How Hard Should Hard Work Be?

Hard work never killed anybody. Or so we heard repeatedly growing up. Clearly, that does not ring true these days. The tragic passing of young Anna Sebastian Perayil, allegedly of overwork, four months into a job with a prestigious consulting firm has raised fundamental questions about the prevailing work culture.

?It has almost been a central belief across cultures that hard work, in all its forms, is, by definition, good. We have grown up hearing about its desirability and have been admonished repeatedly by parents and teachers against laziness. Students who spent hours studying, often staying up nights, were held up as role models, and scathing comparisons were drawn with the rest of us. An often-repeated line that most of us would have heard was that ‘this was the time to work hard; after all, we had the rest of our lives to enjoy ourselves.

?Of course, as we discovered, the 'rest of our lives’ had no place for enjoyment. The workplace valorises hard work even more. And curiously, it puts a premium on working beyond the mandated and paid-for amount. Treating the job ‘just like a job’ is apparently a horrible crime. We are meant to go ‘above and beyond’ and work 70 hours a week for our own good without getting paid extra for it.

?What is strange is that this idea sits at odds with how we market the fast-changing world we live in. In a primarily agrarian society, one could understand the emphasis on hard work, for our bodies were virtually the only machines we had access to, and life was exceedingly hard. Backbreaking work schedules were the only way to navigate everyday life. Everything was a chore—farming, drawing water, collecting firewood, washing clothes, cooking, looking after children. With few support systems, it was impossible to survive without working really hard.

?In an industrial society, working hard took on a new form. People became cogs in a machine, each with a designated and repetitive role. Individuals lost control over their lives; the physical workload was punishing, but there was also a measure of order. Work hours were regulated, and extra hours meant extra wages. The coming of trade unions helped harness the collective power of the workforce and allowed them some leverage for negotiating better terms.

?With the coming of the knowledge economy, where the body is not exercised at all and it is only the mind that is at work, one would have expected the codes of the workplace to change. But surprisingly, we use the same yardsticks that we used in agrarian and industrial societies to measure work of a completely different kind.

?We have had so many technological instruments that have come to our aid in the workplace post the arrival of the personal computer, and yet there is no change whatsoever in our workload. On the contrary, what has happened is that work has vampired our leisure time by making us accessible and answerable at all times. The future is meant to give us even greater freedom as AI transforms the world, but how many of us truly believe that work cultures will change?

?Greater leisure has been glittering on the technology mirage for decades now. The promise of having more time to devote to the other, more important parts of our lives has been held out to us in every successive technological epoch.

??For those who hark back to the past with nostalgia about how hard they worked in their youth, it is important to recognise just how different the world is today. Unlike the past, where the line between work and the rest of our lives was sharp, today it is virtually nonexistent. Letters took weeks to reach the intended receiver; planning cycles were stretched over months, if not years. Once we got back home, we were truly home. Today, work consumes not just a part of our lives but all of it. Pressure is constant, and it is no surprise that there are so many diseases of modernity around us that were virtually absent in an earlier time.

?And work is just part of the pressure felt by the young. Making one’s way in today’s social landscape is no picnic either. The self has to be burnished and put on display, not just once in a while but every single day. And then there is the pressure that is exerted by one’s peer group. The success of a few is the instrument time of the many stolen. The promise of reaching dizzying heights by following the recipe laid out by the ‘winners’ in this world seduces so many others to strive beyond their capacities. The ‘hustle culture’ that is looked up to encourages this ‘winner-take-all’ sentiment.

?The great illusion that the white-collar workforce carries about themselves is that they are not ‘labour’, that they are a higher category of beings. This leads to an expectation that they create about themselves that, as part of'management’, they carry an additional responsibility that goes beyond what is officially their remit. The corporations are only too glad to feed this delusion by creating a range of symbols that emphasise their superiority—fancy titles, important-sounding language, training sessions. There is an elaborate protocol that serves to obscure the fact that all employees are part of ‘labour’.

?At its heart, the problem lies in the combination of a vested business interest on one side and an internalised feeling of guilt on the other. Cost structures of organisations have been optimised around the assumption that employees will deliver more than what they are paid for. Every new benefit from technology is offset by reducing the workforce so that the pressure on existing employees remains the same.

?Anna‘s death is not an isolated case. While death may not be the outcome in thousands of other instances, the toll that the valorisation of hard work extracts is real. Hard work is important, but life is even more so.

(This is a version of an article that has previously appeared in the Times of India)

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