How much does it worth?

Since the whole world went into an undefined lockdown, many things have changed. We needed to learn how to be productive from home and how important it is to take care of our mental health… We had enough time to learn more about ourselves.

But now that we are back to “normal,” I‘m wondering if we are back 100% to what it was before the pandemic? For me, the answer is clear, NO. And it scares me that many people and companies are saying yes. But why? because this affirmation means that all the learnings and the things we went thought over the last almost three years are thrown into the trash.

In a personal level, I like to believe that every time you learn something new, an old version of you dies, allowing the new one to live, to take that new knowledge to become a better version of yourself.

In a working level, some companies understood this, giving flexibility to their employees to work from home (or wherever they want) if that is what work better for them (and of course, to their productivity) or to return to the office, benefit given specially by those companies who has employees around the world.

But from the other side, we have the companies who are asking people to go back three years in time, to forget about the importance of their work-balance and mental health, using arguments that has been dismiss with professional studies and not taking into consideration how the employee feels.

For me, as a UX Designer, it is important to feel that my employee cares about me, as part of my job is to take care of company’s users/customers. That being said, I truly believe if a company has good communication with employees and take care of them it will be reflected on the product and its adoption, as somebody said, happy employees means happy customers.

And, from the other side, after a long period of lockdown and uncertainty in the world, a economical crisis is inevitable, causing a lot of chaos everywhere, specially in the professional field.

And here, in this exact moment, is where I start to wonder… How much does my emotional and mental stability worth? From one side, it’s well known that everyone wants to be financially stable, specially in a middle of a crisis but in the other hand we also want to be able to work in a place where we can reach our fully potential without compromising our inner peace, without having a daily high levels of cortisol and all the implications that it will have in our physical and mental health.

So… How much does it worth? what are we willing to lose?

I’ll close this reflection with the following phrase of the psychological impact of the Great Depression

The hardships of the Great Depression had a tremendous social and psychological impact. Some people were so demoralized by hard times that they lost their will to survive.

Are we going that way? Are we about to experience a modern global depression?