Opinion The rush to nowhere: Can we pause?
Work is worship, so we’ve been told. That doesn’t mean we see the opposite, leisure, as sheer laziness. It’s alright if every free moment isn’t spent on activities that bring material gain. It’s the choices we make in our spare time that bring us closer to living a good life.
A gig worker during work hours in New Delhi. (Express photo by Abhinav Saha) Every news outlet has covered the exhausting pressures of 10-minute deliveries on gig workers who operate in a cycle of constant anxiety, often risking their lives to meet deadlines and maintain good ratings. Needless to say, it’s a complex issue. If they had any better prospects whatsoever, would they zip around on precarious two wheelers in this biting cold, lugging heavy bags for Blinkit or Zomato? Finally, the depressingly wide chasm between promoters with their billion-dollar valuations, demanding consumers and beleaguered delivery boys began to grate on a nation’s conscience but it’s not just businessmen who have a duty to improve labourers’ conditions. It’s a question begging to be asked, other than an ambulance, why should anyone need anything in under 10 minutes?
Because, hurry culture is the bane of modern life. We’re all expected to be more, to achieve more, to create more, as fast as possible. The world venerates a Mamdani for becoming a Mayor in his 30s and a Mark Zuckerberg is a global icon for building Facebook in his 20s. It’s standard practice for companies to incentivise sales and reward rapid results. Speed sells. While there’s nothing wrong with wanting more out of life, when everything feels urgently required — and it’s coming at the cost of somebody vulnerable — it’s only right to recalibrate that to-do list. Unfortunately, a perpetual state of being frazzled has come to mean success. Outpacing everyone to get stuff done, breathlessly, is our default setting. Ten-minute deliveries correspond exactly with the current need to wring out the last bit of efficiency from precious seconds. Perhaps it’s time to calm down and humbly recall that at least existentially, most of what we do doesn’t matter.
Meanwhile, signs of paranoid rushing are everywhere: in traffic jams, the security queue at airports, even in students’ hectic schedules. A city kid’s life is an intense whirlwind of dashing between tuition and extra curricular activities and they’re as tired as grown ups by the end of the day. I was a latchkey kid with many hours to ride my cycle, play hide-and-seek and carrom with other latchkey children post school. Or, spend blissful afternoons reading random, possibly inappropriate books all of which, no doubt, contributed to my (embarrassingly happy) lack of ambition today. Those unregulated hours of trivial pursuits didn’t skill me up to great academic glory but would I trade them in to be enviably accomplished like the children of today? Absolutely not. Childhood idleness is necessary to figure out one’s priorities and interests, even to decide what kind of life we want to live.
Mostly, I feel bad for the youth. Market forces aka chronic uncertainty have created this imperative to overachieve and tear through life. Definitely though, every age has its struggles with deadlines and productivity. No time to see in broad daylight, Streams full of stars, like skies at night. W H Davies’ wistful lines from his poem Leisure in 1911 warned that busyness distracts from the beauty of the world. However, the state of things are so much worse now it feels tone deaf to rue the fact that nobody has the headspace to quietly appreciate nature’s bounty anymore. Obviously, there can be no day dreaming since eking out a living has never been more challenging. Even off-work, there are unspecified expectations that we must keep branding and selling ourselves, whether it’s slyly posting our own successes for potential employers, or furthering an agenda via networking. Alas, leisure time can no longer be separated from self promotion.
Work is worship, so we’ve been told. That doesn’t mean we see the opposite, leisure, as sheer laziness. It’s alright if every free moment isn’t spent on activities that bring material gain. It’s the choices we make in our spare time that bring us closer to living a good life.
The writer is director, Hutkay Films
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