Is There A Middle?
A friend and I had a long conversation yesterday. We spoke about living in a world where nothing is enough anymore, about working in a world where everything must sell and no goal is a sweet spot.
Every business wants to run at scale, without quite looking deep into who they truly are, what they stand for, what vacuum in the current situation do they plug and recognising how much is enough to go after. Which results in a bunch of very horrible things: unhappy employees, zero work-life balance, unhappy families, burnout and lifestyle disorders.
Why is there no place where just having a simple job that you like showing up for everyday enough anymore? Look at some old school businesses — like Kayani’s in Pune. Kayani’s sells biscuits, freshly baked, and mawa cakes. It is enough that they make fabulously beautiful mawa cakes and Shrewsbury biscuits. It is enough that they make a batch that sells out pretty quick and when it does, they pull down the shutters. People queue up outside this old bakery, waiting for it to open every morning and evening. They shut shop at noon, you see, for a quick afternoon siesta and to prepare for what is always a busy evening at work.
You do not see the owners trying to figure out how to manufacture more at scale, expand their business to other cities, run into a million logistical issues and egos and basically take a beating just so they can boast about being a national scale business with thousands of employees, become a public company and in short, enable literally just 3–4 people in the entire company to go home on time and spend time with the family and not grow a tumour.
It is no longer enough to be just enough. It’s turning practically every company into a sales company. How do we sell more, how do we double our revenue, how do we hire more, pay less, cut down on overhead costs? It’s turning us into two extremes: people committed to run this race in order to afford the comforts they want while fitting into the majority world view of successful, and people who must rebel at every level, agree to settle for different levels of compromise so their spirit is not entirely crushed.
Where do you go if you wish to be in the middle? Where do the people who want balance go? Is there a middle path anymore? Is there an old normal anywhere?
