When Work Stops Being Only Work

We began with a simple question, but it did not stay simple for very long.

Ritesh had just come home from work, so it felt natural to begin with him. Before we even entered the topic properly, there was a small interruption of ordinary life. Did he get the promotion? Did he get the new job? That was where the conversation opened, not with theory, but with the practical uncertainty of modern work. He explained that his role was transitioning. It was not exactly a promotion, at least not in the clean sense. It was a different opportunity, a different responsibility, something he had wanted, but the question of money had not yet been discussed. They would not reduce his salary, he said, but whether there would be a higher band or extra money was still unclear. He had already checked with colleagues who had made similar transitions three or four years earlier. They had asked and had not received extra money immediately. Perhaps at the year-end review cycle, things would be considered.

Already, work was not just work. It was role, money, recognition, uncertainty, calculation, hope, and the quiet knowledge that systems rarely move as cleanly as people would like.

When we asked what came first to mind when thinking about work — money, usefulness, routine, people, tiredness — Ritesh did not choose only one. He said that nowadays, if he was not thinking about this new role, work meant routine, money, and connection. Sometimes it was not even about the work itself. It was about going somewhere, being somewhere, doing something, feeling useful. It kept a person busy, almost keeping them “off the street,” as we joked. But underneath the joke was something serious. He said that if people working now were suddenly told they were fired, the main hurt would not only be money. It would be loneliness. It would be the feeling that one is no longer useful, no longer contributing anything.

That was the first real door of the conversation. Work gives us money, yes, but it also gives us a place in the day. It tells us where to go, whom to speak to, what to complain about, what to feel tired from. It gives us evidence that we are still part of something.

Then Ismar entered from the other end of life. He has been retired for twelve years. When asked what work had meant to him — money, usefulness, routine, people, tiredness — he gave one of those answers that only he gives, direct and a little severe, but also logically consistent in his own way. In his opinion, even if some people do not like work, and even if nobody should become a workaholic, work is necessary. He said it may sound radical, but if someone does not work to maintain himself, then what is the reason to be alive?

We challenged that, because life is more complicated. What about people who are financially independent? What about someone who owns a penthouse or apartments and lives from rent? Ismar thought about it and said that even this is a kind of work. If someone has apartments, even by inheritance, they still have to maintain them, administer them, renovate, paint, manage tenants. So for him, work was not only salary. Work was the effort required to sustain one’s life.

And then, somehow, Elon Musk entered the room.

The Mayor brought in a mental exercise from a comparison he had made: if Elon Musk’s wealth were treated like the GDP of a country, where would he rank among the countries of the world? Ritesh began calculating from India. India is trying to reach a five-trillion-dollar economy, he said, and had briefly surpassed Japan to become fourth. If Musk had around 1.8 trillion dollars, he guessed Musk might be somewhere between tenth and fifteenth. Ismar thought of Brazil, estimating its GDP in the trillions, and also guessed around fifteenth. The answer given was twentieth, just above Switzerland.

That changed the emotional temperature. Suddenly we were not only talking about social balance through work. We were talking about systems, wealth, taxation, fairness, and what kind of world work belongs to.

Ritesh said that if one person could stand as the twentieth largest “country,” then this showed a failure of the system. The system, in his view, is designed to place certain people at the top and most people at the bottom. He looked at Musk’s style of work, his companies, and the way people are treated, and he saw everything becoming tradable, even relationships. He connected it to older systems like feudalism, where most people were subjects and everything belonged to a few. Capitalism, he said, had replaced feudalism, but perhaps these extreme billionaires were products of the new system in the same way feudal lords were products of the old.

He did not speak hopelessly, exactly. He said he was personally hopeful that not in his generation, maybe not in his lifetime, but eventually a different system would be designed. He had been reading Erich Fromm, the German philosopher who moved to the United States, and he brought in the idea that some people behave like sheep who need a leader. People are afraid to take charge of themselves. They follow figures. They are made to feel inferior. Unless people rebel against authority, he said, the system will not change.

Ismar saw it differently. He said he personally would not want that much money because it would give him too much work, and with his current abilities he would not be able to manage it. His main question was whether the wealth was honestly acquired or not. If it was honest, then he did not see the problem in the same way. He did not think one rich person was responsible for poverty around the world. Life is hard for everyone, he said. He also did not fully believe the system alone had facilitated such wealth, because otherwise there would be many trillionaires, not only one.

