I Will Not Die

Why do you think the movie Fight Club was so popular? Why do you think so many people identified with it? Because it showed us a guy who escaped from his hellish nightmare only after he became delusional and beat himself up. That’s just about what our jobs, our own hellish nightmares, can do.

The monotony might actually kill us

After we go through the learning curve at our jobs, things really start to look the same every day. In the beginning things weren’t quite so bad. We had new people to meet, new tasks to learn, new responsibilities to master. But for many of us, those days are now a distant memory. Now we come in every day, shuffle paper around, answer e-mails, and solve the same problems that we fixed yesterday. And we can look forward to doing them all over again tomorrow.

That stupid person over there just won’t shut up

Not that every person we work with is intolerable, but at most jobs there’s at least someone who comes across as extremely annoying. They have a really loud laugh, or they always use the same phrase, over and over again. Or they’re always talking about the same stupid thing. It’s not that we’re mean-spirited people. It’s not that we hate them or anything. It’s just that we cannot escape from them. We are forced to coincide with them for half of our waking hours. We are forced to exist beside them. Sooner or later, the laugh becomes unbearable, the same old news becomes boring.

Our bosses just don’t seem to get it

It’s not that we all hate our bosses or anything. There are lots of great bosses out there. But what they don’t seem to grasp is that the jobs they do aren’t actually that difficult. They never understand that we could probably do their jobs just as well as they can. They take their position of authority for granted. They forget to prove to us the talent that their authority is supposed to represent. At the same time, they forget that the jobs we do support their jobs entirely. They forget that without us, they’d be doing the job we’re doing now. They owe us something for that.

The rewards we get are disproportional to our efforts

A raise? It’s not always just about the money. Money helps, but most of know that our companies have budgets, and most of us want to have a role in the company’s profitability. None of us want to bleed the company that feeds our families dry. But our jobs constantly demand that we do more, and more, and more, but our jobs don’t often pony up for that. Most of us are more than willing to try our best to do more but most of us want at least something for our efforts. A little recognition. Hell, a thank you would be great now and then.

Our creativity is stifled

Many of us work for companies that are built on layer after layer of procedures. There are rules that govern the tasks we do, the way we can interact with people, even how and when we can eat. If we have a new idea about something, it faces a long obstacle course of denial and skepticism before it finally ends up in the trash. But the people on the ground usually know pretty well what might work and what won’t. If they would just listen to us for second, they would figure out that we might have something really useful to share. We might actually have a good idea or two.

There is just no damned variety

I mean seriously. Many of us spend more than half our waking hours involved in our jobs. After we include getting ready in the morning, the time we’re actually at our work places, and the time we need to get home, sometimes it is much more than half. Then we have this small little pocket of time in the evenings where we can try to squeeze in some new scenery. It’s not much, but for many of us, it’s the peak of our days. But it’s so small. The whole rest of the time, we see the same highways, see the same walls, and sit under the same lights next to the same people doing the same things we did the last day.

Can we escape?

For many of us, that’s our single biggest hope. We hope to one day be able to move on to another more engaging job, maybe one with more dynamic responsibilities, or maybe we hope we can start a business of our own. Can we relieve ourselves? Can we do it without becoming delusional? We don’t have to always beat ourselves up over our jobs…sometimes our jobs do that for us.

(Update, 2:30pm: This has now been viewed over 500 700 800 times by Reddit users. Thanks everyone!)

(10:55pm: Ok, … wow. I better add StumbleUpon to the list. 126 200 1580+. Hi Stumblers!) Wow…

Seriously, I want to thank all the Stumblers. Traffic from StumbleUpon has just now (Aug. 18th) surpassed 2,200 3,600 6,000 hits. I think you guys are going to be responsible for making this blog. Truly, I thank all of you…

Dereck :: Jul.10.2008 :: Work :: 17 Comments »

There are thousands, possibly millions, of people who work day in and day out and see no hope in a future that they want but believe they cannot have. As they grind away at some job, they often reminisce about some “other” life, some “other” place that they would like to go, but all the many circumstances around them remind them that the other life they think about is just not for them, that it belongs to their nostalgic inventions behind their closed eyes and no where else. But I don’t believe that’s how things ought to be. And if we are the masters of our own individual “oughts” then we should be able to disgrace our circumstances and prove them wrong by summoning our courage and our abilities and using them both to go where everything around us tells us that we can’t.

What is cubicle trench warfare?

Cubicle trench warfare is what I hope will become an informal group of people who aspire to free themselves from their workaday positions so they can enjoy much better, more enjoyable things in life. Care to join me? Most people go to work, plug away, go home, sleep and then go back to work. But what if we insert into that routine a very dirty little secret? A secret that even during all the mundane tasks that we must do, people engaged in cubicle trench warfare will harbor a completely separate set of tasks, all of which represent a furtive labor to escape.

In other words, engaging in cubicle trench warfare represents all the things you do, whether while at work or not, that will help lead you to the exit. Whether they be extending your education, developing your skills, working part-time on a small business idea, replacing your income, you name it.

Ideally, if we can get enough people involved taking active steps to free themselves, we can engage in some revealing discussions. Ultimately I see the home for this idea in the forum, where a community of people can talk about different ways they are engaged in our secret little individual wars.

Dereck :: Jun.23.2008 :: Work :: 8 Comments »