COPING WITH CAREERISM

The 21st century workplace is gradually becoming a ghetto with human beings getting gradually transformed into mechanical entities. The result has been that the emotional man is slowly but surely including towards his nemesis. The one reason has been the mad race for productivity.

Excessive digitisation has made human beings wired creatures getting mired in informatics and tied to electronic gadgets. The more a person tries to escape out of this the more he gets bogged down into the morass.

This predicament has led to an existential crisis. A situation in which an individual starts questioning the very purpose of his or her existence. The very foundation of their life begins shaking at the base. Does life has any meaning, purpose or value? The malady is certainly a modern phenomenon that has caught up with the Indian workplace where people are being made to “run twice as fast as they can”, in the words of the famous author Lewis Caroll of Alice in Wonderland fame.

As organisations try to fleece their people for that extra drop of blood, the human nature at a workplace is the first casualty. Everywhere we hear of growth rate, production targets and market shares as the human being is being haunted by the corporate culture that has become some kind of corporate vulture. What this corporate culture fails to appreciate is that the humanity has been pushed to the brink. In the words of biologist EO Wilson, humanity is facing its gravest crisis owing to “Paleolithic Emotions”, “Medieval Institutions” and delusions about its “God-like Technology.”

As technology replaces humans, rather enslaves them to almost total domination, glitzy computer screens do an irreparable damage to the human life that frantically searches for its real solace ina virtual world. Stability and peace are giving way to instability and conflict leading to a mechanical life style where the human being is converted into a robot, a productivity enhancing human machine devoid of all human qualities.

But the human being in this human machine still lives though at a much deeper subconscious level and at times rebels because it does not accept this subhuman reality. Thus, slowly, this productivity machine enters into a state of conflict with its two lives, one the mechanical that it has been forced into and the other the human that is its basic nature. This conflict gradually is becoming a perennial condition striking at the very core of work-life balance with a vengeance. Slowly the performance that had peaked plateaus subsequently declines.

This situation is now becoming a predicament with more and more people at more and more work places. Diminished enthusiasm at work, sense of alienation and lack of drive to excel are slowly becoming the reality for many. Where is the solution? There can only be two ways. One way is that the organisation tries to change its course but given the hectic pace of competition that those organisational entities think they are into, this is highly unlikely. The second way is that the individual defies its dilemmatic condition of being both a human and a robot so that it can regain the perspective and realise its real self. But for this it needs to come out of its self-imposed careerism that is the new disease that has inflicted the workplace today. The sooner the better.