Workaholism - What next?

The age of workaholic culture appears to be coming to its end. Man has worked a lot for the last one hundred years. All the time he was under the impression that he would find leisure with the machines taking up most of his burden. But on the contrary he has become busier at each stage of his progress. For all his maladies born out of his race against time, rest and relaxation are alone his solution. Today we have begun to use terms like green, nature, peace of mind, calm and quietness, serenity etc. All these words indicate that enough is enough of the material and mechanical advancement. We have developed head phones that beat out noise. We want to have our houses in a serene atmosphere. We want the food that is grown naturally or organically. Everywhere the buzz word is 'eco-friendly'. It suggests that nothing is as comfortable as the natural way of life. Nature has a rhythm of its own. It has a pace with which all the creatures have to adjust and proceed. Unfortunately we have created a pace that is not in tune with the rhythm of the nature. Workaholism has accelerated this pace resulting in all kinds of syndromes related to stress. Life cannot be healthy and peaceful unless the 'bio-rhythm' synchronises with the rhythm of the nature or what I would like call the 'eco-rhythm'.

You can observe that the pace of life has become faster over the last few years, especially after the second world war. It is manifested in our music, food habits, sports, thinking, listening, travelling, working - literally in every walk of life. When 'eco-rhythm' and 'bio-rhythm' do not keep pace with each other or in other words do not synchronise well, it results in stress. Workaholism is one of the worst kind of obsessions for which rest or relaxation is the only solution. It is like a rocket that has travelled too fast and escaped from the gravity of the earth. If at all we want to come back to earth once again, we need to slow down our speed and the process involves lot of problems too. So the clarion call, "Back to Nature", by Wordsworth way back in 1798, is more meaningful to us today.

How long do we advance?

Sometimes I begin to think how long do we progress at the present speed? Though the evolution is taking place since time immemorial, the pace of the progress probably doubled or trebled or even in multifolds only after the second world war. The invention of motor vehicle, specially the use of fossil fuels in the motor vehicles, has largely contributed to the fast pace of progress and advancement in science and technology. What could have probably taken a few million years to develop has taken only a couple of years now. Look at the development of electronics and communication. We never dreamt in our childhood that one day we would move with the mobile phones in our pocket. What an amount of information is available to us today? What an amount of luxury is available at our disposal?

But how long do we advance like this? At what cost are we enjoying all these benefits of so called culture? "Nothing comes out of nothing", said Shakespeare in King Lear. The laws of physics also believe in this principle. Something else must be at loss when we have gained. It is obviously the mother nature at whose cost we are developing. Many species of the animals, birds, aquatic life have become extinct. A large portion of forest has disappeared from the face of the earth. A great deal of fossil fuel has evaporated. Man has emerged as an unconquerable king. All this has changed in a span of just fifty years or so. Fifty years is nothing when compared to the life of the earth. If the nature minds it takes just a few seconds to throw us back to the stone age. How does this threat come to us? Will that be through our own creation or will it come in the form of natural calamities?

If at all it comes through our own creation, might be it may come in the form of another war or nuclear holocaust. The greater possibility, according to me, is the exhaustion of fossil fuel. Once the deposits exhaust, there is no other substitute to fill that vaccuum immediately. Eventhough we are searching for other forms of energy, we may not find an immediate success. The development shall suffer or take a step back by the time we find an alternative. There are already strong signs of this possibility. The day may not be too far. At the most it may be just a decade or another five years away now.