Have you every cried at your work-place? Been in that state when you no longer can hold back your tears? Well, I have. Does this mean that I am weak? No, it doesn’t.

We all are facing a battle that the other is unaware of, be it in our personal lives or our professional lives. With all the emerging technologies to make our life simple, all we get is a more complicated one.

While these technologies have reduced manual labour to a significant amount, the mental labour has increased drastically. People don’t have time for each other. People are glued to their systems or phones. Even if we are sitting in the same room, each one of us is in our own different worlds. Simple conversations have become very rare. Technologies these days, on one hand, allows us to work or connect with the entire world from the comfort of our rooms, while these same technologies, on the other hand, have taken away the personal life of people. People have thousands of friends on social media, but not a single true friend to talk to. When we talk to someone, it relieves us of a lot of stress, but in today’s busy world, no one has the time to sit and talk. All are running a race they themselves are unaware of.

On the professional front, as more and more tasks are getting automated, the competition for job, to be able to provide for a better life, to meet the ever increasing demands, is increasing drastically. Everyone is expected to better themselves by every passing day, give in better than that of yesterday. There is another person ready to take your spot always, so people live in constant fear of losing their job, of not being able to meet the ever-increasing needs, constant stress.

This results in every person compromising on their personal life, on their own physical and mental health. People are expected to work like robots. Their work-life balance goes for a toss. People are loaded with more work than they can handle, and in order to fulfil it, life itself is compromised.

How long can a person survive in such condition? Isn’t it normal for a person to break down at some point in time? When this point arrives, since most of our time is spent at our work place, is it really such a big deal if this point arrives while we are at our work place and we can just not hold it any longer?

As we already know, crying helps us release a lot of stress and hence make us feel calmer. Once we are out with it, it also helps us to concentrate on our work better. So, in a way it has its own benefits. Also, it is normal to cry as it is an emotion we were born with. Saying this, I don’t mean that it is fine to cry like babies for every little thing, but crying once in a while, when you are way too stressed out, is of no harm.

The happy faces we see everywhere doesn’t really mean that the person has no sorrow in their life. It simply shows how well the person is able to cope up with their sorrows. But it’s not necessary to have that smile on even when you are dying inside. It’s ok to give in to your emotions, to express your sorrows. We are human beings after all. Whom are we pretending in front of?

This is very well quoted by Ron Steer in the below quote: