Severe work stress of the middling workforce has resulted in India’s growing sickness burden and a reduced quality of life. (Photo credits: Pexels)
While all the conversation around workplace stress has brought the predictable life-coach mantras of work-life balance, meditation, self-care and setting boundaries back into circulation, nobody tells you that these solutions, too, are often far-fetched and abstract. That’s because stress is just not an entry-level problem of the young workforce, but an internalised drill for a large number of the mid-level workforce, tied as it is to larger questions of affordability, economics, relevance and most importantly, a lack of options.
One may argue that stress is variable and cannot be measured as such but this section of the population is probably bearing the brunt much harder and much of the reason is financial. Let’s look at the 45-55 age group, who are traditionally considered to be in the twilight zone of the productivity pyramid. This group caught the crest of the post-liberalisation years and was quick to junk the slowness and predictability of the socialist era. That eagerness to grab a piece of the world fuelled a competitive and high-performance race. Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies, the new craze to stay connected to global corporations, brought in long and punishing hours on the promise of getting rewarded as “employee of the week.”
As corporates cashed in on this new wave of desire, this group – then called yuppies (young urban professionals) — unwittingly legitimised the hustle culture that we see today, the kind that defines self-worth with professional success. They even argued that some amount of stress was a good accelerator, the deadline was like a game challenge and delivery was like winning a competition. Conformism came easily to this generation that was enamoured of creating aspirational lifestyles and luxury benchmarks. Ironically, they are now the victims of the same culture they chased and are being told that this lifestyle needs correction.
A mid-career professional now has no choice. There is the tyranny of replacement by a bubbling tech-educated workforce and the constant financial insecurity of maintaining the life that one has built through the decades. Experience is no longer an asset unless one acquires new skills in e-classrooms. And the pay packages can only be static with advancing years as companies protect their long-term investment on a younger workforce for continuity than somebody who will be bowing out in a few years. As new-age sectors take off, this group has fewer choices to change streams – age is a liability. There is, therefore, just no room to be lax.
So when there’s talk about prioritising me-time, developing a hobby, mini breaks or signing up for a retreat for well-being, the late-age professional would much rather push themselves over the edge and use their leisure time to stay relevant, and investable. Many in this group are even signing up for weekend skill classes to stay ahead in the game and build up reserves in their post-retirement years.
There’s another big difference. This stress is self-built and internalised, rather than an extraneous imposition, and is born out of every kind of insecurity, be it financial (will there be enough money to earn and invest?), emotional (money is still the self-confidence cushion) and social (money is still an access card). And with no social security worth the name, this group cannot afford to destress. Even when companies put systems in place. For, this is a larger question of whether one can afford to draw a line in the first place and still battle anxieties or whether one can cope or be asked to quit.
This is the reason why sustained and severe work stress of the middling workforce has resulted in India’s growing sickness burden and a reduced quality of life. One of the most effective studies on stress and its impacts on the mid-career professional comes from the Finnish Longitudinal Study of Municipal Employees (FLAME), which followed 5,429 public sector employees, aged 44–58 years, over 28 years and found them to have developed acute depression, a decline in cognitive ability and movements, sleep disturbances and somatic symptom disorders. Besides diabetes and heart disease, an increasing proportion of India’s elderly population is reporting dementia, Alzheimer’s, cancers and auto-immune disorders.
American author and educationist Carol S Pearson once described mid-life workaholism as “the ego desperately wants safety”. So any relaxation is seen as equivalent to idleness or unworthiness. For the vast number of ageing post-liberalised Indians, stress has already consumed them.
