Are you a Total Worker?
No, I am not talking about being a workaholic, but how much our lives have started to be dominated by work and how much we value and see ourselves, from the lenses of our work or career. Total Worker is always busy and it doesn’t always have to be associated with direct work.
Imagine a scenario, where you wake up early, and immediately check the phone to check if you need to put out any fires. Then you meditate for exactly 10 mins. Then you eat a light breakfast and hit the gym. Post that you travel to work while listening to a podcast or a book, and at work, you spend the entire day trying to solve a set of problems and complete a set of tasks and above all trying to optimize productivity. Now and again, you take a break, because that will help enhance your productivity. After a 12-15 hour work day, you head home, all the time getting Slack/Teams notifications long into the night. Exhausted, you go to bed, believing still that sleep will help you work efficiently the next day.
How was your mental health during the whole day? Overwhelmed, Stressed, Tensed, Agitated, Exhausted, Lonesome? Invariably it leads to burnout at some point in time.
Everything to us starts looking like a task to be completed or work to be done. Be it our hobby, our passions, spending time with loved ones, or celebrating festivals.
We become a total workers if
Work becomes the center around which our lives turn
Everything else that we do is in the service of the work we do
We convert our leisure, play, and activity all slowly into work
When we start defining meaning in our lives based on the work that we are doing.
So basically, when our lives start rotating around work, everything else just becomes work or about our work. Then we have become a Total Worker.
This basically means that we should be conscious of what we are doing and try to present and enjoy the simple pleasure in life. Recently Akshat also wrote that it’s better to give your 80% at work. That doesn’t mean that you only have to do 80% of the work, but often Parkinson’s law allows us to do the same work in a lesser amount of time and provides us with some room to spare for our personal lives.
At the end of our lives, we should not define our worth just by our work. We are much more than that and that self-reflection would allow us to remain humans and not become “Total Worker”
Reference
- https://bigthink.com/the-present/andrew-taggart-can-universal-basic-income-end-our-cultural-obsession-with-work/
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