"Pretending to Work Instead of Working" By Aditya Singh

Most offices today have turned into stages where everyone is acting. People sit in front of their laptops all day, moving the mouse, opening and closing files, typing a few lines, or sitting in meetings that drag on without meaning. If you look around, you’ll see people staring at their screens as if they’re deeply involved in something important but often, nothing real is happening. We spend more energy pretending to work than actually working. This daily act of looking busy is exhausting. By evening, people feel completely drained, not because of hard work, but because of the effort of keeping up the show. It’s like spending the whole day running in circles and ending up nowhere. 

But the truth is, the real work doesn’t get done in this game. It waits for us until we return home. After office hours, when the body is already tired, people open their laptops again and finally start doing the tasks that actually matter. Dinner is rushed, conversations with family are cut short, and the idea of relaxation disappears. Nights become the only time where real work happens. The day is wasted on pretending, and the night is stolen by unfinished tasks. What should have been leisure becomes another shift, another round of deadlines, another weight on the mind. Slowly, home is no longer home, it becomes an extension of the office. 

This has become a new kind of pandemic, spreading silently in every workplace. Everyone pretends because everyone else is doing the same, and no one wants to look lazy or out of place. Whole teams and companies spend their days in fake busyness while real progress barely moves. People are burning out, not because of too much real work, but because of the endless hours wasted on acting busy. And this is the cruelest part: there is no finish line. The cycle repeats day after day, week after week, leaving us more tired, more guilty, and more trapped in a system where the show of work has become more important than the work itself.