,700 names of people who died or suffered injury in the mines of Great Britain from 1850 to 1908. No matter how miserable your Internet working conditions may be, the chances of developing a hideous lung disease or having a mine shaft collapse on your head are very slim.

Or consider the plight of the construction workers who built the mighty Hoover Dam. At the US Department of the Interior's site you can view the names of nearly 100 deceased Hoover Dam workers accompanied by the cause of death. No matter how treacherous the morning commute to your dot com offices may be, it is unlikely that you will ever be killed by a gravel slide or crushed by a shovel.

Of course, the industrial examples are extreme. But tamer, more cerebral professions also have a long history of being mentally and physically demanding. Lawyers, doctors, and investment bankers have always kept relentless work schedules. Dare we say, even journalists tend to work fairly hard (particularly when deadlines loom).

If the dot com workers of Norway—or anywhere else—are still suffering from depression and chronic pain, they might do well to visit the British mining site. The uncertainty of working at a risky start-up is bound to cause anxiety, but not all aspects of the New Economy are so new. Hard work has been around for a long time. And relative to the rewards many are reaping in this era of economic prosperity, most of us aren’t working that hard at all.

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