Or we could look to Marx, who predicted exactly this state of affairs succinctly by showing that, at the most basic, there are three traditional ways to increase competitive advantage:
1. Work more intensely over the course of a fixed working day (eg. the 8 hours most people normally work in the United States)
2. Work longer hours thereby generating more surplus value while only being paid for a smaller proportion of your overall work. Today, this typically involves creating a culture that incentivizes overwork and disincentivizes the normal working day.
3. Revolutionize the means of production thereby gaining an ephemeral advantage over the competition. Think the Japanese in the 80s with just-in-time production which allowed them to dominate the automotive industry. Automating work would also fall under this category. Notice this can require (1) or (2) as a pre-requisite to such innovation.
Under this analysis being busy would be a natural byproduct of the reigning economic ordering of society.
The point of Marx' view is exactly that he saw capitalism as necessarily forcing capitalists to continuously adapt for their businesses to survive competition. What zenogais set out are how this, according to Marx, leads to the kind of adaptation that gives the state of affairs in question.
The Red Queen hypothesis alone just claims that continued adaptation is necessary to prevent extinction. In that respect it is much more limited, as it does not predict what those changes will look like.
But in terms of mechanism, the Red Queen hypothesis is very much in line with Marx' views on capitalism. He saw the inexorable need for adaptation to remain competitive as a critical part of driving production to a level where socialism would be possible.
Organisms are not the only things that face evolutionary pressures. If bosses spend enough energy on trying to employ only the hardest workers, the end result is work hours increase until as many people quit over hours as join over compensation.
Note that in white collar fields (most of us on HN) people are usually graded on "hours in the office" not "hours of productivity" and rarely if ever quit over hours, they just spend more time at amazon.com, facebook, HN, twitter, that kind of thing. "He's demanding we go from 10 hour days to 12 hour days so he can get a bigger bonus and we will get squat other than maybe a demand to work 14 hour days next year, well F him, I'm going to increase my time playing farmville on my phone and tweeting, from 4 hours to 7 hours per day" I've seen this kind of thing with my own eyes. This is the genesis of the effect where a bog standard boring off the shelf employee, when converted to "contractor" suddenly gets three times as much work done in a mere six hours as an employee required to be butt in seat for twelve hours can accomplish.
I think its a nearly universal truth amongst white collar employees that if they only had to be at work while actually working, they'd probably only be at work about four to six hours per day, but they'd get at least twice as much work done. This is obviously a Fortune50 kind of observation more so than a startup.
In the pre-internet era it was pointless meetings and teambuilding activities and water cooler talk and especially smoke breaks. Oh and extended lunch at desk, in addition to the actual lunch hour, plus extended breaks.
In the end, if not carried out to extremes, it works out for everyone. The white collar workers experience something like a grade school playground or perhaps kindergarten classroom experience where most of their time is spent talking about their feelings, and who's in or out of such and such club, gossip, and what they saw on TV last night, and the boss gets a promotion because obviously he's more effective because he had butts in seats for 12 hours and his management competitors only had butts in seats for 10 hours and that's all that matters because that's all that can be verifiably documented and measured. Its not a bad life, as things go, as long as you don't mind sitting around doing nothing in an office (literally) almost all day.
Evolution is reactive to current circumstances only, and not toward anything, not even survival. It's absolutely possible to evolve yourself extinct, and it happens all the time.
It fits very naturally. You work a bit harder to try to get a small advantage over your competitors. But they do the same thing, so now you work a little harder still. And so on. There's no way to (unilaterally) stop this progression without suffering an immediate disadvantage.
"must constantly adapt, evolve, and proliferate not merely to gain reproductive advantage, but also simply to survive while pitted against ever-evolving opposing organisms"
Are you looking for the link between expressed behaviour and social standing? Or between social standing and reproductive access and mate selection? Or, maybe there is a link between the use of tools (including social constructs) and "an evolutionary trait towards survival"?
1. Work more intensely over the course of a fixed working day (eg. the 8 hours most people normally work in the United States)
2. Work longer hours thereby generating more surplus value while only being paid for a smaller proportion of your overall work. Today, this typically involves creating a culture that incentivizes overwork and disincentivizes the normal working day.
3. Revolutionize the means of production thereby gaining an ephemeral advantage over the competition. Think the Japanese in the 80s with just-in-time production which allowed them to dominate the automotive industry. Automating work would also fall under this category. Notice this can require (1) or (2) as a pre-requisite to such innovation.
Under this analysis being busy would be a natural byproduct of the reigning economic ordering of society.