I got sick with a really nasty cold recently... knocked me right on my ass. But it really underscored to me how psychologically conditioned we are to keep working anyway.
My wife got sick first. She was in rough shape. This virus really rattled the lungs. Lots of coughing. Fatigue that just wipes you out.
I thought I was in the clear. I managed to avoid any symptoms for the first 5 days or so that she was sick.
Then, a dry cough. Little tickle at the back of the throat. I knew what was coming.
Soon I was coughing this dry cough at my desk, trying to get as much work done as I could. November is really busy at my job, but the finish line was in sight.
I felt comfortable missing work Thursday, one week before Thanksgiving, but forced myself to go in on Friday and tie up loose ends.
It was just me and one other coworker in the office that day. A woman with a very sick mother who is barely hanging on. After I got home Friday I felt worried that my coworker would catch my cold and have to stay away from her mom. Or even worse, that her mom might catch it.
And I thought, wow, things sure have slipped back to the bad old days from before the pandemic.
Remember how work-from-home was the standard for a little while? How everyone was sent home to stop the spread of Covid-19? Now plenty of us are supposed to be back in the office and no one is supposed to work from home anymore. We’re back to the old dynamic that says finishing work tasks is more important than concerns about spreading illness. We’re back in the office to prop up commercial real estate. Productivity was higher during the work from home period also.
The pandemic is recent enough to remember with a lot of clarity. It’s also recent enough to notice the slip back into old attitudes about taking sick days.
There is always this internal dialogue happening. Are my symptoms enough to take seriously? Will someone accuse me of loafing?
I am reading Stephen King’s The Stand right now. A pandemic horror story. Captain Trips, the informal name given to the deadly flu strain in the book, starts out like any common cold or flu. Coughing, sneezing, stuffy head, fever... until your lungs fill with gunk and your sinuses produce so much mucus you drown or your brain burns out from fever and you die. Not exactly comfort reading when you’re getting over a cold like me. But the way people react when they start coming down with the A-Prime superbug is so relatable.
Denial.
Why is denial always the first reaction when I start getting sick?
I feel like there’s a mental aspect to any illness. I think to myself, “If I try and push through maybe I can just tough it out.” It hardly ever works. But my brain keeps thinking that anyway.
My internal boss shines a much harsher light on me taking a sick day than any real boss ever has. “Do you really need to use your PTO? What if you get a lot more sick and you already used all of your sick days?” My internal boss is such a dick!
But sometimes he wins and I go into work anyway. Feeling crappy. Getting less work done. Feeling exhausted at the end of the day. Probably spreading the virus around to coworkers.
Psychological conditioning is the reason I have to convince myself to take a sick day. Our work lives condition us to hoard the few sick days we have, “just in case.” Psychological conditioning makes us push ourselves harder than we have to when we aren’t feeling good.
I am reminded of every war movie. People are afraid to take a sick day because they don’t want their coworkers to have to pick up the slack and do our work when we’re gone. Just like soldiers don’t want to let their buddies down in the trenches. We simply don’t want to let our buddies down.
Until we’re too sick to care. Dragged from the battlefield exhausted, wiped out.
If you ask your workmates they would probably rather do a little extra bit of your work than get sick.
But until I feel really low I have been conditioned by our capitalist society to prioritize work tasks over my own health. This is not an idea that popped into my head organically. We are all conditioned into this kind of thinking. It doesn’t work on everybody... but it works on a lot of people.
So maybe keep that in mind the next time you get a sniffle or a dry cough. Don’t be a hero... at least not on behalf of your workplace. Work against your conditioning. Notice it. And move past it.
Let’s make them pay.
