I had written this anecdote in January 2019 right before the pandemic, but then removed it as I thought people might think this means that I am not serious about my work. Ironically, pandemic happened only a bit after this and now more people are thinking about work/life balance and how family matters. To this, I want to add a story that recently happened. My sister had her nose broken and needed a surgery. I was the only relative in town. I accompanied her as there was no way she could drive on the way back and I mean, anyone who is going through a surgery needs to be with someone they trust. We went to the hospital early in the morning, I was with her the whole time, said farewell when she was taken to the surgery room and got constant messages from the hospital about each step of the surgery. After about 5-6 hours, I drove her home, stayed with her for a couple more hours, made her soup and a Persian dish similar to porridge called Ferni to soothe her sore throat caused by the tube they inserted into her throat to help her breathe, stayed with her a few hours for the anesthetics to wear off, stayed a bit more and came home. All of these when I had two interviews and a few meetings that week. When we came home, my sister's roommate seemed so nervous, didn't even say hi appropriately and when asking why, she said she had a meeting. She went immediately into her room and didn't come back for another 3 hours or so. When she was done, she came out, started talking and later laughing, being relieved from the stress of her work. When I was leaving, she said "It's very nice what you did for you sister. If it was my sister, she would have dropped me off and leave".
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I was walking on the main quad on campus when I saw a sign about TEDx event happening the day after. I took a note of that on my calendar and attended it the next day. I was excited to see the talks. It would have been my first ever TEDx event I had ever attended. I was expecting professors giving talks about their research or something really significant. What I saw instead was a small room full of undergraduate students and a very ordinary podium. I thought to myself: “This seems different from what I expected, but let’s see what it’s going to be about”. I sat there until the first speaker started talking. An undergraduate student reading from her notes about her problems as an immigrant. Another undergraduate student talked about problems with women’s right, again reading from her notes. The topics were great but the performances and the speech while good, were not impressive. The third or fourth speaker, however, came and started walking around. She was not reading from her notes so I thought to myself: “At least this one is prepared”. She then started talking about how she had trouble finding a topic for her speech because all her friends counted on her and that she didn’t want to disappoint them. In the end, she decided to show them her weaknesses this time and stop the process of faking and hiding her real feelings, so she decided to share this with us and her friends who had attended the talk. She then moved on and talked about how speedy everything is in our lives and how we are always so anxious about moving from one stage to the other that we don’t even sit down and celebrate a success or mourn a failure. We are under constant pressure to hide or suppress our feelings and pretend that all is well in all circumstances and that we are so strong, no matter how hard we are pushed…
I connected with her speech right away. Since I moved here, I always felt this was a big problem but felt like nobody was seeing or taking it seriously [or was allowed to]. The problem of how things move so fast and people are motivated to keep moving and never sit down and relax for a moment and think about the consequences of their work-related decisions on other aspects of their lives. People barely have time to celebrate a success because success means planning for more and more success and failure means standing up right away and fix things. Vacation, break, parental leave are limited and people are under constant guilt for not having enough time to spend with family. Coping with this means repressing the healthy normal human feelings. More and more people are living individually, separated from their families and loved ones because job has been defined to be more important than family, than health, than everything else in this standard. This is a huge problem. Many people don’t see the significance of the issue because they have always lived like this and are trained to think this is how life is supposed to be. I remember watching a Youtube video about how greeting has now changed from “I’m good” to “I’m busy”:
Individual 1: Hey, how are you? Individual 2: Oh, Busy.
And people say it as if they are proud! As Cal Newport explains in his book “Deep Work”, measure of productivity in the current standard equals being busy while being busy all the time does not equal being productive. For productivity, we need to give our brain a peace of mind, a break sometimes as is proved scientifically and by practice. This is how brain functions. With the current standards, things are redone multiple times because being too busy too much of the time has reduced healthy brain function and thus overall productivity. It is time to change the way we look at things. It is time to sit down, relax and rethink our standards. We don’t live to work; we work to have an enjoyable life or at least live more consciously?