If the words “force equals mass times acceleration” are mildly triggering, I apologise. Newton’s second law of motion will be familiar to anyone who’s ever studied physics. For some who struggled with that course, it may bring back painful memories. But for me, as an awkward teenager, it was oddly comforting – proof of an ordered, structured universe where cause always led to predictable effect. I carried that belief into university, where I studied physics, and even into my career. If I just worked hard enough, success would be mine.
But nine months into my first job, I got made redundant. It turns out that life doesn’t always obey Newton’s laws.
Losing your job is tough for anyone. But for me, it was devastating. I had worked so hard, yet somehow I had still failed. It felt like a violation of everything I thought I knew about how the world worked. And on top of this, I was completely burned out after months of manic work.
My employer was not a company run by sadists who delighted in playing with the hopes of naive young graduates. There was a broader context to this layoff. And once I had passed through the shock and numbness, I could begin to see it. It was the summer of 2001, and all was not well with the world. The dotcom bubble bursting had sent financial shock waves around the globe, forcing my company – a management consultancy – to cut jobs.
And the crisis itself wasn’t even unique. Similar things happened during the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crash. In 2011, there was the eurozone crisis. In 2013, the rupee crashed. In 2015, turbulence on the Chinese stock market.
No one saw any of these crises coming – or at least not precisely. And in almost every case, they weren’t triggered by some enormous, dramatic event but by small, seemingly innocuous failures that snowballed into something far larger.
And this is where ideas from physics come in again. While Newton’s second law of motion proved an imperfect way for me to analyse the world, there are other ideas from my studies that have helped me understand these crises, and our place within them. All the above events are examples of chaotic systems – ones that, in theory, can be explained by cause and effect, but in practice are so sensitive to conditions that tiny variations can spiral into radically different outcomes.
Take the “three-body problem”, made famous by the Liu Cixin novel and the recent Netflix adaptation. If you have two planets orbiting each other, you can predict their paths for ever. But add a third planet, and suddenly the forces interacting between the three bodies become so complex that the mathematics explodes into unpredictability. The system is still governed by clear laws, but an infinitesimally small shift can throw the whole system off balance.
This idea doesn’t just apply to things as big as the financial system or astrophysics; we can see such complexity and unpredictability in our own lives. For many, the response is control: we optimise our schedules, work harder, operate at maximum capacity. I know I certainly did. I assumed the way to get ahead was to work as hard as humanly possible. But physics teaches us that, for systems susceptible to chaotic forces, this actually makes us more fragile, not less.
Think of a power grid. Most of the time, it hums along without problem. But during an unexpected surge – for example, when millions of air-conditioners are switched on at once during a heatwave – the system can overload and shut down. To prevent this, engineers design grids with slack in the system: surge capacity to absorb unexpected spikes. A grid that operates at 80% survives a sudden spike in demand; one at 100% causes blackouts.
As a young graduate, I had been living without any surge capacity, at the limit of my abilities. And that’s perhaps why losing my job was so painful. But the truth is, most of us do the same. We convince ourselves that if we just push harder, we’ll be fine. But the more we operate at our limits, the more vulnerable we become.
A recent report from Mental Health UK revealed that 91% of UK adults have experienced high or extreme stress in the past year, with young people feeling it most acutely. Meanwhile, nearly half of young workers regularly work unpaid overtime. Among all UK desk workers, 84% feel pressured to work overtime regularly and 65% have to work at weekends to get their job done. We’re a nation of power grids running at 100%, wondering why we’re burning out.
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And from my own personal experience of burnout, I’m reminded of another idea from physics. You can heat water gradually and nothing seems to change – until you reach a critical threshold, boiling point. And suddenly the whole system transforms –undergoing what’s known as a phase transition – from liquid to gas. People can absorb strain for a while, operating at maximum capacity, appearing fine. But stress doesn’t accumulate linearly. It builds until a critical point, and then the system flips. That’s why burnout often feels sudden, even though the pressure has been building for months or years.
Over the years, I’ve learned techniques to build my personal surge capacity. I try to always leave enough slack in my day for the unexpected. And I’ve learned that recovery isn’t a luxury, it’s essential.
But we’ve built an economy that celebrates overwork and treats burnout as personal failure rather than as a design flaw. The recent Keep Britain Working review revealed an alarming increase in people dropping out of the workforce due to mental health conditions. Could it be that the overwhelming nature of work itself – the expectation to operate at 100% capacity with zero surge capacity – is what’s making people unable to work at all?
Until we recognise that resilience requires inefficiency – that robust systems must have slack – we’re just optimising our way towards collapse. Newton’s second law still holds. I just wish someone had told me that it’s not just about how much force you apply, but knowing when to ease off.
Zahaan Bharmal is the author of The Art of Physics and a senior director at Google, writing in a personal capacity
