2013-01-13
Explanation
This comic, titled "How Stress Works," satirizes the no-win cycle of stress and guilt that many people experience. In the first panel, a character happily declares, "Agh! I'''m too stressed. I should try to relax by taking on less work." The arrow then leads to the second panel, where the same character is now anxiously clutching his head and saying, "Oh God I'''m doing nothing with my life. I'''ve got to do more." The implication is that this loops back to the first panel in an endless cycle.
The joke captures a common psychological trap: when you are overworked, you feel stressed and want to do less, but the moment you actually reduce your workload, you feel guilty and unproductive, which drives you to take on more work again. The comic presents this as a fundamental and inescapable feature of how stress operates, rather than something that can be resolved through better time management.
The votey (bonus panel) extends the joke with a graph plotting "Actual Amount Done" versus "Optimum Amount of Work" against age. The "Actual Amount Done" curve dramatically overshoots and then crashes past the optimum, reinforcing the idea that people never manage to hit the sweet spot of the right amount of work -- they are always doing too much or too little, and the gap between what they do and what they should do only grows over time.