My Pandora’s Box
In more ways than one, 2020 was an unfortunate year. This was the year that tested human endurance to its limit. An absolutely unpredictable year that swept us off our feet without warning and left us gasping for air. Now that we’re all trying to move on from our trauma, I’ve decided to bring my pandemic blues out of the dusty archives and take a moment to address our collective grief.
Our boss yelled at us today.
The morale has been a little low recently. We are, of course, battling a pandemic situation around the globe right now. I have not left the house in months. Or that would probably be a lie (or exaggerated truth — choose your fighter). I’ve left the house briefly under the excuse of grocery shopping, covering up the guilt of being an irresponsible citizen under the guise of being a good daughter, helping her parents out. And even then, stepping outside has never felt satisfying. Not when I have a cheap piece of synthetic cloth circulating my breath between my nose and mouth. Or when my vivid imagination conjures up images of larger-than-life pathogens floating above my head, waiting for the chance to swoop down upon me. Or when rubbing alcohol on my palms as frequently as 5 times in 20 minutes makes me feel like I’m trying to rub off the outer layer of my skin.
Not when I’ve villainized every human being within a two meter radius, imagining them tearing off their mask impulsively to triumphantly cough on me just to make a point while I am helplessly rooted on spot.
This is a person who experienced life on the football field. Someone who left the house on an impulse just to be alone among strangers. Someone who frequently extended their patronage to the small neighbourhood businesses offering their dining services. A terribly self-reliant person who needs frequent company.
Today my life resembles none of that.
This is usually the point where I would like to take the opportunity to interrupt my well-meaning advisors by saying that yes, many people have it worse than I ever could. And I personally find it an awfully sadistic habit to highlight examples of other people’s misfortune to feel better about oneself.
I am fortunate that I am dedicated to my work, and majority of my work, as a student of Computer Science Engineering, can be done from the corner of my room on my precious laptop. So, with nothing else in my USP working out for me right now, I have made the very conscious and deliberate decision of devoting myself to my work.
I have grueling online classes from 6 am in the morning everyday, till 9 am. After which, I have the rest of the day to work on my various personal projects. If I were to list them all, I sense I would be inviting pity from some of you readers, along with the label of ‘workaholic’ and opinions I normally would not ask for — so I’ll save that for some other discussion in the future.
I am not complaining, and neither do I want pity.
But our boss yelled at us today. And it felt bad.
And for a moment, I felt like I wanted someone to sympathize.
I wanted to show him my daily schedule, all my self-imposed commitments and responsibilities. I wanted to say people are dying around us, and how even as a fairly optimistic person I often worry about the people close to me. I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and somehow show him the world of uncertainty a 20-year old faces today. What kind of job training am I to receive, if there seem to be no jobs available? I wanted to point out how we only had less than 24 hours to complete the task that was set for us. How I’m running on barely 4 hours of disturbed sleep while I type these words right now.
How my mother complains everyday because I prioritize the assignments over spending time with her.
As young adults who have not sold themselves to the slavery of capitalism yet, how unreasonable the demands of the corporate world sound.
And above all, how sensitive we all are due to prolonged loneliness, frustration and helplessness.
Then I realized our boss also probably feels the same. After all, he has a boss too. At best, he may be better at dealing with these emotions due to his experience.
And then I felt better, once I could find logic to the rebuke.
When I committed to this kind of a training program, I undertook the responsibility of fulfilling all its requirements.
Even if I find some demand unreasonable, it does not warrant this kind of a long-term reaction. I say long-term, because short-term reactions are a little harder to control, as I have observed for myself today. I do not want to make excuses for myself. When I signed up for this, I had the resolve to shoulder it all — and I have not yet lost it one bit today. I will still shoulder it all.
And yet, when our boss yelled at us today, I felt bad.
The topic I started to write on, was the toxic side of ‘hustle culture’.
Hustle culture is basically the false promises that were made to some of us when we were younger. The lie which is “work hard now, so you can relax later on” which often misleads naïve youngsters into the vicious cycle of unending productivity. This is quite a predictable outcome, because as stated by Paul Krugman in his book, “The Rise and Fall of American Growth”:
“It’s a shocking prediction for a society whose self-image, arguably its very identity, is bound up with the expectation of constant progress.”
We do, indeed, measure our self-worth in terms of our constant progress, and the more we achieve, the higher we tend to raise the bar. If humans were easily satisfied, we would not be looking for wormholes in distant galaxies today.
So how do you expect yourself to be any different? When do you decide to stop?
It is during trying times like these, that we are forced to realize that although people do care, they do not care enough to compromise on certain things. A company only has your best interests at heart as long as it does not cause a conflict with their own.
And such a phenomenon has unfortunately been normalized by this ‘hustle culture’.
I feel this kind of societal pressure has really taken off in this generation in particular, due to popular use of social media. Often, while scrolling through my Twitter or Instagram feed, I come across people posting photo evidence of their extravagance, thanking their hours of labour for it.
Young people feel like they’re falling behind, that they’re running out of time. At some point, being in your 20s was considered very young. A 20-year old in 2020, however, has much less room for error. Room for error which we have personally discarded for ourselves by constantly comparing ourselves with strangers — that too from a skewed perspective to boot. We really are very unkind to ourselves, if you think about it.
As a result of this, even something as normal as taking some time off to find yourself runs the risk of having you mislabeled as ‘lazy’.
(I really do not like that word — lazy. I’d rather use ‘uninterested’ — at least that implies the person in question has a choice. ‘Lazy’ being an overused word immediately paints too many people as having some intrinsic character flaw they cannot get rid of no matter the situation.)
This culture is toxic because it has a negative impact on all kinds of people. It causes some people to resort to excessive work because they feel such behaviour makes them superior in the eyes of society.
On the other hand, for the category that would have normally invested as many hours of their day working anyway, it creates an unnecessary pressure that does not yield increased productivity in any way. I’m sure if I had the time to do some research I’d be able to supplement my claim with statistics that proved that hustle culture might actually result in decreased productivity.
We are also encroaching slightly upon the topic of toxic positivity, so I’ll just go ahead and address it outright.
To be honest, sometimes I wonder if I’m a victim of toxic positivity, or if I just happen to be a more optimistic person in general. Quite a valid question, if you ask me, since sometimes by trying to be self-aware, I might overdo it and end up with feeling like I am simultaneously both clever enough to fool myself and unintelligent enough to fall for it as well.
Toxic positivity is stifling. It is the internal or external denial and invalidation of authentic feelings of hurt. In a world where mental health is already not discussed as much as it should be, such toxic positivity only results in further regression in this aspect. It silences people who need to speak out. It causes them to feel more lonely than usual, since usually they would have dealt with their negative feelings themselves, but due to self-denial, they cannot even confide within their selves. Add to that, the shame and guilt of thinking ‘forbidden thoughts’.
But the humans that existed back when Shakespeare penned Shylock’s famous monologue are no different than the ones that step into the office today.
Life is not always easy to handle — and feeling like it has spun out of control does not make it any less worth living.
It is okay to feel sad when sad things happen.
It is valid to feel scared when the situation is genuinely scary.
It is absolutely alright to feel angry, hurt, resentful, misunderstood.
Because last time I checked, these were all human emotions, and we are human after all.
And so, when our boss yelled at us today, I felt bad.
And this is what was left at the bottom of my Pandora’s box after the storm had raged on.
