When Zahaan Bharmal lost his first job just nine months into his career, it felt like the universe had broken its fundamental rules. As a physics graduate who believed hard work inevitably led to success, the redundancy notice shattered his Newtonian worldview where cause always produced predictable effect.
The moment everything changed
Bharmal's redundancy came during the summer of 2001, amid the dotcom bubble collapse that forced his management consultancy employer to cut jobs. This wasn't a personal failure but part of broader economic chaos that would repeat in subsequent crises - the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crash, 2011 eurozone crisis, 2013 rupee crash, and 2015 Chinese stock market turbulence.
What physics eventually taught him was that these events, like his personal burnout, were examples of chaotic systems. While theoretically governed by cause and effect, they're so sensitive to conditions that tiny variations can spiral into radically different outcomes.
The three-body problem in everyday life
Bharmal points to the "three-body problem" made famous by Liu Cixin's novel. Two planets orbiting each other have predictable paths, but add a third body and the mathematics explodes into unpredictability. Similarly, our lives and economy contain so many interacting forces that small shifts can throw everything off balance.
Most people respond to this complexity by trying to exert more control - optimising schedules, working harder, operating at maximum capacity. But physics teaches that for systems susceptible to chaotic forces, this actually increases fragility.
Britain's surge capacity crisis
The analogy of a power grid illustrates the problem perfectly. During normal operation, grids hum along efficiently. But when millions switch on air-conditioners during a heatwave, systems operating at 100% capacity experience blackouts, while those with surge capacity - operating at 80% - absorb the spike and continue functioning.
Most British workers are living without any surge capacity, operating at their absolute limits. Mental Health UK reveals that 91% of UK adults experienced high or extreme stress in the past year, with young people most affected. Nearly half of young workers regularly work unpaid overtime, while 84% of desk workers feel pressured to work overtime regularly and 65% work weekends.
Bharmal compares burnout to water reaching boiling point - what physicists call a phase transition. People can absorb strain while appearing fine, but stress doesn't accumulate linearly. It builds to a critical threshold, then the system flips suddenly from functional to burned out.
The Keep Britain Working review shows an alarming increase in people dropping out of the workforce due to mental health conditions. Bharmal questions whether the expectation to operate at 100% capacity with zero surge capacity is making people unable to work at all.
He argues that we've built an economy that celebrates overwork and treats burnout as personal failure rather than recognising it as a fundamental design flaw. True resilience requires inefficiency - robust systems must have slack built in.
After his own burnout experience, Bharmal learned to always leave enough slack in his day for the unexpected and recognises that recovery isn't a luxury but essential. The lesson from physics isn't just about how much force you apply, but knowing when to ease off.
