When Work Becomes a Death Sentence — The Silent Price of Modern Jobs

If your parents had the money or you knew how to get by, you would get a vocational course with a whole new parameter. You would choose to study (if you were successful, of course), based on what jobs the institution you paid top dollar for was likely to guarantee at the end. This mad rush to land a job begins before you even embark on your final educational stage.

The fundamental question, of course, is to what extent competition, in its most brutal form, played a role in this young man’s death. Stress and anxiety are the product of competition, both at the level of the company and at the level of individual workers. Trying to draw a line at which competition between companies can operate is futile, because it denies the very concept of a capitalist economic model. Companies must and do compete with each other and only the winners will survive. That is the law. That is fundamental.

“The descent into hell is easy,” Virgil wrote in the Aeneid. The problems begin for the individual when he allows himself to be drawn into this corporate process. If you choose to be a mere pawn in this process, you are likely to be forced to play the game, just as corporations must: a race to victory or death. Individuals who are unable to create the necessary space between the behavioral expectations of the corporation and their innate ability to handle the stress that it entails are often victims.

So what are the options available to an individual, other than the biggest one, which is to opt out of the rat race itself, into some kind of bohemian escape? How can you set boundaries to make your life a little less frenetic and more holistic? Can we insist on the right to disconnect as currently provided in some Australian companies? Will this right be universally accepted? Could you claim the privilege of “Eternity” benefits, which will ensure that you can stay in the workforce for a while? Or does your situation force you to become a bit like those classic Japanese automaton masses that exist simply to work? Could you choose to be self-employed and adapt your working hours to your various economic needs, eliminating concepts such as full-time employment, regular pay and increases in money, rank and hierarchy?

These are the kinds of questions that hang over this child’s death in a world that doesn’t yet know how long human jobs will last, given the speed at which automation and AI are rendering most of us relatively expendable. Depending on where you live, how you were raised, your age, and where you are in the economic cycle, the answers will be wildly different. Some will have a choice. Many will have none.

Dilip Cherian is the founding partner of Perfect Relations and is a litigation and branding specialist. Author on X @DILIPtheCHERIAN