This is where Ritesh pushed back. His point was not only whether the money looked legal on the surface. It was about the structure underneath. Ordinary people earn, spend, and pay taxes. But billionaires can hold assets, borrow against them, spend borrowed money, and avoid selling assets that would trigger taxes. He gave the example of buying X by placing Tesla shares as security rather than simply selling assets in the ordinary way. The system allows some people to leverage debt in a way normal salaried workers cannot. Ordinary workers pay taxes at source. The very wealthy move through loopholes and structures. Even data centers, he said, use water that belongs to everyone. If a company consumes shared resources and makes private profit, where is the compensation?

Then taxation opened another wound.

Ismar said he did not know exactly how Musk’s taxes worked, but in Brazil the question of taxation felt unfair because people pay and do not receive proportionally. Bad schools, bad roads, bad streets, poor transportation, corruption in the police and public services, universities becoming places of political indoctrination, education getting worse and worse. What is the reason to pay taxes, he asked, if the state does not pay back with good services?

Ritesh, coming from India, understood the frustration but rejected the premise that therefore one should not pay taxes. He said that for people at a certain level, a good road or a good school looks like the expected return on taxes. But some people do not have food. Some tax money may be feeding people who are dying without food. A person with a house, food, land, air, and water already stands on a ground that belongs to everyone. So one cannot simply say, “I did not get my road, therefore I do not owe anything.” If money meant for roads is stolen through corruption, that is another problem, and people must fight for accountability. He spoke about public interest litigation and the Right to Information in India, ways citizens can ask where money has gone. His position was balanced but firm: corruption must be challenged, but responsibility toward weaker people cannot be rejected.

Ismar did not pretend to have a solution. Brazil, he said, is not the only country with bad conditions. Corruption is connected to human beings. Change the president, governor, mayor, and corruption may continue. He gave the example of the city budget where more than one billion in local currency was suspected of deviation out of around four billion, and still the mayor remained in office. We sat with that. Some questions have no neat Brida ending. Sometimes the table only gives the problem a place to be spoken.

And then we deliberately moved back to the bright side: can people make friends at work?

Ritesh said yes. Some friends from his previous organization are still in touch. Some became almost like family. They invite each other home. At his current workplace too, there is a sense of collaboration, even community. But he was careful again. Every workplace has dynamics. Some people are friends only for work. Some are human contacts, nothing more. Some become real friends because of character, nature, time, or because one friend introduces another. Work can create friendship, but not automatically.

He made a point that stayed with us: we often spend more waking time with colleagues than with a spouse. In the morning there may be only a few hours together at home, then work, then evening, then sleep. If the workplace environment is bad, then one-third of life is damaged.

We asked whether his wife had become connected to the wives or families of his work friends. That was more complicated. One reason he had taken the flat where he lives was to be near friends, so that she could meet people too. But in seven or eight months, the closeness had not fully happened. They had met occasionally, spoken, been polite, but not yet become real friends. Sometimes, he said, they are almost forced to meet because the men are friends. They may cook, speak, behave politely, but they have different mindsets and different ways of presenting things. He remained hopeful that perhaps in the future it would grow.

Then we returned to Ismar and retirement. Was he prepared? How did the week change after full-time work stopped?

He said he had prepared himself because he had plans for retirement. Still, many people become depressed after retirement. In his own case, he is single and has lived alone for most of his years, but even then he recognised the risk. Most Brazilian men, he said, play soccer, play cards, play snooker, drink beer, watch soccer. He does none of those things. If he had only stayed home watching sitcoms or films, perhaps life would have become difficult. But he thinks he is doing well. He has no problem with depression or similar illness. Still, he said, people need social company. It may come from neighbours, the gym, colleagues, activities, or extended family. We were not made to live alone.

And yet his retirement has not been empty. For the past six years, he has been the primary caregiver for his mother. Before that, he studied, finished a graduate course, went regularly to the gym, travelled, and attended lectures at the university and cultural places in Curitiba. Now he is in Campo Grande because his mother needs most of his time. He did not present this as tragedy. It is simply the shape of his life.

There was also good news. His apartment in Curitiba, which he had considered selling, had been rented two weeks earlier to an acquaintance. He hoped she would pay properly and not cause problems. In Brazil, he said, renting property is not always a good business because tenants often destroy the house. Even this small detail returned us to his earlier idea: property may look like passive income from the outside, but in real life it is still work.

From there we moved into Ritesh’s world of hierarchy. How do people address each other at work in India? Is it first name, sir, madam?

He said India is very hierarchical. From school and college, people are trained to call teachers sir or madam. Freshers entering the corporate world often carry the same habit into the office. But modern corporate workplaces, especially in big cities like Bengaluru, try to create flatter hierarchies. He now calls his boss by name. People call directors and CEOs by name too. Still, the culture remains underneath. He has seen developers calling senior developers sir, sometimes perhaps jokingly, but the instinct is there.

