Work and life style

Many young people now a days, engaged in busy professions like finance, business management, information technology etc., in the burgeoning knowledge industry, have very little time to spare, in the course of a normal working day, either for themselves or their families. Some of them even display tendencies befitting workaholics. Their time frame is usually packed mostly with business, but sometimes also accommodates structured leisure elements or packages considered ‘cool’ or ‘in vogue’. All of these do not leave many windows allowing them to just look out watching the fading colour of the sky in the evening and wish they could become like a kite gliding into the distant horizon or do something, anything, that does not necessarily have any use value and call for approbation or sanctions of their peers.

It is as if not only are their professional life governed by parameters set by the businesses they work for, and hence ultimately, by the market, their individual life, their choices about consumption to keep their body satiated and the mind tamed, are increasingly dictated and manipulated by the omnipresent and omniscient market. Everything that they do or choose not to do must make sense in terms of a generally accepted paradigm about how to conduct life along a materially secure and prosperous path. They exist in a social ambience - in the family, within the community and wider cultural mileu, valuing and aspiring such a trajectory of life. My life, that is. Irrespective of whatever happens to the environment that supports it or the other concurrent lives in competition.   

One wonders, however, if they sometimes miss the work-life balance in an untutored common sense. Which begs the question if some of them would choose to subvert against the denominational patterns of social and cultural preferences, the choices of the items of consumption and leisure (things of desire), the subtle subservience to a ‘factory’-produced uniformity of products and customs, a fetish for efficiency and a distaste for redundancy, apprehension about asymmetry and cultural diversity that run counter to the fundamentalism of the power elite in modern democracies, especially its neo-liberal globalising variant. If they could breach this hegemony, there would have been a need to review their singular focus on profit and self-aggrandisement in both spheres of work and leisure. This also could have nucleated a question or two about the contents and organisation of their work (modularity, object-orientedness, extreme reductionism coupled with an assembly line unity), its impact on the environment and other fellow human beings and even its intellectual quality and worth. 

This interrogation of the work and its implication on the life of the workers, especially the knowledge workers, is especially important because there is an aura of superiority, novelty, modernity and of course an array of privileges associated with their exclusive domains of specialised technical competencies. There is a positive impetus, a danger if you like, for such workers to buy into an identity based on such specialised knowledge-oriented work and the consequential hubris. By allowing them to play a key role in the innovation and management of the industry and businesses and, increasingly in sprucing and speeding up governance, the work defines their relevance to those at the helm of the business and the government, in the process providing them not only their financial security but prosperity and social standing and giving them a chance and a reason to celebrate their life in style.

‘Celebration of life’ is often suggested visually on the pages of glossy coffee table books showing walls coming alive in exquisite colour and lustre, huge antique furniture pieces, plush upholstery, ethnic décor, soft lighting, sumptuous food and expensive wine laid out on a scale befitting royalty. And of course an assemblage of chic crowd with similar or higher pedigree and clout enveloped in the hubbub of good-natured banter and a sweetly nagging flavour of good and gated living.

Except that this picturesque life must unspool endlessly. For if it ever stops for want of fuel that runs the motor the response would be to quickly recover the foothold on the bandwagon. Nobody in the right mind would countenance a possibility of even a jolt to the familiar identity, let alone a loss of it.

For them the work they do is probably their only identity and their lifestyle the only acceptable one. If you take out the work, and consequently the attendant assured wherewithal and the status along with it, the emptiness of a life of ordinariness starts staring at them. A sort of life they have not been accustomed to looking at except occasionally through the windows of their cocoon and ignoring it. Work thus becomes an escape from a life which otherwise does not make much sense to them.