Becoming Comfortably Numb

Breaking free of the golden handcuffs in pursuit of something more

Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? — Pink Floyd

Like most people, when they leave school and find the question ‘What are you going to do?’ thrust upon them, I didn’t know the answer.

I opted for the safe bet of work in IT/Finance, where jobs were abundant. Fast forward four years, and I have since learned that these jobs are neither meaningful nor interesting. This was my lead role in a cage. To society, I had ‘made it,’ but all I could envisage for my future was a disgruntled, albeit relatively competent middle manager. And there was no way I would scale the corporate ladder to the summit because of my relative indifference.

These factors became the two core reasons for changing careers: I found the work meaningless and uninteresting.

The mistake I made was following societies’ highly prized career values — money and status

And the assumption that this would lead to comfort and abundance — the metaphorical cage. Yet, ‘a walk-on part in the war’ would be my meaning and my way out. I just had to find it.

It has become clear to me that a ‘cushy’ well-paying job cannot provide me with any real sense of meaning. I know what constitutes cushy. It is having so little to do in the working day that you could complete all your tasks within half an hour. Or it means being able to work from home, pretty much unsupervised.

Yet, from the outside, this all looked great.

Back in the office, the need to wear a suit can make you seem more important than you are, a facade blown out of the water when coronavirus showed us what jobs really matter.

Having followed this path because of the promise of an abundance of jobs upon graduation, it wasn’t long before I realized this wasn’t enough.

I even lacked interest in IT and finance before choosing the course. Mistake number one: there has to be an interest; it will sustain you in the inevitable tough days. As Jordan Peterson says, you have a moral obligation to pursue what is meaningful.’ And that to achieve this, you need to take responsibility.

Well, there was no responsibility in having a job that often required next to no effort other than moving the mouse to ensure that the skype symbol remained green and available — the irony, inside, I was red and dead.

I could have done my work in half the time

Of course, there were many days where it was very busy. With office jobs, it tended to sway between both extremes. However, after four years, I would estimate that I could easily have condensed my workload into a year and a half.

But nobody wants to talk about this — aside from David Graeber — because we would realize that we no longer need the sheer number of middle management positions that currently exist. And this would lead even more of us to question our existence, leading to further discomfort.

These jobs epitomize where capitalism has gone wrong; it has done what socialism was chastised for — creating a litany of pointless work.

Don’t try and tell me these jobs are necessary aside from the comfort it seems to bring to a society that says — hey look, this is a well-paying job, look at what I have — so more must therefore be created. I know that many choose to work to live and are happy to snatch any nice perks going and that’s fine.

For me, I’ll happily wait to wear my golden handcuffs when I’m six feet under. I’d prefer to live now. Work takes up too much of our time to settle for the mundane.

The uncomfortable future that I chose to escape

I have found that large chunks of corporate work involve explaining what has been done and what will be done — taking up considerably more time than what is actually to be done.

I also saw people in my career who were further down the road and didn’t want their lives. Of course, they had responsibilities, too much of it sometimes, but mostly protruding metrics again. Some would log on at 6 AM and stay on until seven, eight, nine, and even much later at night.

Fair play to them, but it wasn’t a game I was particularly enchanted by. At this point, I must acknowledge and re-emphasize that I am biased in that some people genuinely have an interest in this type of work, whereas I do not. However, my points about the lack of work or the necessity of such work are still valid.

But don’t just take my word for it.

I have heard people in their forties and fifties routinely acknowledge that they could not wait to retire. That’s normal. Or is it really? Sure, when you are hitting 60, it’s nice to look forward to retirement when it’s within touching distance. But 40, 50? You may have more than 20 years to go.

A few years ago, before embarking on a period of travel, an older colleague praised my decision, highlighting how I don’t need a boring office job at my age.

That’s another thing, maybe it’s due to me being mid-twenties, but there is a yearning for adventure still inside of me, or at least a bit of excitement. I’ve learned that office work cannot provide this.

Millennials and Gen Z are going in the right direction

The millennial movement towards meaningful jobs is a positive side effect of governments stifling every other aspect of their lives.

In an age where monetary success is increasingly beyond their reach, young people seem to have subconsciously decided to put their core values first before any institution or government can tell them otherwise.

You will work for an average of 90,000 hours over your lifetime. 90,000! And you still want to work to live? That’s a lot of hours to be bored and whittle away. If you can’t afford a car, a house, a holiday house, why would you not look at the core segment of your life when seeking to inject your days with meaning?

Call me privileged, to be able to chop and change my sacrifice — it’s true, I am. At least compared to many outside the developed world. But, as one of the first generation in my family to attend college, off the back of countless previous generations laying the groundwork in place to get me there, it would be even more immoral for me to ignore the one thing college was supposed to teach — the ability to think for myself.

Huge multi-billion-pound corporations are not contributing to the greater good of society. And I was in dire need of something with a more tangible impact that didn’t run antagonistically to my core values.

Yes, these are huge job creators and provide workers with comfortable standards of living. But only comfortable insofar as it fits into the capitalist ideal; Constant. Perennial. Consumerism. As George Carlin pointed out,

A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.

Drudgery led me to this moment

All of this was swirling in my head when I landed in a large high-rise office building, one amongst many, in the City of London. This was where pandemic-induced working from home became a blessing in disguise because the idea of being in an office where you had to pretend to work was surely one of the highest forms of torture on offer. There are only so many drawn-out trips to the bathroom one could indulge in. It is truly like being a caged animal. And I could already feel myself wasting away in my sedentary position a mere three years into this career.

And I was well and truly brought to consciousness by this pain and career angst. So I sought to do something about it — again, using Peterson’s tips for breaking the goal into small actionable pieces. I went through an agonizing period of reflection and thinking about a new potential career. There was no doubt it couldn’t just be a sideways move; it needed to be a clean break into, what I consider, a real job. One that benefits people.

This is not to antagonize those who are successful and derive meaning from such jobs. It’s a personal take on my own, admittedly frustrated, experience. It is also to let soon-to-be graduates, or would-be career changers, know that while office jobs may be perceived as a step up over some mundane ‘shit’ job, it is quite possible that the lack of meaning you encounter could be far worse.

For others still suffering — you can break free of the golden handcuffs. Just don’t expect it to be immediate. If I’m honest, it took 3 and a half years to get to the stage where I handed in my notice for the last time in this career. Two years spent wondering and ruminating, one year deciding and half a year of planning.

As with all great cliffhangers, you will have to stay tuned to find out what career I ultimately did choose. I intend on making it a significant part of my future writing, maybe even devising a publication dedicated predominantly to it — that’s the thing about having an interest.

Above all, I aim for a walk-on part in the war, something that already sounds more exciting.