If you live in Bangalore, you see it every day. The same tired faces, trapped in traffic—morning and night. The dull quiet of the office cafeteria at 9 PM, where dinner feels like an extension of work, not a break from it. Weeks of trying to meet a friend—only for work to cancel it at the last minute.
The exhaustion isn’t just physical; it’s something deeper, like the air itself is heavier with the weight of long hours and unfinished to-dos.
So when Narayana Murthy says that we Indians should work 70-hour weeks to build the nation, it doesn’t quite land as inspiration. It feels unfair.
We are already burning out our bodies, our years, our lives. What exactly are we getting in return for this endless overtime? What, really, are we trying to prove?
It’s easy to romanticise long hours when you’re a honcho or a founder. You can afford to equate relentless work with national progress or personal virtue. But what does it mean to the people on the ground? Forget nation-building—research shows that it doesn’t even lead to better results for companies. Just more burnout.
A recent Leaders.com article confirmed what many of us already feel—this isn’t just opinion, the research backs it:
- Productivity sharply declines beyond 55 hours a week. After that, you’re not working better or smarter—you’re just working more.
- Chronic overwork increases stress, weakens decision-making, and even shortens life expectancy.
- The real winners in hustle culture are not the workers putting in extra hours, but the companies benefiting from free labour.
So if we already intuitively know this, why do we still believe in the hustle?
The Indian middle class is particularly vulnerable to thinking that we have to always work more because we are only a generation or two away from scarcity. We saw our parents put in long hours, not because they wanted to, but because they had no choice. Somewhere along the way, this necessity hardened into a virtue.
But here’s the truth:
A 70-hour workweek is not a sign of discipline. It is a sign of inefficiency, poor systems, and a broken work culture.
Because If working hours were the measure of productivity and success, are the people getting laid off working any less than others?
I don’t doubt that Murthy means well. But we should be careful about who gets to write the narrative of success. Because when people in power say ‘work harder,’ they are not the ones paying the price.
Someone in a previous article commented with a quote from Thoreau:
“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”
And what is the real price of those extra 15-20 hours squeezed out of us every week?
- The friendships we no longer have time for.
- The small, golden moments with parents and children growing up—that won’t come again.
- The version of ourselves that once had energy for things beyond work—evaporating, like unopened perfume, fading before it’s ever used.
And this is not even counting the life-sapping commute.
Success isn’t just about how much you work. It’s about whether your work is actually building the life you want.
Hustle culture makes people forget they have a choice. But owning your story means stepping off the treadmill long enough to ask: Is this the life I meant to live?
Because if success comes at the cost of everything else—is it even success?