Recently he had noticed something new. Younger colleagues had joined his team and treated him with great respect. It made him feel older. He recognised himself in them, remembering how he once approached seniors with the same careful respect. There was something funny and slightly uncomfortable in becoming the person others treat as senior.

He also compared sectors. In hospitals and medical care, where his wife works, hierarchy is much stronger. Doctors, heads of departments, and superiors are addressed as sir and madam. Manufacturing also carries more hierarchy. Big-city corporate technology spaces have flattened some of it, but India does not become non-hierarchical overnight.

When asked whether this affects decision-making, Ritesh said the problem often appears more at lower levels. At the higher level, directors and CEOs may listen if someone stands up and says something, at least publicly. They may not take the advice, but they do not usually humiliate the person. At lower levels — team lead to developer, reporting manager to employee — people may cut others off, dismiss them, or make them afraid of bad reviews. He had seen colleagues crying because of such pressure.

We compared this to other cultures. In Australia, teachers were called sir. In Germany and France, respect is built into the formal “you,” with German “Sie” and French “vous,” while children are addressed informally until they become older and are then given the formal form. Different cultures solve hierarchy through different grammar.

Then Ismar gave us one of the clearest lines of the day. We asked whether people at work wear a mask, becoming polite and social in one place and different outside. He said we all use many masks: father mask, husband mask, worker mask. Some people’s masks are not so different from one place to another. Other people change greatly depending on the environment.

We also asked about farewell parties in Brazilian workplaces. He said they are common. When he left, there was a general farewell with another colleague in front of around 200 people. His direct boss shook his hand and said some words. He was not disappointed. In fact, he would have preferred not to have that kind of emotional ending. A small moment with his direct boss, with whom he had a good relationship, would have been nice. The big general ceremony could have been suppressed. That was very Ismar: not rude, not sentimental, simply honest about what kind of social ritual fits him and what kind does not.

Finally, we came to remote work.

Ritesh had spent the previous month working from his native place, far from Bengaluru. Did he miss his colleagues? Not really. For one month, it felt fine. He wanted to spend more time with family, sit with them, talk to them. His grandfather was ill, his aunts visited, and he was busy with home life. He did the routine work, but he was not missing the office. If it were six months, perhaps he would want to go occasionally to the office, chat, have coffee, brainstorm, and collaborate in person. But daily office travel is exhausting. In Bengaluru, even a short commute can take one and a half to two hours a day, and that drains energy.

When asked whether he would like long-term remote work from his native place, even for less money, he said yes. Earlier in his career, he wanted to enjoy the office culture, the big buildings, the colleagues. Now work has become more transactional: a means of putting food on the plate. In big organizations, one is part of a machine, building one small part. He could do much of that from home. What matters is being able to be with parents not only on the phone, but in the same room. If his native place were only 200 kilometres away, he would happily go home every weekend.

He was also clear that companies should not be confused with family. During COVID and after, many people said workplace is home and colleagues are family. Ritesh rejected that. If he and his wife were ill, his parents, brother, or family would find a way to come and rescue them. His organization could deliver a laptop for work. That is not the same thing.

Then we turned the question back on ourselves. In Brida, English is part of the process, but often the real thing is simply having a place for a decent conversation. Does a table like this replace something that work used to provide?

Ismar said it is similar, but different. Face to face, we can know more about the other person. Online conversation is not a complete replacement for the real environment. He had read that productivity may be higher at home than in the office, but he does not think working from home should be adopted forever for everything. It depends on the activity.

Ritesh saw more future in it. He said many people now work from home and need different conversations, different points of view, someone experienced to speak with. He compared it, carefully, to therapy or group conversation — a place where people talk, express, and receive something from the environment. He imagined immersive conferencing becoming more real, where it feels as if people are in the same room. For him, this kind of table gives opportunity. He cannot simply travel to meet us, but here he can see us and express himself. He thought it may be especially good for older people, retired people, and people who need some social time. He imagined his grandfather, if alone, having a place to say that his grandsons never visit, that the young are busy with their own lives. He also connected it to village life, where people sit together, sip coffee, and discuss everything — even international affairs, even wars, even leaders from other countries.

What we discovered was that work is not only work. It is a room where society happens. It can be unfair, hierarchical, exhausting, corrupt, transactional, and even cruel. But it also gives routine, contact, friendship, usefulness, and a reason to be seen. When that room changes — through retirement, remote work, caregiving, or disillusionment — social life has to find another room.

Maybe that room is family. Maybe it is a gym, a lecture hall, a neighbour, a coffee break, a village bench, or a screen. Maybe it is not a perfect replacement for face-to-face life. But for now, across Brazil, India, and France, we had one small room open between us.

And for an hour, it was enough.