Needed soon: A switch to life-work balance
I see two sets of people around me. One overworked with no time for anything else, and the other hardly with any work. Both have their own challenges—one has no time to breathe and the other has all the time only to breathe.
The first ones are the working-age group, mostly working in a corporate environment. This group spends long hours in traffic to reach their offices, where the employers expect them to work long hours so that stakeholders can be well rewarded. They spend their most youthful years, the 20s and 30s, slogging to earn a good life for their old age and for educating their young children. They hardly enjoy their young days beyond eating out or ordering in. Vacations are meant for resorts that promise convenience at a cost. There is no time for friendships and the finer things in life; they are available to their families mostly for major life events.
The second set are retired people in their 60s and beyond, sometimes a little younger. Their life is structured with pensions, saved money and well-settled children. Being educated, they can do a lot, but the mental makeup may not encourage. Honestly, there are hardly any opportunities for them in a youth-obsessed world. They end up consuming all the content on TV, OTTs, YouTube, with WhatsApp as a lifeline. Those who are active are mostly active on the stock market.
That leaves us with those in their 40s and 50s. By 40, most people start developing anxieties about their professional future. It is that stage of the career where the pyramid quickly gets narrower and not everyone can go up. Multiple fresh recruits can be hired by replacing one mid-management resource. In new-age industries, there is hardly any space for those above 50. Though the retirement age is usually at least 58, practically, people start getting redundant much sooner.
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