Coffee Stained and Cramped
Our employee stuffed into a tight collard shirt dappled with coffee stains, hunches over the steering wheel on his way to the office. Upon arriving, he hurriedly snatches up his belongings from the back seat of his all too small car. Then rounds quickly and shuffles into the building, past the front desk with moments to spare before anyone could notice he was running late. Our cramped and coffee-stained employee collapses into his computer, letting out a sign of exhaustion despite his week only just beginning. Then after taking a moment to collect himself. He rolls the awkwardly shaped office chair closer to the desk as if to prop himself up.
Once securely erect, he begins to scroll through a seemingly endless inbox of unread emails accrued throughout the weekend. After some time, what feels like an eternity to the worker, he finds himself dozing. To ensure his future employment, he forces himself to slug down another dark cup of stimulating sludge from the breakroom. It gives him the jitters but wakes him up enough to keep his job. Naturally, as is the result of such substances, the second cup doesn’t sit well with his digestion landing him in the bathroom. Our employee finds himself spending a dangerous amount of time in the stall, and his thoughts begin to wander.
Cramped between the metal walls of the stall, he starts to contemplate his life and working conditions. In an effort to turn his thoughts away from his current predicament, he grips his phone and desperately scrolls through every social media site he can find in a vain attempt to push away his self-awareness of the situation. Warding off his thoughts as if he were some witch doctor attempting to fend off dark spirits in the dark of night—our employee’s phone is his only weapon and defense against his self-conscious awareness.
Mustering up the strength to return to his desk, he washes up, and while at the sink, he starts looking a little too long into his own eyes through the mirror. The visage he finds staring back hardly resembles who he thought he would become. The face is gaunt, with dark circles appearing like that of a dead man propped up. Once again, shaking the thoughts of his predicament from his mind, he retunes to finish his work for the day. With some success, he makes it through the day only tormented by the occasional moments of intense dread brought on by his work’s monotonous and tedious quality. Though these thoughts threaten to drive our employee to the brink of psychosis, they nevertheless prove impotent for the time being.
Thank God It's Friday
Our coffee-stained employee is the picture of many who work mid-level office jobs. We face an epidemic of despair-related illnesses, and the environments we have constructed to work and live in undoubtedly play a role in our collective psychosis. Who can thrive as a robot pushing meaningless papers day in and day out? It is no wonder that we have steadily lost our capacity for self-understanding. It was a survival mechanism developed to protect ourselves from modern society. The dark spirits no longer torment us from the trees. They are within us and manifest themselves through the mottos, “Living for the Weekend” and “Thank God it’s Friday,” which are the corporatized cries of the employee who is steadily having their soul pulled from their body.
There is no straightforward solution to fix our lifeless work environments, and every attempt by young business people to build a thriving work culture only serves to patronize their employees. These band-aid solutions of adding snacks to the breakroom and lounge chairs in the lobby, while seemingly beneficent acts, only infantilize the employees and distract from the real issues at hand. Problems that seem endemic to the very nature of the work that has been created as a product of a consumerist society. It is hard to give meaning to the employee filing paperwork in triplicate in an effort for a company to push out its 434th lip balm color.
Deaths of Despair
The accumulation of wealth and the desire to earn a living may very well be the only sustaining factors for a significant portion of the workforce. Unfortunately, such motivating factors do not have the legs to keep a person working until retirement. It does not take a particularly bad day to bring a person to ask themselves, “what is it all for anyway?” A question that can tear down any thinly veiled motivations for employment within even the most robust employees, let alone the cramped stained man we have been envisioning here. In the face of such a terrible question, only the genuinely creative and innovative person can think their way out of the associated thought traps that may lead them to despair. For the bulk of us, we suffer the same fate that is being reported in nearly every medical journal; we join the masses of people becoming depressed and anxious.
The root of the issue resides in the consumerism that has overtaken our society. At every level, we have goods, services, and entertainment multiplying at untenable rates. We have outstripped our desire, and now we have stooped to developing synthetic desires. I could not want the 434th lip balm color unless I were exposed to the masses of lip balm previously created. Our slow death brought on by the artificially produced work resulting as a byproduct of our synthetic desires can be rectified if we are willing to follow some ancient advice.
If we no longer wish to fall prey to our current predicament, then resigning ourselves to deny our desires may be the most viable solution we can embody. Of course, it is not a revolutionary call to action. The advice to renounce desire is a quintessential dictate from ancient times. The sage would say that there is something worthwhile in scratching an itch if you have one but making yourself itch only to scratch yourself raw is a wholly unproductive enterprise. I would not argue that we ought to renounce all desire but only that we, at least in part, head the call of our ancestors and once again place our desire under the control of our will. If we can check our desire and prevent it from multiplying, we may be able to combat the rampant consumerism that threatens to destroy the soul of our modern society.
If our ancestors could look at us, I do not want them to say of our generation, ” They scratched themselves to death over an itch that was only ever an illusion.”
Support My Work
If you enjoy my content and found anything written here to be of value, please consider supporting me!
Purchasing anything through one of the links below will provide me with a commission that will be used in sustaining my site, purchasing new equipment, and the procurement of pizza.
MerchandiseAudible
Terrific article sir!
Thank you!