Somewhere along the way things like sleep, having a life and not being exhausted all the time stopped seeming cool. They began to be considered luxuries, and no longer necessities of living a well-rounded, fulfilling or even healthy life. Dark circles, countless yawns and the penchant for glugging one coffee after another became badges of honour. We began to romanticize the burnout.
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Before we move forward, I want to clarify that hustling for something we care about, working our butts off for something important to us are noble, important pursuits. Having an entrepreneurial spirit and wanting to build something from scratch is a brave path to take. So when these are the people that run the risk of burning out, it is a worthy endeavour, but still not one that should be romanticized.
I’ve barely entered the workforce, but already, I see so many former batch-mates, mentally and emotionally drained, dreading the next day of work, with little time to do anything other than work or think about work. Around the time of the Industrial Revolution, a model emerged; stating that people should be given off enough time from work, just to recover for more work. In essence, life was about work and nothing else. It was also no coincidence that society as a whole, experienced a series of public health crises around this time.
But I digress. I have a theory about just why we, as a people, have begun looking at emotional and physical exhaustion from work, with rose-tinted glasses. The entrepreneurial spirit has been bastardized, filtering down massive organizations, creating an environment that breeds tiredness and the death of the much vaunted work-life balance. Entrepreneurship is all about creating employment, being your own boss and adding value to society. In situations like that, working till you’re sapped of everything makes a lot more sense. But when we’re in an organization, working ridiculous hours that ultimately only makes the rich even richer, well that’s harder to justify. Especially in a country like ours, where overtime is a Western privilege for the most part, it’s even harder to justify. Let’s do some math, shall we?
Let’s say you got a new job that pays Rs. 30000 a month. Your listed working hours are 9am to 6pm, six days a week. But when you start your job, you end up staying at work till 9pm each day. That’s 3 extra hours a day, 18 extra hours a week. In a month, that’s 72 hours. With a work day that should be 9 hours, you actually end up working a whole extra 8 days each month. In a year, that’s 96 days; more than 3 months of unpaid work, that is simply expected of you. Every industry isn’t like this of course. Some industries like healthcare or journalism demand more hours, but have immense value to society as a whole as well. But when we look at industries like hospitality or advertising, it is a lot harder to pin down its extrinsic value to a community as a whole, especially when compared to something like healthcare.
Of course, finding a way out of this isn’t easy. The job market is a mess, supply is way higher than the demand, and pretty much every company only cares about the financial bottom line. But the point is, we seem to have moved beyond just accepting it, we’ve begun to romanticize it. Bonding over 16-hour workdays, a perennial lack of sleep and overwhelming exhaustion just isn’t normal, and it shouldn't be treated as such.
Perhaps worst of all though, burning out in the short-run, may be an annoyance, but in the long run, it directly contributes to depression, anxiety, elevated levels of stress and a whole lot more. So, instead of romanticizing the burnout, let’s ask them what we can do to make things a little easier, or implore them to put their mental and physical health first.
The intention of this piece was never to offer solutions, but rather to draw our attention to a burgeoning phenomenon that normalizes abnormal behaviour.
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