n a t b s

Stupid corporate pablum.  What does that even mean?  Doesn’t that sound like something a facist dictator would say regarding some kind of mass execution? And why are they telling average employees, the grunts, about srategic goals?  It’s some misguided attempt to get us interested in the broader funtioning of this company.  But no one cares about that, you know why?  Becuase if the comapny saves $50million this year, do we see any of it?  Not a dime.  We still get our regularly schedualed paltry raises.  When ____ was talking about all these savings and thanking us for our hard work in achieveing them, I really wanted to say “So, we all get big raises now right?”  Becuase that’s how it should be.  Somehow the rich man convinced the poor man that helping him get richer was good for him.  It’s not, the rich man is greedy and he uses people.  The poor man should see that.  It’s as plain as day.  WE ARE BEING TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF.  Ownership essentially boils down to taking things and keeping them through violence.  And it leads to exploitation.  It’s a platform for exploitation.

I wonder why as a society we don’t work less: then we would merely have less things, but we would gain more time…. Personally, I’d choose time over things.  But it seems that human society actually reveres the creation and peddling of crap wares.  If we’re not doing that we might as well not be alive.  But why?  What is everyone afraid is going to happen?  Why must we build everything and anything above and beyond basic food and shelter?  I’m not saying I’m completely against doing this, I’m simply questioning that we MUST do it, or do it to the extent that we do now.  Why do we put so much value in such valueless things?  “You get to have a home and food becuase you make ipods or websites”  but not “you get to have a home and food because you are a human being“  that never happens.  It’s as if we posit material goods and the destruction of the planet as more valuable than human life.  Can someone please tell me why it’s this way?  Why does our society seem only to function on and reward the consumption of more resources when it seems obvious that we need to be using less resources?  Maybe it’s the elites that put us on our empty task; an army of workers shoveling gold into the mouths of a few elite capitalists…

Is it that crazy to not want to work?  At least, to not want to work in the corporate-America sense?  I have a job right now, and I hate it.  Those are strong words, and when I tell you what I’m about to tell you, you might question my reasonableness: by most standards by which people judge jobs, mine is actually pretty good.  The benefits are decent, the pay is decent, the company is financially stable, it’s not all-consuming of my life, it’s not that hard, and my boss is really cool.  Now you might be saying, “Andrew, you’ve got a good thing going, quit yer bitchin’” and you might have a point.  But let me tell you why I hate it.  It is utterly mind-numbingly uninteresting.  In addition to that, I don’t think I fit well into the 9-5, work-in-a-cubicle corporate lifestyle.

Let’s start with uninteresting.  I know people get jobs to earn money and stay alive.  I get it; interesting is a luxury.  Maybe it has something to do with my privileged upbringing, but I feel like interesting should not be a luxury.  I feel that I have a limited amount of time to be alive, and it pains me deeply to be spending so much of my time on things that I couldn’t care less about.  My time is precious and limited and it kills me to be selling it for a mere $25 an hour.  With an average American male lifespan of 75.2 years, that means my life is valued at approximately $16.5 million.  Sounds like a lot, but no, compared to the infinite value of a human life I find that to be a paltry number.  Money is a necessity in this society, and so I do it.  I work.  But I can’t help but feel on some fundamental level that I just can’t stand doing something that I don’t care about.  I feel that it’s almost a tragedy: all the millions and billions who toil away merely to survive, and on who’s backs others get rich.

On top of uninteresting, I have a real problem with taking orders…from anyone.  I mean, I can do it, but I absolutely hate it.  It fucks with my sense of freedom.  Every day I have to take whatever they give me, and take it with a smile.  It’s awful.  And I work in the drabbest, most un-beautiful place ever: a floor with minimal walls and rows and rows of gray cubicles, windows that don’t open, corporate propaganda on the walls.  I mean, would it kill these people to have some real art on the walls?  All we see is the soulless work of ad executives.  Why anyone thought this feng shui would be good for productivity, is beyond me.  I’m also coming to realize why fascism is so closely related to corporatism.  A corporation is a fascist enterprise in many ways. With the constant propaganda, the suppression of free will and free speech, taking orders, doing everything for the good of the company, taking queues on morals from up top (read: warrantless wiretapping), and living under fear (of getting fired).  Dissent is not readily tolerated.

The really scary idea is that the whole country could be run like this.  That’s why privatization is so fucking scary.  There’s a reason we have governments that are separate from these profit-seeking entities.  Life in a country is, or should be, about freedom and self-determination.  Those are not good things when profit is the only goal.  What I’m trying to say is that the government should stand up for what’s important but not profitable.  The influence of corporations on the government truly frightens me.  They are scary places that suppress humanity.  And the only people getting any significant benefit from the whole thing are the people at the top.

This has been a bit of a rant, but I hope it made sense to some people.  If anyone has any suggestions out there for making a living without giving over your life to one of these entities I’d love to hear it.  I’m young and still trying to figure out the course of my life, and I know that I want to steer clear of corporate life;  I’m just not sure what that will really mean for me.  I’m not sure I care.  I just want to get far away from this place and all places like it.