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friend of mine recently passed away; I can'€™t say I knew her well but I knew her well enough to feel that swift jab to the heart leaving me with a hint of melancholy. She worked at an advertising agency in Jakarta and perhaps being hard-pressed on deadlines, she worked through three consecutive nights without sleep.

Guzzling down unhealthy doses of energy drinks to toil through the draining nights. My layman assumption predicts that her body just couldn'€™t handle the sleepless, stressful nights coupled with the caffeine-loaded energy drinks. It was an unnerving, tragic death of a woman known by her friends to radiate exuberance.

Looking at this tragedy it would be fairly easy to lay the blame on her. After all, one would assume, she should have been wise enough to take care of her own body.

Yet as many young people living in a bustling, metropolitan city such as Jakarta have experienced, it is not that simple.

The reality in our working environment is harsh, pushing us young people to extremes. Pressures from deadlines, unrelenting bosses, highly competitive working environments '€”none of these help us ease the tight tensions already smothering us.

We are pushed to work harder and harder for the bountiful money or the glamorous prestige or the security of a career, and we'€™ve become oblivious to the fact that all these become instantly pointless in the face of sickness and death.

To soothe the burden and obscure us from this lethal possibility we are given constant reassurance and obscure guarantees that if we work hard enough we will gloriously succeed.

Seldom, though, have we been told the price of this success: That unmanaged stress and overwork can be utterly destructive.

Numerous studies by various universities have been conducted throughout the world and all have unequivocally shown that overwork does shorten our lives. The Japanese even have a word for this, karoshi or literally '€œdeath from overwork'€.

Even if death or your failing health doesn'€™t make you tremble in dismay, studies have also shown that overworking yourself also leads to family and relationship issues, lack of sleep, lack of focus, erratic emotions often leading to short tempers and a variety of other distressing issues that no one should undergo daily.

We are abandoning real happiness and health of the current moment for a desire of happiness and health of the future.

Knowing this, have we as working individuals done enough when it comes to personally limiting ourselves to the dangers of overworking, to say that dreadful word '€œno'€ to our bosses'€™ face?

Or have we just brushed aside this serious matter with laughter and foolishness, self-reassuring ourselves that the repercussions of overworking will never happen to us? This is ignorance at its worst.

I am not in anyway denying the need to work, but I am trying to simply ask how
we should work and for whom or what should the work be. What good is excessive money when it is used to only pay the towering hospital bills or the casket in which to lay our bodies?

Not only are the employees themselves to blame for this but companies can play a vital role in stopping this enslaving practice, and should also have the decency and the understanding that their employees do need rest and are not mere automatons that can be
constantly pressured with a verbal whip.

For many young employees these days who are wishing to jump-start their careers, the saying '€œwork to live not live to work'€ becomes nothing but an empty moral remark. We have no clue whatsoever on how to find that delicate balance between life and work nor encouraged to do so.

It is absent from our train of thought when daily social-working pressures are pestering us from all directions and deadlines are just lurking behind the corner.

My friend'€™s sudden death and the grief it brings will pass much like any other death. I am naive enough to hope that this tragedy doesn'€™t happen to anyone else again, but I am aware of the reality of the world we live in, and sadly she will not be the last.

I hope though for the time being she becomes a grim reminder of the possible bleak future of the over-workers, of those who dwell in stress.

We may say to ourselves that our youth can cope with this volatile working environment. Yet, what my beautiful friend and many people throughout the world have heartbreakingly shown is that we'€™re young; we'€™re hard working but not invincible.

The author is a freelance writer, based in Wellington.