Today is Sunday and that means that the “Sunday Scaries” have begun to set in. For those not familiar, the Scaries are that feeling of dread that one gets knowing that Monday is approaching and that means corpo drudgery for another five days or so. Along with this dread comes the panic of not getting every last little ounce of fun out of one’s “free time” on the weekends before having to go back under the thumb of The Man. Yep, I can haz it.
I’ve been back at work now for just over three months after being unemployed for nearly 2 years. One of the things that I’ve discovered about myself is that left to my own devices, I don’t really have a drive to do or make things for the most part. Which is not to say that I did nothing while I was free from the strictures of corporate America; it’s just that nothing that I did was really anything that I would consider impactful to anyone but myself. As it turns out, I realized that I actually do like having some external force telling me what to do (or at the very least, asking me for my help in getting it done). In other words, I’m not particularly good at defining initial projects or activities that need to be done (e.g. “seeing a need”), but I do enjoy exercising my creativity and ability to help realize a goal once it has been identified (i.e. “filling a need”). The problem comes in when it comes to scheduling and deadlines. I like to be told what to do, but not necessarily when or how it should get done. Not that I don’t like (or need) deadlines, but the rub is the often arbitrary and needlessly compressed nature of deadlines on the corpo side.
I think that’s what bothers me the most about corpo work - being told to do some work (sometimes work that I don’t want to do) and also when that work should be done based on someone else’s impression of the work’s importance, because usually that deadline is completely driven by monetization expectations rather than whether the end result is actually useful to humans as a whole. I also dislike the idea of externals telling me how long something should take to get done. Those deadlines are usually entirely based on monetary reasoning and profit motive.
It always comes down to money in this society though, doesn’t it?
Overworking employees all in the name of “efficiency” or “return on investment” in order to have more profit in the pockets of the owners/investors; replacing employees with ill-conceived and world-burning digital slaves because humans are too “independent” and some can’t be easily exploited; providing “product” for a whole raft of people to sell and market before the other guy, because Sales and Marketing people have to earn money to live too; the list is endless. But so much of that burn-out that results and all the badness in corpo life is a result of this false sense of urgency that usually - usually, but not always, I guess - comes down to some monetary motive.
The Scaries come for me when I think about having to “be available” during a certain time frame, having many different things to get done (most of the time, too many), and wondering what new things are going to get side-loaded into my day that will disrupt the work that I was planning to do and when someone else’s arbitrary schedule change will result in more shuffling of priorities and hence more stress for me. That whole “being available” translates in my mind to “constant scrutiny” and that scrutiny usually comes from multiple eyes that are attached to people with multiple different priorities and goals, all while trying to maintain 100% efficiency in each pair of eyes, which is honestly too much to expect from any human being. Some people can do that, but I am not one of them. And to be quite honest, I don’t think anyone can do that for too long.
My Utopia
My basic idea of what work would be like in my dream world would be that it would essentially be groups of individuals where people did the work because they believed in the work itself and that that work itself was good for any segment of society as a whole. If acquisition of basic life necessities wasn’t dependent on the work, and massive profits weren’t the 100% motivating factor (and hence, the desire to “maximize” resources in an effort to save costs to be profitable), then people could focus completely on doing their task at hand and if more tasks were required, more people could be brought in as needed to work on them because there would be people out there that would find them interesting to work on.
As I’ve said elsewhere before, I think most of us would be surprised to find that there are a lot of tasks that people would actually do if a) they weren’t worried about earning a living wage, b) they had the opportunity to move freely about between them for as long as they wanted to work in that space, and c) they actually had the time to focus on others because they weren’t so consumed with “gettin’ theirs first”. It would allow more people to really find what they’re good at doing and do that to contribute to society, or even do something that maybe they’re not good at but are capable of doing simply because “it needs doing”.
Let’s take a look at a modern tech company as an example (because that’s the industry I’m in). In my perfect world, the founder(s) would have come up with a great idea that is beneficial to some segment of the population because they really think it would help them, and they rally other like-minded individuals to work on it with them. Over time, you have a company made up of people that aren’t there for all the money they can make, but because they believe in the core goal of what the company is trying to do and want to help bring that to reality. The engineers are there because they want to participate in the technical excellence of making a great product; the marketing people are there because they think the product is great and want to tell as many people about it as possible to get them to use it; the managers are there because this is, after all, a group of disparate humans all working on the same product, and interpersonal issues will come up and everyone needs to be reminded of where the company is moving every now and then; sales would be the evangelists that get people to actually use the product, help them set it up, and mediate feedback to the product people who would do what they do and direct the features of the product. And the people would operate within their own biorhythms and desires to get shit done in the way that works for them, which would actually require people to get good at communicating with one another as equals and collaborators instead of some Machiavellian hierarchy of little power enclaves.
A lot of things would still operate as they do now, except that without a profit motive or personal fears of keeping one’s job as the instigator(s), it’s all done in service to anyone that’s using the product and what they need or want most. But as people within the company grow and change, they can move around into other areas more easily, because the back-filling process is easier since it should be easier to find qualified people that want to do the vacated role. As new projects come up, teams could be ramped up more easily because it would be easier to find people who are looking to join in (and some of them just because they can, not necessarily because they’re all up in the company’s rah-rah bidness).
The interview process would likely change a lot, as salaries would no longer be an inducement for people to seek a job - any job - and then it would be people who are just interested in doing the work. Interviews themselves would probably change a lot also, as companies wouldn’t have to be so specific or picky about candidates in order to protect their “investment” and the candidates wouldn’t feel compelled to lie about their skill sets just to get in — they could walk away from a misleading job description just as easily as the company can for whatever capricious reasons they currently do today. And I’m sure there’s some other things that would change too, and not for the better, but I feel like those things would be easier to deal with (or at the very least more useful to come up with solutions for) than the system we have now. Granted, without basic life necessities as a motivator and inducement to keep people at their jobs (or get them there in the first place), this would introduce a lot of chaos - but it would force a company to be a Good Place To Work in order to attract employees. Having this freedom of movement would keep companies a lot more accountable to the “don’t be evil” mantra. It would remove the leverage that companies have to mistreat their employees, and would also prevent burn-out by giving the employees the opportunity to leave at any time for however long they needed to in order to maintain their sanity and enjoyment in doing the work.
Now, all of these changes require a change to the human condition to consider others before they considered themselves, so I don’t think this will ever actually happen (and certainly not in what’s left of my working lifetime). Plus, it would also require some societal and legal changes (at least here in the U.S.) to both limit the allowable stratification of wealth and enforce the social responsibility to “give back” so as to greatly reduce the profit motive and benefit society (and humanity) as a whole, and also remove corporate “personhood” such that they become effectively collectives or co-ops - organizations of humans rather than “living” entities unto themselves. The questions for a business’ existence would shift away from how can I make the most money for myself and towards how can we make something that benefits humanity.
Yeah, right. Like that’s ever going to happen.
