Conditioned by Corporate
I’ve been working in the Corporate set up for over a decade now. I also moonlight as a writer, to hold on to the last crumbs of my identity that is fading in the lights of the computer screen I am in front of all day. Yes, all day, because 9 to 5, 8 hours of work is passé. We don’t do that anymore, especially in third world countries so eager to please their foreign counterparts that we ironically freed ourselves from decades ago, after fighting for hundreds of years, only to act like slaves yet again years later...Sheesh! I wonder how annoyed the ghosts of our freedom fighters are. Anyway, the more I am sucked into this set-up, the more I realize how conditioned we are.. If I sound like every other anonymous blogger yearning to break the chains of corporate and live freely, it is because I am.
Agreed, that for many this is the dream, to be able to sit all day and earn a six figure income, moving just a few fingers on the keyboard. I cannot begin to have a discussion about how sometimes this feels the wrong place to be in, without feeling like I’m being ungrateful for the opportunities, money and comfort this career has brought along, and perhaps this guilt, like many others, is the effect of corporate conditioning.
I’m not sure how many of us feel this way, but I do know I will have company when asked to raise our hand if we ever felt lost in lives, doing the same thing over and over again, with every wait for the weekend, every meeting that could have been an email, every attempt to sound as polished offline, as we pretend to be in our communications online. While many of us are here by choice, the others are here simply because we didn’t know we were capable of other things, and by the time we do realize it, we’re so conditioned to think that any career beyond ours that doesn’t pay a monthly salary, irrespective of the amount of work we put in, isn’t really a career, or at the most, isn’t for us. Words like stability, safety, long-term, are often thrown into the mix by our own conditioned minds, that isn’t just scared of leaving the comfort zone, but petrified of anything that doesn’t involve doing the same mundane things, no matter how much we start to resent it. A few like me who used to dream of breaking free, eventually become so conditioned by the environment, or perhaps our greed gives into the luxuries we can now afford, that we accept the fate we chose for our own selves.
We no longer have any one to blame for the path we’re in, but us. Once in a while though, like on this holiday (that you hope isn’t disturbed by calls from work, because you’re expected to be available all the time…flexibility...duh!), away from the humdrum, away from routine, sitting by the beach, the sound of waves overpowering that of keyboard tapping, we wonder….
“What if I stop believing everything I’m conditioned to believe, and start thinking for myself? Is the unknown beyond Corporate and stability, really that bad? What if it isn’t?”
