Many of them want to be the perfect partner and/or parent, have a glorious career, and experience impressive personal growth. They want to be online 24/7, and maintain an athletic and healthy lifestyle. In short, such an inspiring range of ambitions are quite the challenge to realize. Older generations had less excessive ambitions, and they included fewer life goals. I think that made things a lot easier for them.

Why is this the key observation in this argument? Because I worry about the pressure people are under because of these ambitions and dreams. Pressure that’s even worse due to an ever-increasing workload.

TU/e is a wonderful university that’s doing great at the moment, and is fulfilling its ambitions amply right now. Better positioning, growing student numbers, increasing internationalization, active valorization, successful connections to the industry and society, appealing programs, and a compact, close-knit community. There’s a general recognition within and outside the university that things are going well. This collective ambition is added to people’s individual goals.

Within our university, as is the case at many other organizations, the workload is getting heavier. There’s more pressure on education, and on research to acquire projects, since state funding is dwindling and we’re shifting to contracted research and public-private partnerships more and more. Students experience a heavier workload, too, albeit with partly different characteristics .

In an ambitious environment there’s room for taking pride in goals achieved, but there’s always extra pressure as well. That pressure worries me, but it’s hard to relieve. If only it was, everyone immediately would. After all, who benefits from talented, hardworking staff breaking down? It’s often a long way back up the ladder from there.

We’ll have to figure out which of our activities are redundant. We’ll have to reprioritize, postpone some of our work, and do it a later time if it’s still needed and useful. But what’s most important is communication in this matter. Executives have to be sensible enough to pinpoint heavy workloads, discuss the issue with their employees and come to a solution together.

Besides, I do hope that everyone experiencing a heavy workload alerts the people who can help them. Don’t hide your problem by putting even more hours in completing heaps of work you really don’t want to do. We deserve sane and wise leaders and involved and open staff who are all willing to address and alleviate the issue of increasing pressure and workload.

There’s no such thing as a perfect world. But as long as we make sure to balance life in general actively, it will remain pleasant.