The Hindu Business Line : `Hurry-worry' ties you down

Progress in the technology era demands its own price — in terms of personal health, drive, and energy. Wealth is the goal, and well-being is lost along the way. Here's how one can resist this syndrome.

With the coming of the free-market era, everyday living for the average manager has visibly become an exhausting drain on one's resources, just as it has become more exciting, varied, challenging and even financially rewarding. The evidence of which is seen in the mushrooming of clinics and gyms as well as alternative therapy gurus to deal with all sorts of side effects — from obesity to hypertension, high cholesterol and also being prone to diabetes, digestive disorders and heart ailments. The severest penalties of progress apparently are paid through a decline in personal health, drive, a sense of well-being and energy. Constant pressure to catch up with deadlines wears down patience, increases anxiety and appears to harden people from the inside, in some way. Over and above all this are the insidious but growing intolerance, irritability and insensitivity to the needs of others, one manifestation of which is the rising accident levels, road-rage and reckless driving which you would have sensed while commuting to work this morning!

One could say this is nothing new and on the road to prosperity one must just grin and bear it; or that we will get used to this fallout of a consumerist, capitalist era, and so on.

Yet, need it be so? At least for us Indians the question could be asked: Can we tap into the wisdom of the ages available in this country and find a modern way of living that marries functional use of the highest level of technology with peace and harmony in living?

This question is normally avoided by the so-called practical-minded professionals, and even dismissed as empty philosophising. Yet what it demands is resisting the seemingly unavoidable trade-off between well-being and wealth.

True, life in the big Indian city has always been one mad rush. Mumbai was so different from all other metropolis even way back in the 1960s; yet today the situation is qualitatively different from those days in a couple of important aspects. First, speed and hurry alone are not the main issues any more, but it is the growing risks of failure and uncertainty and the associated fear in one's career and private life. These, in turn, are brought on by a far higher level of aggressiveness, possessiveness and a competitive drive to win anything and everything... a prominent feature of life these days. Anyone who questions the validity or wisdom of this approach is dubbed a reactionary, if not a `loser', which is the ultimate negative tag anybody can get!

Secondly, the "hurry-worry" syndrome is not restricted to the minority of the highly ambitious but works on everyone from the school child who is forever running from one tuition class to another, to the ordinary organisation-man who no longer has the certainty of lifetime employment and little real sense of accomplishment and responsibility.

Among the younger ones, of course, the realisation of this state of affairs is less acute; and equally the concern to discover the real causes is not so strong. And yet, as competition intensifies externally, not just for markets but for all resources, it feeds on the ambition of the individual's own competitive urges. Competitiveness, for promotion and favour, for rewards and recognition, becomes an all consuming fire that robs the individual, in many cases, of time to call his own and more importantly the discrimination to tell the means from the ends.

Working for 12 hours a day leaves the young executive both tired and ill-tempered. This is much worse when both the husband and wife work full-time. As a result there is little energy or inclination toto spend quality time with children and family. Hobbies and reading have been given short shrift, yielding place to the passive visual entertainment of video or TV. And these do little more than holding the mirror up to the consumerist lifestyle. Socialising too has become a ritual, as it is often with some business interest thrown in, involving the same people from the world of work. Managing time is, therefore, defined as the big central issue, and courses on the theme are perennially popular, yet they address only the symptom, not the root cause. Managing time reflects the way one manages priorities, and each one does it in a way that shows up his/her own needs, compulsions and beliefs.

Try this test: close your eyes and keep them closed for a minute, open them when you think 60 seconds are up. You would be amazed to find that most of us do not have an accurate sense of the passage of time. In a study done some years ago, amongst a group of people it was found that the first person to open his eyes did so after eight seconds, and the last one after 45 seconds! Our minds and bodies seem to be beating to different rhythms. So where does one start, if one wishes to have some worldly comforts that a career brings, yet do so with holistic living?

To begin on the road to an alternative way of living, one must reach back not just into the gentle and enlightened teachings of the compassionate ones from the Buddha downwards but also, paradoxically, the findings of modern science as well. Modern psychological and neurological discoveries have repudiated the theory of philosophers such as Hobbes that human nature is necessarily aggressive and self-seeking, and life is therefore a battlefield.

Dr Howard C. Cutler, a Western psychiatrist who has worked and studied with the Dalai Lama, quotes a research study to assert that aggressiveness and war are not innate to humanity. He mentions in his book, The Art of Happiness (Riverhead, New York 1998), co-authored with the Dalai Lama, that numerous scientific studies demonstrate an innate human altruism. Doctors have also established that coronary risk factors have been found to be associated with those who were most self-focused i.e. the `I-me-mine' generation! A recent issue of the Newsweek magazine carried a cover story on the power of prayer. Through pictures of brain scans it showed that during deep meditation the part of the brain that dealt with self-consciousness changed dramatically and shrank in size, while other areas to do with insight improved.

Says the Dalai Lama: "As human society and environmental conditions gradually become more complex, this required a greater and greater role for intelligence." He goes on to add that if the human ability develops in an unbalanced way without being balanced by compassion, it can lead to disaster. Yet he is firm in his belief that the essential nature of man is of gentleness and compassion. And that man's eternal quest is for lasting and happiness — which must mean peace as well.

Many of us caught in the throes of making important decisions in life could apply this as basic guideline — that all of us are driven by a desire for happiness, although we often confuse it with pleasure. If we but stopped to think whether a step we are about to take to change of job, location, marital status or a course of study would add to our long-term happiness, which by definition should not hurt or harm others as well, then we would vote in favour of the more altruistic, generous and socially constructive actions.

Such use of intelligence is a form of meditation indeed. Changing our point of view along these lines and seeing the reality of achievement or ambition in such a perspective, we thus lay a firm foundation for dealing with the problems of modern high-pressure existence. Instead, to continue living the way we do and periodically go to a counsellor, doctor or guru or a course of ayurvedic treatments is but another instance of our tendency to seek "Band-Aid" solutions to the deeper issues concerning our health and well-being. How one could get in touch with oneself more closely and effectively through reflection and retreat will form the subject of another article in this series.

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