A manager at an Indian bank reportedly said this to an employee who was asked to give up their holidays to meet targets. When I read it, I didn’t feel shock. The pattern recognition part of my brain started to itch . Most managers will never say that sentence out loud. Plenty of workplaces are built on it anyway.
Here’s a number to sit with: 83% of Indian IT professionals report burnout. That comes from a March 2025 survey by Blind of 1,450 verified IT professionals. The same survey found 72% routinely working beyond the legal 48-hour workweek, and one in four crossing 70 hours. And that’s just one sector, measured once, because someone happened to run a survey. Nobody is polling the nurse, the teacher, or the bank clerk. But if you’ve held a white-collar job in the last few years, you don’t need a survey to tell you something is wrong.
Great industries are built by great people, and great products are built by people who care. Yet in 2026, I keep watching great companies work against the very thing that made them great. The idea of a “job” has mutated into something your grandfather would not recognize.
When people become data points
Somewhere along the way, white-collar work culture stopped being people-centric and became data-centric — optimizing every inch and every nook. I’m not writing this from the outside. I live in this culture. I am part of it. In my world, every person is an employee, every employee is a number, and every number is a data point in an Excel sheet that decides how “well” they are doing. Utilization. Velocity. Billability. What the sheet can never capture is the human behind the cell — their motivations, their circumstances, the fact that they are trying not just to survive but to feel alive.
The tell is in our vocabulary. We say resource. I have said it in meetings. You probably have too. “Do we have a resource for this?” “We’re losing two resources next sprint.” It sounds harmless, but language is never just language. Say “resource” long enough and you start to think resource. A resource is something you allocate, consume, and release. A person is someone with a home, a family, and a whole life that exists outside your Gantt chart.
Where we learned this
If you grew up in an Indian household, this logic didn’t start at your first job. You were measured by the marks you brought home, the entrance exams you cracked, the college you got into, the package you landed. Worth was always something you produced, never something you simply had. So when the workplace tells you your value equals your output, it doesn’t sound wrong. It sounds familiar.
That is exactly what makes it dangerous. When you have been used long enough — so used to being used — you start doing the accounting on yourself. Your self-worth stops coming from being a son, a daughter, a spouse, a sibling, a friend, and starts coming from what you bring to the table. The pressure follows you everywhere: at your desk, on a holiday, lying in bed at night. Slowly but surely, it chips you down into a husk of the person you used to be.
There’s a film I keep going back to: Tamasha. If you haven’t watched it, please do. Imtiaz Ali splits Ved into two people using the frame itself — the free, storytelling self on one side, and the tie-wearing corporate self on the other, living out his father’s script, his boss’s script, his stakeholders’ script. Everyone’s script but his own. The film came out in 2015. It has only become more true.
The cost
A few weeks ago, a mother working in an IT firm took her own life, along with her baby, shortly after she was fired. I don’t know what she was going through in those final days, and I won’t pretend to. What I can speak to is the weight this industry places on people — a field that increasingly feels like a minefield, where “firing” has become casual vocabulary and every layoff email reduces human beings to “impacted resources.” Behind each of those phrases is a person doing the math on rent, EMIs, school fees — and, if the culture has done its work on them, on their own worth as a human being. That is the real cost of use-and-throw. And you and I are part of the system that produces it.
Let me be honest: I have done this myself, without realizing it. I have looked at people and priced them by what they produce and how fast they produce it. It took a while for someone to knock some sense into me. This post is part of that.
To the one performing
To everyone out there performing for the sake of it — performing because deep down you’re not sure that if you stopped, you would still be loved, still be cared for: maybe you are in a place where that fear is justified. I want you to know there are places where it isn’t. There are people who will love you at zero utilization. Your worth was settled long before your first appraisal cycle, and it will outlast your last one.
We tolerate this culture partly because of a quiet superiority we carry around. When it happens to someone else, we think: they didn’t work hard enough, didn’t go to a good enough school, squandered their chances — they deserve what’s coming. But when it happens to us, it is the greatest injustice the world has ever committed, because we did nothing to deserve it. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most people don’t deserve what they’re getting. They’re getting what they could get. Often the only thing separating you from them is that your environment gave you a little more.
So here is my ask, to myself as much as to you. Audit your vocabulary. Notice the moment a person becomes a number in your head. Push back when a meeting starts talking about human beings like inventory. And if you lead people, remember: the sheet that tracks their output will never track their dignity.
Treat humans like humans, and your commodities like commodities.
