The confessions of a non-workaholic
workaholic. I do work quite a bit. Not a big fan. But like it or not — not, more than like — work has come to define me. Or, more accurately, I have chosen work to define me.
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The word 'workaholic' is a tricky one. Thanks to its portmanteau origin (work+alcoholic), it comes across as a negative trait for someone who works compulsively. But certainly, for those describing themselves as one, it's really a brag in drag. 'I'm such a workaholic,' is something I can imagine Yudhisthir say while entering 'employee of the month' heaven — before being gobsmacked to find the more chilled-out, 'work hard-play hard' Duryadhan already sitting there quaffing a Rusty nail.
While I am not a workaholic, I may be borderline ergomaniac, someone with an excessive desire to work. In an overwhelmingly gendered world, office work does help to dodge uncelebrated housework, like deciding which colour of napkins the house help should lay at the table. I don't take pleasure in working for the sake of working. But I do take (perverse?) pride in working well. I leave the quantitative aspect of work — banal things like hours per day — more or less left undefined, the only point being to end it each day, in a satisfactory way. But quantity does creep in, imperceptibly. It's been four years since I went on a proper holiday (a weekend trip 2 hours away from home). My reading for pleasure has gone down drastically. My itch to supply work, regardless of demand, has metastasised to such a level that only two of my other
