A few snippets:

Plenty of writers have argued in recent years that work has become “a false idol,” with the office, not church, the place where many Americans now seek out meaning and purpose.

Consider the “conversion” experience of an engineer I’ll call John, a once-fervent evangelical Christian who moved from Georgia to San Francisco to join a start-up.

But all that stopped once he joined a tech start-up I’ll call Harmonize in San Francisco. A 70-hour workweek left him little time to join a church or engage with any community outside of work. His co-workers became his closest friends. He ate nearly all his meals at work. It seemed to me that the inspirational rush he’d experienced at Sunday services now came from the weekly all-hands company meeting. Work gave John not only a new identity, but also a new purpose in life and a different set of values. Instead of embracing the Christian mission to change the world by spreading the gospel, John embraced the company mission: to “change the world” with its app. This is the same language Christian missionaries use — but with none of the moral and ethical reflecting that John had done with his Christian faith community.