Constant work a reality of life

Everything in life requires constant work, whether it’s friendships, relationships, professional roles, running a house or managing finances. The very fact that we are human means that we acknowledge the existential truth that there will always be work

Growing up in a middle-class family in Mumbai, my brother and I were constantly reminded by family that if we work hard during our early years, life will be easy. I took this idea very seriously. I thought that if I continued to do the work in the early years, at some stage, life would feel easy and there would be respite from constant work. I carried this idea with me for a long time, hoping for that moment to arrive where it felt like there was a break from constant work. Some years back, as a therapist I started working with clients in the age group of 60 to 80 years and that’s when my bubble burst as I realized that even at this stage of life, there was so much work to do, so much to process, manage and then re-organize. It occurred to me that, ‘constant work’ is a reality of our life. However, the cognitive understanding didn’t lead to emotional acceptance, and like most people I struggled. All my understanding about human mind, existentialism didn’t reduce the inner turmoil I went through. In the pursuit of avoiding this reality, I even searched, ‘At what stage does life feel easy?’ (Read: absence of constant work).

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Whether it’s millennials, Gen Z or the generations before them, everyone struggles in acknowledging this truth. For millennials, constant work spilled over to not just doing their work but learning to keep oneself updated when it comes to technology, deal with the recession in 2008-2009 and a constant need to be productive including social life on weekends.

Gen Z often feels there is pressure to create an impact and having a purpose at an early stage, building one’s own brand on social media and then learning to remain authentic, finding time to work on their own mental health. Virtual onboarding, working remotely, lack of in person possibilities for building trust with the organizations they were employed has saddled them with more work, anxiety and led to lot of them struggling with Impostor Syndrome and then in turn working on it to deal with self esteem issues.

As someone who overthinks, I can tell you that after enough contemplation and doing the work emotionally, finally in middle adulthood, I embraced the idea that everything in life requires constant work, whether it’s friendships, relationships, professional roles, running a house or managing finances. The very fact that we are human means that we acknowledge the existential truth that there will always be work. A fact that maybe we don’t want to accept, or we believe that we can find a way around.

However, our life does get a little easier when we learn to be friends with this fact and build our pockets of rest and downtime around it. The most important task in adulthood is making a mindful choice about how we navigate life in alignment with our own value system, the same applies in relation to work that surrounds us. The process of figuring what suits us is also an experiment. I have worked too hard and then harbored thoughts of a sabbatical, only to acknowledge that between these two extremes, the reality of constant work continues to linger. Finding a middle path has taken a while but helped me recognize that I need to build space for rest and pause daily. I have built pause rituals at a fixed time daily, as my opportunity to engage in activities that are physically and emotionally soothing and even if I can have 10-15 uninterrupted minutes of this, it’s easier to continue doing the work.

The other day, I was telling a friend about how planning a holiday begins with work and then laundry/unpacking post-holiday, and yet we could laugh about it and go ahead with our plan. Maybe you know you are getting adulthood right, when you can acknowledge the irony of life, joke about it, still complain about how adulting sucks and yet not feel bitter or resentful. In such moments, suddenly all the work one has been putting in over the years, just begins to make sense.