Poor God!

These days everyone is working gazillion hours a day, in an always-connected, round-the-clock culture. We are all compelled to respond to that latest email,  which just vibrated on our device no matter the time of the day. If you do not respond to that email, even if no serious damage would be done by waiting till next morning, a) you are considered a slouch and somebody who is not “on top” of things and b) somebody else will respond taking the conversation on a tangent, which you will have to spend more time bringing it back on track. The higher you rise in an organization, you are “pressured” into checking your emails even while on vacation.  We sleep with our phones by the bedside and check emails when we wake up in the middle of the night for a nature call. Sure, we can impress the boss with our email response to the offshore team at 3am….  But, have we gone too far? I suggest we should implement an email moratorium for certain times during the day where we will not get any emails. (by implementing rules that no mails/tweets/social media posts will be delivered to us -ofcourse letting the senders know that). If something is that urgent, folks are available on their cell phones anyway….

For the workforce who started the last 10 years, it is very difficult to imagine that there was a time in the not too distant past where people worked (even in fields like information technology and medicine) without internet or cell phones or for that matter even (land) phones.  There are enough studies underway to suggest that people consistently missing 8 hours of sleep per day are at risk of severe health problems. We all complain it was rude on the other guy’s part when he is distracted from our conversation, attending to that beep on his phone, but yet we do the same. Scientific studies show that humans cannot really multi-task without suffering from quality of the work done. I dread to imagine what happens when we get chips implanted in our bodies that will directly communicate to our brain every tweet, email and facebook post?  (well, that seems to be the direction we are headed, anyway) What kinds of inbox rules would we be putting on those? Should it wake us up in the midnight or will it be delivered in the middle of our dreams  a-la -inception part 2?

Here are some fun facts/ food for thought:  It is said, during the (Indian epic) Mahabharata war, they fought only from sunrise to sunset. Even war used to be paused during the night! Actually, let us not even go that far back in time, the inspiration for this post is a daily schedule I recently saw from the early 1970s for the world’s busiest and richest Tirumala temple, where the hours were noted as 7 am to 10:30pm, which itself was considered a temple open for the longest hours in those days. Compare this to the current timings where the temple is not closed even for a full hour in the night . C’mon, We don’t let the “poor god” rest even for an hour a day? 🙂 I think we have made it enough of his problem now, so he better find a solution for all of this soon 😉