Brave New World is one of my favorite novels by Aldous Huxley. It is said that artists are true prophets of the times to come because seldom in their time they appear maverick and hysterical or the world portrays them as such. The imagery that the author sketches appears more than true today. The dystopian novel, which sparks a debate on free will, authoritarianism, and human agency paints a poignant picture of the times we live in. Neil Postman rightly says that Orwell’s 1984 was the death knell that hasn’t turned true, but the enchanting sorcery of Brave New World has entrapped us with nowhere left to turn.
One of the key features of Brave New World is human conditioning, a conditioning that leaves him without agency, choice, and will. He is laughing but not thinking. He is taking the soma drug to forget his misery and is moving on to the next project, next promotion, next task, next….. But ultimately getting stuck in the dark hole of meaningless existence. He gets up in the morning; praying for weekends, then on weekends dreading the horror of attending the office in the days ahead (now with remote work, he should be available 24×7). I am penning down my rant (reflections) in the milieu of a young girl Anna Sebastian, a 26-year-old CA, working for EY who passed away falling prey to Toxic work culture and at large our societal outlook on work, life, and success.
This story feels very personal as any individual who has worked in the corporate sector has faced the onslaught of a never-ending workload. I also had an opportunity to work on a few reports of employee satisfaction surveys of many of the top companies in India, based on these experiences, it has compelled me to voice my dissent on a system that thrives on sucking the blood and soul of employees in the ecosystem.
I would like to approach this subject from a micro and macro perspective. Firstly, let me engage with the Micro perspective, which encapsulates a Toxic Work Culture. And when I say work culture it encapsulates the holistic outlook, not limited to a physical space. Let me elucidate on the various facets that make up this toxic work culture in brief:
- Work-life balance:
This is probably a buzzword and one of the most abused words in the workplace. But still, this is one of the most critical factors which causes an imbalance in the work life. There are naysayers who say we should work for 70 hours a week and a few Instagram reel so-called entrepreneurs who say work-life balance is not an Indian concept per se, and we should work and this work-life balance concept is alien to us and alienates workers’ commitment towards organization. But in a nutshell, when we see how Anna’s mother mentions how she worked on weekends, late nights, etc., highlights the plight of every employee and that something had to go this bad, to bring such debauchery of human decency to run(ruin) human lives to ground.
This phenomenon has further escalated in the era of work from home, where the employee is expected to stay connected 24×7 or round the clock. Gone are the good old days of logging off from the system and coming back to life. I feel this aspect should be looked into critically or else we cannot break this spell of bonded corporate slavery.
- Enabling work environment:
We see the Modern workplace views an employee as a resource and strives to extract maximum value out of him. We have advancement in the human resource management paradigm and the talk of moving towards employee engagement, his needs, etc. These are by and large limited to our HR textbooks and manuals. The work environment and especially managers act like feudal lords and make the lives of employees under them a living hell. The carrot of appraisal and stick of deadlines leaves them at the whims and fancies of the Manager.
In this case, too, Anna’s mother complains that the Manager used to schedule unlimited meetings round the clock to seek multiple updates after updates. I remember an instance, where my friend had narrated that on a Sunday we were at a cousin’s wedding when the manager asked him to have a plate of biryani in one hand and work on an Excel sheet for analysis of the project on the other hand. This is in a nutshell the toxic and regressive work environment that leaves employees frustrated and disengaged.
- Nature of work:
David Graeber in his book Bullshit Jobs has aptly described various jobs that exist which are really adding zero value or negative impact on the lives of those who are working and the actual impact of their work. For example, one of my friends, whose work is to check the quality assurance of a social media company. His job is to watch hundreds of videos daily and tag the video. The nature of video varies. In the evening he has a mandatory 30-minute session for relaxation with a therapist to look into his mental conditioning after exposure to millions of images.
On the surface level, the company seems to have empathy with the worker that it has arranged for counseling and therapy. But if we look beyond the surface, should a normal human be exposed to this magnitude of images and emotions? Even in the case of Anna, she was exposed to never-ending projects and files and clients, ultimately taking down her precious life. We need to reconsider and place human dignity, autonomy, and choice at the center and realign our workspace.
These were according to a few of the important facets of toxic work culture. Now let us look at a few of the macro perspectives.
