Withering away in the office
Please just automate this shit away and let us live.
Back at it. Back in boredom land. Back in soul-destroyer nation. Back in uselessness and a nagging feeling of guilt as I do nothing of value while others labor with blood and sweat to provide for their families.
Well, what else?
The office is such a surreal, incomprehensible landscape. Everyone, absolutely everyone, knows that what we do there is complete bullshit — numbers on some shitty spreadsheet, dollar values that determine the owners’ wealth. And still, it is perhaps the best option for anyone as disillusioned with the present as with the future. At least you’re somewhat comfortable and do not pay with blood and sweat, but merely with the slow degradation of your mental faculties.
It’s the best I can do. I have accepted this and I can live with it. I live for my free time and my family and friends. My hobbies.
So, here’s a little story:
After I finished my master’s degree in business administration (I was an incomprehensibly stupid little shit and thought I would finally make my family proud and provide for them etc. etc. — the usual sorry immigrant’s tale), I was promptly thrust into the white-collar hellscape, supplanted in hellishness only by the blue-collar one. After a year of slow withering away of personality and life force, I gave that up to… become a teacher.
Excellent choice for someone with severe social anxiety, ADHD, and the good ‘ole occasional depression. Did I mention that I’m stupid?
I never finished my degree but I worked as a math and physics teacher for almost two years. Couldn’t stand that either, unsurprisingly. The kids are alright and fun mostly, but fuck everything else about being a teacher.
The thing is: some mental issues make it so that you never truly get to know yourself. It takes years upon years and many hard experiences to find out who you truly are, what you can do, and what you cannot. So the only choice you got is to try out things until something, eventually, somewhat fits.
There’s multiple problems with that:
Every worthwhile job takes years of learning. Only after the learning do you even realize what the job entails. Practice differs from theory, as in all matters of life. So by the time you have tried out like two things, you are over thirty and financially and mentally desperate.
A fitting Marx quote:
“For as soon as the distribution of labor comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”
Everything sucks. Every single job. All of them. Some are better than others, but they are all terrible. Why? Because inevitably you lose independence and self-determination. Your days, weeks, years, decades are dictated by the arbitrary rule of others. By institutions, by obligations, bosses. You are not free.
Related to the second point: you’ll never find anything remotely acceptable. At least in my case. You’ll have to make constant compromises (“alright, just two days until the weekend”, “okay, just four months until my next holiday”, “I need the money, I need to eat, Mom would be sad”, etc. etc.
After my stint as a teacher, I tried out a couple blue-collar jobs. Admittedly, I romanticized them a bit beforehand. Just do your physical job and then go home without a worry in the world, right? Wrong. The disrespect alone I got as a waiter and barkeeper was astonishing — from bosses, customers, even family members and friends. And then the pay…
“You’re wasting your potential yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah.”
And now I’ve come full circle. Back to the roots. Back in boredom land. The stuffy backrooms where everything feels wrong and some demonic presence (some spreadsheet, some PowerPoint) always lurks just around the corner. Corporate meetings must be, I am convinced, the greatest torture method ever devised.
This is also, by the way, why I haven’t been writing much in the last couple of months. I’m hoping to get back at it more, but Jesus Christ am I constantly tired.
You want to know the worst thing? My darkest secret?
I work in fucking marketing. Yeah.
Even (inherently problematic) patriarchic constructs such as masculinity or manliness or strength are slowly drained from you as you lose all face when the boss shits all over your work in front of your coworkers. That’s why I find it curious how even cringe conservatives and followers of the church of Tate defend corporatism. Dude, you’re literally getting yelled at by some arbitrary other dude, placed arbitrarily above you, and you’re not even punching in his face for all the disrespect.
God, I wish I could just do that.
Well, at least I’m not hungry, at least I can pay my rent, at least I have my weekends and my movies and my shows and especially my supporting partner.
What a life we could live without all the bullshit. I’ll never get over it.
Please, for fucks sake, automate us all away. Let AI do this shit, I don’t even care.
Cheers,
Antonio
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Good to have you back, Tony.
Well said.