When livelihood takes over life

Illustration: TBS

On a fine weekend morning, the wuthering wind is coming from the marshland and gently touching you as if a light feather just went past you while you are slouching over the mini table and reading a book. It's a sunny morning, but the sun still seems so adorable. A siege of herons is flying far away from their roost. Sitting on a chair al fresco, you are left with no company but your son, who is playing in the open field with your wife and a cup of coffee. 

The comforting weather, the cup of coffee you are imbibing and the panorama – are all helping you rediscover your usual ebullient self after a hectic week as you look at the stretched bucolic beauty before you with bated breath and chew over your vicissitudes of life.  

Now divert your attention to this narrative – your friend (just imagine) who works in a reputed company and earns a handsome amount of money every month is spending the same weekend preparing a presentation for a meeting, away from the warmth of his family and nature. Even on the weekend, he is working his fingers to the bone. Now, how do you compare these two scenarios, and which life would you like to have? 

To lay bare the truth, most people nowadays are rather habituated to the second type of lifestyle – so immersed in their professional life that they have no family life. In his famous poem 'The Waste Land,' TS Eliot writes, "Unreal City//A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many//I had not thought death had undone so many//And each man fixed his eyes before his feet." These lines indicate our modern-day busy lifestyle.   

People are so caught in the vortex of professional life that they have forgotten to have those fireside chat with their friends at the end of a busy day, spend some quality time with family members to learn about their woes, and peruse poetry books to learn deeper philosophies of life and even have a good night's sleep. 

In reality, we have stopped living, let alone drinking life to the lees. Everyone wants to wallow in wealth and enjoy all the trappings of luxury. Especially, our obsession with so-called 'success' and lure for filthy lucre is depriving us of the mental peace we all aspire to have, yet deny to act in the right way to have it. A big irony of life is that we earn for our family, but we don't have time to spend with them. 

Then suddenly, one fine morning, you wake up just to find yourself lying in a hospital bed in a moribund situation - counting your last moments and regretting all those occasions when you should have tried to create some treasured moments instead of dedicating them to other purposes.  

Well, a mad race is defining our lives, and part of the blame for this situation goes to the organisations we work for and those who work in those companies. Some kind of culture, especially in the corporate and agency areas, has developed, which has inculcated a twisted sense of success and growth in the employees' minds. Different organisations are cultivating this culture, and as a result, people subconsciously feel that nothing is more important than what you achieve in your professional life. 

This is like programming, which railroads you into believing that you have to sacrifice all those family time, weekends and holidays to achieve growth and grow your importance in the company. By doing so, the employers are blurring the lines between professional and personal life and coming up with new shenanigans to pull the wool over the workers' eyes to exploit them. The manipulation, in some cases, goes as far as obsoleting ideas like overtime, insinuating that the companies can always keep you on the clock even without paying you for those extra hours.   

Part of the onus for this unhealthy culture also falls on the individual employees as well. In every company, you will find some people who help the organisation set unrealistic goals by working beyond their scope of job description and working hours. These people put all their eggs in one basket instead of diversifying life. Such types of co-workers are always ready to fire on all cylinders and will stoop to any level to weasel their way into success.  

Workplaces, with great alacrity, take their examples as standard and refer to others as icons to keep exploiting the employees further. It is actually this group of fellows who are impediments to developing a healthy workplace culture. And when an unhealthy practice gets established, that is when the management considers working beyond your regular office hours, at home during late-night hours, weekends and holidays as normal, and expects everyone to work in the same unhealthy pattern. This is how manipulation is being dressed up as growth or success in modern-day workplaces.   

Trapped in this, only the good workers get the short end of the stick. The straight arrows find it difficult to balance between family and professional life. Caught in the crucibles of professional tangles, they feel torn between their family and workplace. Decision makers forget the fact that life is a pendulum where it should lean towards family as well sometimes. The employers want the pendulum to always swing towards them, ultimately robbing the workers of their family life and mental peace. 

Such kind of unhealthy work culture and pattern is being repeated, mutatis mutandis, all over the industry – an industry burgeoning painfully on the backs of exploited workers. Such culture is seriously impacting the physical and mental health of the workers and leaving knock-on impacts. When someone works in such a way for months and years on end, only the trajectory of the recurring bouts of depression and pent-up frustration gets lengthier, which ultimately leaves you lobotomised.  

Moreover, stress and ailments are natural concomitants of such long work hours. According to a study by the World Health Organisation (WHO), long working hours have been associated with an increased risk of heart problems and death. The study showed that around 745,000 people died in 2016 from stroke and heart disease caused by long work hours. Working more than 55 hours a week is related to a higher risk of heart disease. 

We often tend to be oblivious to the likely effects of unhealthy work patterns. It is often seen that the same organisation which is advocating for mental health issues is forcing their employees to work beyond regular working hours and stretch themselves too thin. There is a dichotomy between what different companies say and what they do. 

People working in these offices feel suffocated, exhausted and burned out, yet they continue to work in the same machine-like way because they have got this feeling that these signs of burnout are actually trophies of success.   

Now give it a thought - what's the point of earning if you cannot spend quality time with the people you are earning for? This is antithetical. We are nowadays so absorbed in our work that we don't even realise that we are pushing ourselves over the edge and letting livelihood take over our lives. 

Despite feeling groggy and being on our last legs, we don't pull the plug. Instead, we are just surviving and showboating our materialistic achievements. This is not good because, owing to such a tendency, we are gradually turning into skeletons (spiritually dead) devoid of joy that can be derived from all those nuances of life. 

It's not a good idea to let your professional pressure squeeze out all other aspects of your life and put you behind the eight ball in your personal life. It's time we learn to compartmentalise between our personal and professional life if we want to live a complacent life.   

Md Morshedul Alam Mohabat, Illustration: TBS

Md Morshedul Alam Mohabat is a philomath who likes to delve deeper into the human psyche with a view to exploring the factors that influence it.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.