Hectic World

Consider this-the world on average now sleeps less than 7 hours a day. Compare this with almost 8 hours until a decade ago and almost 9 hours at the end of the 20th century. Why are straining ourselves more? Why do we work more, try to earn more, exert ourselves more and chase our targets with more and more vigour although it is not good for our health? We do it to survive in this world and our efforts are actually to make it a better world for us, Ironically enough, it is becoming more and more difficult to get through each day! Hyper blood pressure, mostly an age related disease is affecting teenagers due to the pressure to perform- to perform in exams, in life and due to peer competition. We strain ourselves more and more each day in an effort to get a good and better life but this pursuit ends up consuming ourselves. We have very little time on our hands and there is a lot to do with the 24 hours we have. We cannot reduce the time we spend at the workplace, infact, we have are working so much more than any of our previous generations that, it forces me to question the purpose behind technological, economical and other sorts of development that we claim to have achieved over our ancestors.

We are doing more work than ever at the office and this requires time. Although there has been an increase in the work we do, there hasn't been a similar rise in the number of hours we have in a day unfortunately. So, where does the additional time we need come from? One of the first things we did was to increase our efficiency and we achieved this with computers and other aids. But that was not enough and we needed more time and this came from our leisure time, the time we spend with our family and from our sleep. All this adversely affects our physical, mental and overall health. We try to cramp more work into less time but corporates being just profit-seekers first and foremost, force their employees to work more. Even in the case of students, life has never been more competitive and hectic and this is especially true in our country. We work more and more than previous generation ever dreamed of, but does that mean that we lead better lives? If we observe it from the financial perspective, there is no doubt that we are better off. But, is it just about money? Shouldn't we take into consideration what amount of effort we put in and what we have lost and what sacrifices we make to gain the money?

For starters, we have very little time to spend with our family and an ad by a
South-East Asian Airline company, which says that booking tickets online will give you more time to spend with your family is a sign of how hectic life has become. There are those who can’t even spend an hour exclusively with their family a week! We hurry to keep our appointments, to make it in time to the office, to finish assignments and projects on time, but we do not hurry when we go home, as there is no pressure to get home early but on all other occasions, we are under pressure to perform in a time bound manner. All this pressure and expectations and competition has resulted in more and more suicides and attempts at taking ones on life are alarmingly on the increase to such an extent that people talk freely about suicide as though it was the easiest of ways to escape and find relief from this world. People are more depressed these days and anti-depressant drugs are taken even by teenagers, as they couldn't handle the peer pressure and deliver the expected academic results. There is no sign of things getting better, infact they are getting worse by the moment.

Life has become a mad rush and is going to remain so unless we do something about. It is our greed that creates this rush. Big corporates exploit and over work their employees for their gains, to such an extent that what the company gains in one day from each employee is what that person gets in an entire month! This is just one of the many instances of giant companies increasing their profits by what is called increased efficiency. But what those at the top of these corporates don't realise is that these men and women too have families
but they are unable to spend time with them and unable to find time for leisure and just sit there and relax. In an article that appeared on the TIME magazine, it says that Asian fathers are struggling to see their children awake even once a day as they go to work before the children are up in the morning and reach well past the their kids' bed time.
We are becoming so career oriented that the concept of family relations is taking a heavy toll and we are simply becoming mechanical in our life and a machine like life is the last thing we want!