- Meaning of success and pursuit of life
Today, in the world driven by the mantra of success, the moving goal post of success and reducing it to material gains, position, status, and the rat race has left our world in a docile position. Look at the case where we are discussing, the talented and educated girl, to pursue her dreams leaves her hometown and joins a prestigious corporate firm and has to work her socks off to achieve “Success”.
No one is against working hard or leaving their hometown to pursue greener pastures, but the social dictate of success means working on the top 4 consulting company, and to get a promotion you have to work like machines till perpetuity … these so-called tracks success Leave our talented and educated individuals on a simulation where there entire pursuit in life becomes dedicated to sprinting on a treadmill with shifting goals and lack of meaning and relevance in life.
There is an Italian film called Still Time on the premise of life in corporate companies. The protagonist as he wakes up in life, has crossed 10 years of his life and when he looks back, he doesn’t remember anything. Not the moments he spent with his beloved, parents, wife, kids, and friends not any tangible achievements. Every time he wakes up, he is sitting in a newly promoted office on the journey(entrapment) of success. Similarly, we are at a crossroads as a civilization, and if we don’t snap out of this spell, we are doomed to be entrapped.
- Glamorization/fetishization of overwork /exploitation
This is also a unique phenomenon in terms of modality. We have had the concept of bonded laborers and slaves, but today as Huxley says, the employee or individual is enslaved by conditioning and is programmed to work and work. There is no existence or meaning in the contemporary workspace without perpetual work for an employee. But the conditioning by the glamorization of this overwork, coming to the office on weekdays, weekends, etc., and claiming that will ease out later and necessary precursor for breaking into the corporate world. All this is a sham, and people well 20 years later also have the same cycle of working for 70 hours a week and getting high as productive individuals.
A 3-day trip to Goa is seen as relaxation enough to again go on the assembly line. It is very important to separate work and life, or else the mental balance and prosperity of an individual get seriously imbalanced. No wonder, the cases of mental wellness across the world have skyrocketed. I would like to quote from Brave New World, where the controllers decide to have a 5-day work week, instead of 6 day work week. (I am not speaking of Bangalore. ) What follows next is chaos and riots as there workers in the brave new world are not able to comprehend what to do with the extra day. We also are facing a similar dilemma as we don’t have any life apart from work. This phenomenon of normalizing exploitation should be challenged.
- Absence of Social Outlook
Human beings are social beings. Our existence is beautified and given meaning by our engagement and conversation with the universe. In the movie, Into The Wild, the protagonist has the adventure of a lifetime, when his body is found in the jungles of Alaska, the note we find is that true happiness is shared. But the tragedy of our times is that our notions of work, success, and its pursuit have left what really matters on the back burner. We hear our friends aged 25 saying that they used to play cricket, and football or read novels and do poetry. But no they don’t have time. They don’t have time for family and friends.
This also has exponentially seen a rise in cases of mental wellness and substance abuse. Our work schedule and priorities don’t leave us, or it is not our priority to engage with others around us, because we are no longer designed to be social. We see in gated societies, that we no longer recognize our neighbors, as important stakeholders in our lives, so to expect to be present in their times of need is an expectation that seems unreal in this day and age.
Today, we are also seeing, authoritarian tendencies on the rise globally, this is also due to the disengagement of a large chunk of the corporate sector from the social sector and civil society. Thus we need careful introspection of our lives.
They say that crisis reveals the existential plight of the infrastructure, and our work infrastructure lays bare in this milieu. The tragic incident of Anna, her family is left to rue her departure at such a young age to the toxic system we have enabled by our actions. This is a failure of our society and a young girl with dreams and aspirations has been razed to the ground. We as a society must be held responsible.
There is a notion that work is work is worship. When seeing the evolution of humans from hunter-gatherers to the present day, the nature of work has changed, the need for work, its impact on society the emergence of Artificial intelligence and automation and its ethical conundrums, etc. How are they going to impact our society in the coming days, is also an area which we need to discuss when we talk about work and workspace. I have not discussed about work and its notion of being beneficial to society and the social responsibilities of corporations as they pollute the environment and give back pennies in the form of CSR. That is for a different discussion some other time.
Thus, this untimely death of Anna should be a lesson for us to reimagine our conceptualization of work, leading to a reimagination of the work paradigm, which enables us to have a healthy enabling workspace, where employees are engaged and happy, have a social life and contribute towards society. I propose a serious rethinking on this pivotal subject as this will set the trajectory of society and civilization.
