Atlas Shrugged, Then Accidentally Replied All

A field guide to the most over-caffeinated species on earth.

Scientists tell us that the human body is a miraculous machine, capable of incredible feats of endurance, complex reasoning, and digesting railway station samosas that have been sitting in a glass display case since 2004.. But evolution clearly made a terrible mistake. It designed a creature perfectly suited for roaming the majestic plains and hunting mammoths, and then put that creature in a cubicle.

This brings us to the most baffling species of modern humans: the Workaholic.

For most of human history, work was a simple equation: you did it so you wouldn’t starve. If you successfully threw a rock at a rabbit, your work was done for the day. You did not immediately schedule a meeting with the other hunter-gatherers to discuss rabbit acquisition strategy. You just ate the rabbit and went to sleep.

But today, we have people who treat work not as a means of survival, but as a competitive sport. The Workaholic is someone who has looked at the vast, glorious tapestry of human existence - art, music, love, nature, and the availability of myriad forms of cheese - and decided, “No, what I really want to do is spend Saturday afternoon passionately formatting a slide deck.”

I am not making this up. These people exist. You have probably seen them. They are the ones at a big fat Indian family wedding who, instead of dancing in the baraat, are standing near the chaat counter with a finger jammed in one ear, screaming about ‘Q3 deliverables’ over the deafening sound of a brass band playing a remixed 90s Bollywood song.

The primary enabler of the Workaholic is the smartphone. In the old days - by which I mean the 1990s - when you left the office, you were gone. You were untethered. If the office needed you, they had to call your house, and if you didn’t answer the landline, they had to assume you had been eaten by wolves. It was a beautiful system.

Now, your boss can reach you while you are in the shower, attending a wedding, or actively participating in your own surgery. And the Workaholic loves this. They experience a profound sense of panic if their phone doesn’t vibrate every four seconds. If you ask them how they are doing, they never say, “I am doing great; I just saw a lovely duck.” They say, “I am SLAMMED. I am BURIED. I am completely UNDERWATER.”

Because they are so heavily submerged in this imaginary ocean of busyness, they have to maintain their personal relationships in frantic, three-second intervals. They simply do not have the time to actually look at a screen while typing. This is why, on your birthday, instead of a heartfelt message, you receive a text from a Workaholic friend that reads:

“HAPy bird day. pls review Q3 metricss. Mcfmr dt acfrp auto-correct ducking hates me. sent from my iPHon while jogging.”

You are supposed to feel deeply cherished by this. It means they paused their spreadsheet for an entire microsecond to acknowledge your birth.

But here is the most tragic part. According to a highly scientific study that I just made up but which is absolutely true, 72 percent of workaholics never actually do anything remarkable. They don’t cure diseases. They don’t invent jetpacks. They don’t figure out a way to make office printers that actually print.

Instead, they sacrifice their youth, their hair, and their weekends to climb the corporate ladder, only to discover that the ladder leads directly to the fabled land of Middle Management at a bank, or worse, a software company.

It’s a bleak picture. Middle Management is a biological miracle of inefficiency, a closed-loop system of profound uselessness. Ultimately, the hard-core Workaholic’s reward for forty years of eighty-hour weeks is a slightly larger desk, high blood pressure, and a commemorative plaque that says, “In Grateful Recognition of 40 Years of Doing the Needful.”

So how do you know if you are a Workaholic? Here is a quick diagnostic quiz:

• Do you consider a “balanced lunch” to consist entirely of three stale Marie biscuits and six cups of overboiled office machine tea?

• Have you ever tried to set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your household maid, or asked your wife to “circle back” to you regarding what is for dinner?

• Does your colony watchman regularly ask for your ID because he only ever sees you sneaking into your own house at 2:15 AM after a “quick alignment call” with the US team?

If you answered yes to any of these, you need help. You need to immediately stop what you are doing, walk outside, and look at a tree. Do not attempt to leverage the tree. Do not try to monetize the tree’s shade. Just look at it. You will notice that the tree is not doing anything. It is not stressed. It has zero unread emails. And yet, it is highly successful at being a tree.

But, let’s be honest., Even though the concept of labor is not my cup of tea, a drudgery to be endured until I can get back into my pajamas and play the guitar, I must admit I admire the terrifying grit of the Workaholic. We may not know exactly what they actually accomplish with the eighty-hour weeks, but without them, our society wouldn’t have life changing innovations like the “Reply All” button, Bluetooth-enabled salt shakers, or highly detailed, color-coded spreadsheets tracking or a highly detailed, color-coded spreadsheet tracking exactly whose turn it is to pay for the evening samosas and cutting chai.. And let’s face it: dedicating your life to corporate synergy is still vastly superior to being a bearded kurta-clad communist who rails against the corporate machine at the roadside coffee stall, using a MacBook Pro he bought with his mother’s credit card..

Now, if you will excuse me, I need to go practice my evolutionary right to take a nap, the only deliverable that truly matters.

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A Request -

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