Wake up, get dressed, drink coffee, rush breakfast, travel to work in hot, overcrowded conditions,
arrive early to impress the boss, read emails, reply, meetings, meetings overran, work through
lunch, crisis, crisis, must stay late to deal with crisis, tired and unproductive, fill
up on caffeine, poor quality microwave dinner, finally leaving, dark and cold outside, no
one around, arrive home late, always on call, mobile device, drink to relax, sleep while
you can, sleep.
Repeat.
Now that probably sound familiar to most of you.
But let's start this theory with a sector that most people don't feel much sympathy
for - the banking industry.
There's been a spate of suicides recently in the City of London.
A JP Morgan employee - a vice-president in CIB technology at the bank's European HQ in
Canary Wharf leapt to his death from the roof.
Then there was a former executive of Deutsche Bank who is believed to have hung himself
at his home in central London earlier this week.
And it's not just employees, after the death of an intern working at the Bank of America
Merryll Lynch in London, there were accusations of slavery in the city.
The 21-year-old was found dead in the showers of his student accommodation after working
21-hours-a-day for three days straight.
Other interns said that they worked extremely long hours, relying on caffeine to keep them
going because they are competing for ultra-competitive jobs that pay well.
There's a process that banking interns know as the magic roundabout, which sounds lovely
but it's not.
It's either this place in Swindon, or it's where an intern takes a taxi home, makes it
wait outside while they have a shower and then head straight back into work.
So what though, right?
Bankers get paid a hello of a lot of money, the least they can do is long hours.
Well, yeah, but whether you're a doctor, a nurse, a lawyer, a farmer, a teacher, a cleaner
*cough cough* a journalist, this probably affects you too.
The mental health charity Mind estimates that
one in six people in the UK suffers from work related anxiety, depression or stress.
And it's something that affects people all over the world, in all industries.
A study by Technologia found that in France, which does have a reputation for going on
strike and having things easy in terms of working hours, found that one in four farmers
and one in five company bosses are overworking and risk burning themselves out.
First world problems?
Maybe, you could argue that a bit of stress is an acceptable trade-off some of life's
luxuries and not having to struggle to survive day-to-day.
But what about this: in the EU 56% of people report working at very high speeds, 60% to
tight deadlines, 40% say they do monotonous tasks, 15% get regular headaches, 33% backaches,
23% get fatigue and the same amount report neck and shoulder pains.
But what about the long-term effects?
Studies by the British Medical Journal have shown evidence for the biological plausibility
of a link between psychosocial stressors from everyday life and heart disease.
And they even show that the risk of cardiovascular mortality can be doubled.
Add to that the risk of strokes, musculoskeletal and gastrointestinal disease, anxiety and
depression.
There's a few things that cause it, high demands, low security, lack of opportunity and if you're
unfortunate enough to be one of my colleagues, having to work alongside a complete and utter
tool.
So if overworking causes such a huge range of physical and mental illnesses, why the
hell do so many of put up with it?
A Harvard business school study in 2008 found that nearly half of all professionals work
over 65 hours a week.
And we do it because we're scared, because bosses seem to put so much emphasis on time
spent at a desk, time spent at your station, rather than the quality of what you're doing.
It doesn't seem to matter that shorter working stints are more productive, what matters is
your time.
And we follow it dutifully.
We sit at our posts, knowing we'd be happier not to be there at all, because we don't want
to be the one who leaves early, leaving a colleague to stay late and appear more conscientious.
That gets even worse in a recession, or a financial crisis like the one that we've had
for the last few years.
If you're constantly being reminded how difficult getting a job is and how lucky you are to
have one, if you're watching people losing theirs and struggling to get a new one, the
slavish grind gets worse and worse.
And now you've got technology that means that you're connected 24/7, only an email away,
always.
Now, Psychology Today has a theory that we've all bought in to a definition of success that
is obsessed with money and power, that we have allowed consumerism and wealth generation
to become our masters, instead of mastering them.
Most futurologists have told us that technology will eventually lead to less work and more
leisure, that automation will allow us more time to kick back and relax.
But so far, the opposite seems to be true.
Jobs have been made redundant by machines, like in the steel industry for example, where
production levels have been maintained, without the manpower.
But the result hasn't been more leisure time, it's been being forced to take work that's
insecure, unskilled, badly paid or being unable to find a job at all and being demonised as
some sort of workshy sponger.
Just recently, the Google CEO Eric Schmidt warned everyone that technology will make
a lot of jobs obsolete in the next few decades.
But how about this?
Instead of seeing it as a warning we celebrate it, embrace the fact that we're going to have
more leisure time and change the way we think about work.
It's just an idea, I'd love to know whether or not you agree or disagree.
Let us know in the comments.
Goodbye.