Stress is your body's way of saying you haven't worked enough unpaid overtime.

Framed as a mock “translation” of stress, the line satirizes workplace cultures that normalize overwork and unpaid labor. By personifying the body as if it were delivering management’s message, the quote exposes how corporate expectations can be internalized until physical strain is treated as a personal failing rather than a systemic problem. The humor depends on inversion: stress, typically understood as a warning sign to slow down, is recast as evidence you should give even more. In that sense it functions as a critique of hustle ideology and the moralization of productivity, especially in white-collar environments associated with Adams’s Dilbert-era themes.