I’ve stepped into the corporate world for a little over a year now, and one interesting observation that I made is that typically those who are the most insecure do the best in their corporate jobs.
How you become a successful employee is to be deeply anxious about delivering on the expectations of your boss. The more anxiety you are able to store within your body as potential energy, the faster you spring into action at the command of your superiors.
Those who depend on their boss or corporate environment for external validation, push themselves harder to demonstrate their utility, thus creating higher impact with the work that is delivered. And this dynamic is heavily encouraged and reinforced. You are rewarded for your performance anxiety, and you are rewarded for putting work as your first priority above all else, and so this creates a feedback loop where you are taught that being anxious and insecure is the correct state to be in. Your measurement of success in life eventually becomes how much anxiety you are able to withstand. This is why high functioning, intelligent people with low self esteem tend to do so well in their careers.
The hustle is sold to us like a romantic adventure that we are supposed set out on. What a wonderful opportunity it is, to be part of a greater whole, to be filled with with purpose, to have a mission.
The irony of it all is that work accomplished through anxiety and external pressure is the antithesis of meaningful action. All great works of mankind, were created as labours of love, not out of fear of superiors or heirarchical pressure. Vincent didn’t paint the starry night fearing persecution, it was a manifestation of his emotional connection with the night sky and landscape around him. Steve wozniak didnt create the first apple computer because somebody pressured him to build one, he was inspired and learnt to love computers because he enjoyed watching Star Trek.
Love is the supreme creative force that gently guides humanity to manifest great works of art, pioneer new scientific discoveries and write epic poetry. Through the gentle guiding hand of love, through the dissolution of anxiety, we can tap into our boundless potential to turn our imagination to reality, and all the secrets of the universe will be unbound and pour out from within us.
But it is precisely love that is unnecessary in a corporate environment. Consistency is more important than passion, even better if everybody is consistently worried (about performance). Love is deprioritised, and employees are encouraged to shave off the corners of themselves until they fit their lives perfectly into the boundaries set by their jobs. Any inefficient or unnecessary parts of our personalities are eventually discarded, because as an employee the center of gravity of your life is not your love or your ability to create. Instead, you are rewarded for revolving your life around an external standard of measurement.
As the years march on, we become our jobs, and shave off bits of ourselves until we are no longer recognisable in the mirror. The unique way we experience the world, the unique flavour of our existence will have dulled into the taste of nothingness. At that point who we used to be would be nothing but a hazy memory, and it would be impossible to remember even if we try.
Ceasing to remember who we are, we lose our ability to love. Without the self assurance of being grounded in our identity, we become even more anxious. By going down this path, I see myself becoming the perfect corporate machine, the perfect anxious slave, eager to please my masters, desperate to remember who I was and know what I am made of.
tossyturny 