My Experiments with Work

Denial

Let me start by admitting I never really aspired to become a manager, much less a Supply Chain Manager. To this day, my parents cannot understand how I can plan, (help) produce and deliver more than 1000 tonnes of fast moving consumer goods from factories to warehouses across India every month, but can still not pack my own suitcase convincingly (actually I can – just not convincingly). Simply put, production and distribution planning was never in the scheme of things.

But here we all are.

Anger

As it is with most problems that beset me at work, this was an optimal solution. An acceptable product of 10% luck, 20% skill, 15% concentrated power of will, 5% pleasure and 50% pain, with no real reason to remember the name (yet). And as optimal solutions and The Rolling Stones go – you don’t always get what you want, just what you need. That is perhaps the most under-appreciated, indigestible piece of truth that us, over-privileged, inexperienced, pseudo-intellectual millennials with a self-destructive sense of entitlement, understand only when it becomes impossible to ignore. This happens, not in the moment you realise that your current predicament is a direct consequence of a near point-less education system built for/by a society that values very specific hacks, which ultimately have little or no relevance in the world beyond the guardianship of its various institutions. It happens when you eventually fall into perfect resonance with this reality, instead of eternally hoping for an escape that doesn’t exist.

Depression

Such experiences are born from an initial lack of belongingness. When armchair philosophers, self-styled liberals and rebels like us, start working for any of the million private corporate establishments masquerading as inter-subjective realities with an ideology (read vision and mission), and get to start discovering first-hand the effects of capitalism on humanity. Closely behind religion, the virtues of this second biggest social experiment in the history of civilisation, are exceeded (and eventually completely clouded) by the combined wrath of seven deadly sins it unleashes upon its unwitting subjects. The progressive counter culture of years of hippy hostel life suddenly gives way to a resentful regime where caffeine and adrenaline power you through numerous social charades of the weekdays, while nicotine, alcohol and some choicest Schedule I narcotics patiently wait to carry you across the existential crises of weekends. This is perhaps the most consistent behaviour pattern across 1^st generation urban millennial workforce, who have slowly discovered that there are no answers and that everyone is navigating through the same mysteries with different points of view.

Bargain

Financial independence is the deal with the devil that we prepare for our entire lives. It is an oft dramatic consequence of a series of conscious choices - each with a different balance between mind and heart – which constitute the opening acts of our tryst with adulthood, the first fruit of our capitalistic endeavours. Its enormous bounties and distractions serve as perfect anaesthetics to the pangs of nihilistic realisations, but in process, start sowing the seeds of acceptance and complacency that eventually grow into our identity. In time, as the greenback boogie picks tempo, these anaesthetics become a steady prescription against the malaise of dreams and aspirations. Few more years down the line, the prescription becomes the diet and the red pills get flushed down the drain as integration with the matrix mainframe is now complete.

Acceptance

Humanity may be overrated but its ability to adapt and keep growing out of its own follies isn’t – like an organism constantly evolving to an increasingly hostile environment. After years, even decades, of internal and external conflicts, we realise it is easier to accept some things than to keep struggling against them. The only difference is how gracefully one can accomplish this without compromising our distinctive individuality. Most of us wear faces to help us get through this eternal pendulum swing between relapse and recovery, telling each other the same lies, over and over again. The few who don’t, just haven’t found one that fits them yet. All in all it’s just a-nother brick in the wall.

Workplace is as real as the real world that people used to talk about in hushed tones, can get. To an observer so inclined, it is an exciting social experiment that one gets to participate in, each day - a dark, delectable melting pot of people with divergent principles, peeves and personalities, all at different stages of corporate evolution. It has the capacity to take you through the entire emotional spectrum on a daily basis, and in process lend you a deeper understanding of who you really are. It teaches us the importance of emotional and social intelligence – abstract concepts which should but can never be a part of organised education.  It teaches us about consequences- of having to live with the smallest of choices and decisions, most of which seem deceptively inconsequential and low-stake at first sight. In this way, it constitutes the most dramatic part of our life long journey to self-discovery, that most of us misread as a mere 9 to 5.

But that’s only because the matrix is designed to keep you distracted long enough from asking the questions that really matter:

“Choice is an illusion created between those with power and those without. Beneath our poised appearance, the truth is, we are completely out of control. You see there is only one constant. One universal. It is the only real truth - Causality. There is no escape from it. We are forever slaves to it. Our only hope, our only peace, is to understand it, to understand the why. “Why” is what separates us from them, you from me. “Why” is the only real source of power. Without it, you are powerless.”