Another one of those days.
I look over from my work to a window with YouTube open. Another compilation of eclectic (albeit mostly unexciting) music just ended, and I have a number of familiar thumbnails presented to me.
Do I want to relisten to modest by default : Permaculture (组织胜过时间) again? Do I want to relisten to slowerpace 音楽 – INNER FLAME again? I think I played both of these yesterday - do I really want to overplay them and have them lose what makes them special?
I have an intense feeling of déja vu. This is a familiar moment, one I would usually follow up with locking my laptop and bursting (silently) through the university library door, and pacing outside, listening to the birds and idle chatter, and occasionally joining in. I may have gotten a coffee or some kind of herbal infusion. And I would have walked back in and got back to the grind. My university really beat a work ethic into me.
Although that doesn't feel as long ago as it actually was, it's a weird feeling, to think that now I don't have that option. I can take a break, it just wouldn't be as idyllic, or as steeped in that context, an unspoken promise of a full life and dizzying heights ahead.
I pick the first album. A familiar figure in a كوفيّة covers my screen, sun behind, with a bunch of hanji rounding out the frame.
Good shit.
Back to work.
I plan to write at length about my experience with these compilations of music that only exist on the internet. The first album namedropped above is a textbook Barber Beats album, while the later is something in a category of its own - it's paced and distributed like a Barber Beats album would, but these beats are not just plundered unknown tracks - instead, an incredibly atmospheric and smooth interpretation of house tracks that are actually not unpopular. Some other day.
The banalities of a corporate job are extraordinary, and any time I give it any thought I find it upsetting that so many of us spend so much of our precious few hours on this planet in the corporate machine. I am lucky not to have to deal with a lot of the banalities of corporate, from where I stand today, but the whole thing just is a farce. And not the funny kind.
I understand that this is a privileged position to speak from. I am not laboring manually, nor am I trapped in the misanthropy incubator that is retail. It's not a competition to see who's soul gets crushed more.
It's just sickening to me, the amount of resources, time - even just the mental bandwidth - just sacrificed to this way of doing things.
Every morning I watch hundreds of cars whizz past, most of which are heading to some office. I am in one of them, more often than not, on the way to my own. A lot of people spend over an hour on their way, some even more. Humanity has discovered gasoline, an incredibly convenient and power-dense fuel, which can be used whenever the obligatory pollutants are an acceptable side effect, and this is what we do with it? We intentionally burn it to go work in an office every goddamn day?
I appreciate that most people who have the option and a shred of conscience use public transportation, and an even larger share of the population has a job that can't just be done from a desk at home 80% of the time. Time taken irreversibly from our lives on our way there, just to keep up the farce. Or at least the foot of the farce pyramid.
And double fuck you if you think driving electric is a great improvement. I think the tech is cool, sure. But a quick search tells me less than five percent of the power in this country comes from renewable resources. Offloading the ecological damage caused by having to be in a different building to stare at the same laptop screen for ten hours onto someone else burning said fuel is naive at the very best and just deceptive to others at worst. Yeah, I totally feel like a piece of shit for driving an older car and not giving money for a company to manufacture a new one and ship it to me (due to my geography, we get a lot of secondhand cars from the US - so that's a few extra steps of shipping - although secondhand is always better, these machines need to give us all the years they have in them).
Am I anti-car then? I love cars. I think - just philosophically - the idea of a machine that can be ridden, operated, from place to place, that converts stored energy into movement, is amazing. I think there's something precious about the conventions and social connotations that are brought about by different cars, which is why I love RCR. Cars are cool. I like driving fun cars on fun roads, I like fixing them when they break (depending on the fix...). I do not like being forced to drive places. I do not like having the entire city being built around people driving to work because they have to. I do not like everyone's finances being tied to a temperamental machine.
I am anti-car because I love cars.
It's not just the transportation. I have to work in a suit when I head into the office. That's a lot of relatively uncomfortable hours. And it's a lot of unnecessary dry cleaning. I don't fucking talk to clients in person every week. Why am I wearing a suit? I'm of half a mind to start itemizing every workday into small "hidden" costs like unnecessary dry cleaning. It's not a conference, it's not a client summit, it's fucking Pizza Wednesday, let me wear a polo, fuck you.
It's the social conventions. Apparently I was starting to be seen as one to keep an eye on when I was leaving the office on time. I did my work, I want to spend the meager sum of the day's hours I still own on something more meaningful than the shareholders. But no - apparently some higher-up thought it to be insulting that I wish to leave before them. So I have to save face and stay late. Which I have been dutifully doing - at no benefit to my work-life balance, nor to either my work or my life - but apparently no extra work isn't a problem, because this same higher-up has taken notice of the extra hour sacrificed to the gods of company culture and has been noticeably more appreciative of the work I'm doing.
I'm doing good work. The shareholders are fine. Let me leave and go home to spend two hours on the good screen.
None of this is necessary. I find that I am actually capable of enjoying the office If I rarely need to be there. At one job, my team was only going once a week - it was just after organizations cared about COVID. I was actually looking forward to seeing everyone, because I wasn't forced to waste hours out of my life with them. One week between office days means that everyone has stories to share, everyone is feeling a little more talkative, everyone just wants to have a good time for the one day they have to be here. Was it our least productive day out of the week? One hundred percent. But it was honestly nice to have.
I get that there are bigger things happening to complain about. But this waste of hours upon hours of human life, just meaninglessly thrown away for nothing - that is a travesty. Lifetimes are being pissed away for no good reason.
I am staring down the barrel of a lifetime spent in office buildings, interacting with others in the least human ways possible, cranking out office work until they replace the entire work computer with a ChatGPT-enabled smart speaker that I have to pay a subscription to use (at which point I would graciously retire and dedicate all of my waking hours to failed projects instead of just being a failed project weekend warrior). This isn't right.
The funniest part of this is that everyone agrees. The biggest non-C-suite big boss, after a hearty lunch and a genuinely heartwarming discussion about childhood summers in mountain villages, will be the first to talk up and down about how one day they want to do their own thing, and "break free". Even the capitalism cheerleaders amongst us were talking about breaking free from "the matrix" this time two years ago. Even those of us who are delusional or miseducated enough to believe in the system want out.
It's funny! It is funny. I have been keeping the whole corporate thing at arm's length, at least mentally. I don't have to hand it to them, fuck the grind, fuck this culture of companies feeling entitled to my time and exertion. And while the café will be nothing but a pipe dream (90% sure about that), I fully expect to be in a smaller environment that respects my time and effort in the future. I don't want to hate my job. I don't want everyone around me to either hate their job or worship a billionaire (no middle ground).
I don't think this is just a corporate job thing either. If you work a physically demanding job - odds are the money you're making is going to these suits who are working very hard 28 hours a day but have time to post three times per day on LinkedIn. If you are a doctor, you are making the world a huge service every day - but your efforts are really just judged as KPIs on a spreadsheet by the person who stands to benefit financially from your important work. It's the same shit all the way down. Working with business types has really made the world look worse to me.
Work is important, human effort makes human society feasible. But the way it is abused to no end is disgusting.