Why do our jobs make us so tired and stressed?

For so many workers, the work week is split into five phases: Monday Blues, Tuesday Denial, Wednesday Acceptance, Thursday hope (It's almost the weekend) and Friday relief (TGIF).

This weekly cadence speaks to something basic: often, our jobs make us more tired and stressed than they should.

Why is it so?

Interestingly, our current predicament would surprise intellectual heavyweights of the past. In the 1930s, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted a 15-hour workweek in the 21st century, creating the equivalent of a five-day weekend. In a 1957 article in The New York Times, Erik Barnouw predicted that, as work became easier, our identity would be defined by our hobbies, or family life.

And, if you look at statistics selectively, they were somewhat right. The average work year has shrunk by more than 200 hours over the last few decades.

However, upwardly mobile and aspirational workers are working longer hours than ever before.

There are several reasons behind that.

If Kool-Aid could Kill

First, if you thought peer pressure was bad in high school, the workplace is worse.

No matter how mundane the task or how meaningless the ritual (my personal favorite: “all hands” meetings where all hands are on the phones hoping no one would notice), the expectation is that we embrace the cause, some larger goal beyond the horizon which is as desirable as it is ill-defined and unattainable.

If you smartly and efficiently do your job in a time-bound fashion and go home in time for dinner, you might get labeled as too tactical (he/she is not strategic and lacks vision), or get tagged with the scarlet letter, i.e. merely “meets expectations” in your performance review.

Any deviation from this unspoken expectation of cultural conformity is viewed as heresy. The emotional expenditure required to keep up the pretense does take a toll.

Work is all you need

Second, as Derek Thompson in The Atlantic points out, work has come to occupy a much more central role in our lives than it was intended to.

There is obviously the financial necessity behind responding to the alarm clock every day, but as Thompson points out, the American conception of work has shifted from jobs to careers to callings -- from necessity to status to meaning.

But as we shift from a manufacturing/agricultural economy to a service-oriented one, the pressure to find meaning in what we do has increased. In those systems, everyone used the same tools and produced the same products. There was no distinction, and therefore no definition based on productivity or output.

In the service economy, absent demonstrable evidence of professional potency, we chase after titles. Going from individual contributor to senior, from senior to principal, from principal to Director, and then to VP, SVP and CEO.

This may resemble a pyramid with the CEO at the top, but in reality the walls of the workplace rise in the shape of an inverted pyramid, its corridors of access getting wider the higher you climb. Sadly, most people trying to get in are at the bottom where the funnel is narrowest. The folks at the top have room to spare and decide who rises and who does not.

And, so we keep hustling to win the jackpot in the white-collared Vegas where, at a game where few really win the desired prize, but everyone seems to be playing forever and pretending to enjoy it with lots of swag to show.

And this is why small workplace arguments like roles and responsibilities and budgets take on an outsized importance. These get personal not because the stakes are high, but because they are low, and too many of us are jostling for a moment in the sun under a cloudy sky. This is what Freud meant by the narcissism of small differences.

Many others have given up and reconciled themselves to that biweekly paycheck, performing their duties with the enthusiasm of a kidnapping victim reading a ransom note.

The modern workplace is like a party where you’re constantly being convinced that being invited is a privilege, and therefore have no right to point out that the food is Taco Bell leftovers and the entertainment is David Hasselhoff.

Work is validation

None of this means that all the blame for our stressful professional existence rests purely with our bosses. That would imply a lack of agency, and I refuse to take that cop-out.

In fact, in an age of unraveling social fibers - distant families, infrequent reunions, estranged friendships, shuttered local libraries, communities separated by long commutes - work has become the one congregation that will accept all converts.

Being immersed in it and consumed by it is seen as validation. Being busy and overbooked is the price of entry. Responding to email after hours are renewal costs.

And feeling needed is not sufficient, we need to show the world proof. Glossy and quantifiable proof.

When work titles become insufficient or unattainable, we chase after retweets, likes and shares of our social media musings, and titles like “achievers under 30” and “top influencer” and my favorite, “change agent.”

Rather than just keeping up appearances at work, we try and put those appearances at work for us.

And that is also why we see manicured social media profiles around our perfect vacations and spacious houses. Our jobs support a lifestyle that we have become accustomed to, as Adam Barker explains in this Ted Talk, where we work long hours to buy stuff we don’t need to impress people who we don’t really know.

Amid the aforementioned congregation of the professionally driven, we viewed our work profile as baptismal water that will wash away our other inadequacies; it has, instead and therefore, become the stress that coasts through our veins and casts a burden on our chests.

Work was never meant to bear the burden of our identity and replace social connections. Work was meant to be a means to buy free time, not to buy more work by selling the little time we have left.

During my graduate school days, I enjoyed being a teaching assistant. Explaining programming concepts using practical examples in a way the textbook did not was one of the great sublime pleasures of life that far outweighed the paycheck. The students showed up to my labs even when no extra points were on offer. Then, I quit to get a more lucrative research scholarship that involved publishing a white paper that no one ever read, but helped me graduate faster.

I have no complaints. I still mentor younger and sometimes older colleagues at work and in the industry and help develop them into better versions of themselves. Those teaching skills have neither atrophied not attenuated. But that idealism has to compete with careerism everyday.

That competition is what is tiring. And that is why we dread Mondays and thank (deity of your choice) it’s Friday.

But you can make things better for yourself.

I have embraced 3 principles over the last 2 years that have led to much better life satisfaction (which is bigger than job satisfaction and work-life balance):

1. Work hard, but take it easy. This is not life and death.
2. Work is just one of many building blocks of life. It is necessary, but not sufficient.
3. Family comes first, times goes fast and you live just once.

Have a nice week!