Tag: corporation

Escaping the Matrix

Previously, I wrote about what the Matrix is and our participation in it. So please read The Matrix before reading this post as it will provide some context that should make this post more understandable. In The Matrix I explained the contrast between the cold and ruthless corporation and the humans that work there. Given the reality of the matrix this conflict is irreconcilable. So you are challenged to make the decision to stay or escape the matrix. Servitude or freedom, that is the question.

Contemplating the Escape

On the surface it seems like an easy decision, where you choose freedom of course and make your escape. However you have been serving your master the corporation for many years, and you are accustomed to this thing called money. Like many other addictions you tell yourself that I’ll quit in a few months or maybe work another year and then I’ll be free. This is referred to as the one more year syndrome. Here is the thing, not only are you addicted to the money but you are also battling a unwillingness to change your life. You have become comfortable doing this thing you have done for so many years, and you fear the unknown. It is even possible that your fear of the unknown is greater than the gains you perceive of being free. It’s kind of like someone who has been a prisoner for decades, the front gate is unlocked, and you don’t even consider just walking out. Holy Shit!

Most people that are considering escaping the matrix have questions that they need to contemplate. I put together a short list that I’ve personally struggled with in the past. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but something to think about. I would caution you not get too hung up on answering these questions. Notice I have not asked the question, which is Why should I escape the matrix? You already know the answer to that one.

Questions to contemplate:

How will I make money and pay for all this shit?
  • That dream you have had in your mind for years, undoubtedly you have been thinking what if I could monetize what I really want to do.
  • Maybe you have been saving up for your escape and that is the answer to having income to fund your free life.
  • Maybe like most us you spend too much, have to much shit, and could cut down on your level of consumerism.
  • Sometimes it is a matter of faith in your ability to figure it out. Sounds week, huh? Do you really think that the thing you have been doing while employed in the matrix is the only way you can generate some income? Fuck No!
What will I do with all this found time on my hands?
  • Pursue your passion.
  • Enjoy it! Yes, you have escaped and to begin with you should get some kind of enjoyment just from this fact.
  • All those hobbies you haven’t have time for are now yours to pursue.
  • Looking for some meaning in your life? Join a non-profit, a charity, a church, or do your civic duty and get involved in a cause (climate change or renewable energy), or political party.
What will other people think?
  • If your talking about those still grinding away in the matrix, they will be envious of your escape.
  • Who cares! What your really wrestling with is what you will think about your freedom.
  • Listen you are embarking on a new life, one that is so different from what you are accustomed to that you will feel a bit alienated from those still plugging away in the matrix. You are freeing yourself from this consumer driven, wealth obsessed society, and embracing a life where you now own your time, which is the most precious thing of all.
  • If you lived your life worrying about what your co-workers, your spouse, friends, or family thought about you, then stop it!

Breaking Free

There is nothing wrong with taking a somewhat methodical approach to making the decision to escape the matrix or to keep on doing what you have been doing, living in the status quo.

Most of us start with the empirical method which is to use a spreadsheet to calculate the financial gain of working longer. Usually this is expressed as if I worked one, two, or three more years. Don’t get too enamored by this approach as it is inherently one sided, and only considers the financial gain of working longer, but fails to consider the non financial costs of working longer. In fact if you choose to make your decision based on the financial impact, well then you might as well keep your shitty job and work until you die. You might guess that I’ve done this myself and was amazed at the amount of money I would have if I continued working in the matrix for two or three more years. Fortunately I knew the cost of doing this and over time became less enthusiastic about my forecasted financial gains.

Given the limitations of the purely financial approach, you might consider a more holistic approach to making the decision to break free or stay in the matrix.

Now there are many factors to consider, but here are a few that come to mind:

  • Physical Health – What toll does your current job take on your physical health? Your 9 to 5 is likely taking a toll on your physical health or at the very least compromising your opportunity to improve your health by having the time to exercise more, eat better, etc.
  • Mental Health – All the stress you endure is messing with your mind and likely making your life a whole lot less enjoyable than would otherwise be possible. Not only is this stress making you miserable, but it is shortening your life.
  • Regret – Will you regret working longer especially if you are getting older? Of course you will. Very few people have ever regretted escaping the matrix, wishing they had worked longer.
  • Joy and Happiness – To what extent is your happiness important to you? Silly question, but this is a huge factor for most of us.
  • Pursuing your Dreams – That thing you always wanted to do, or do more of. Call it a dream or your passion. What price are you paying now by not pursuing your dreams?
  • Relationships – Anyone that spends the majority of their days in the matrix have compromised their relationships. Aside from the joy it could bring to you and others, by cultivating more meaningful relationships, not doing so may end up being one of your biggest regrets.
  • Controlling Time – How much does it matter to you that you have some control over how you spend the time allotted to you each day? Those that escape the matrix have infinitely more control over how they spend the limited time we all have. Just for an example, say you work 45 hours per week on average. If you sleep 8 hours a day you have 16 waking hours available to do stuff. Excluding weekends, this is 5 x 16 = 80 waking hours per work week. If you exist in the matrix you have 80 – 45 = 35 hours to do what you want or needs to be done. Any way you look at it during the work week you have less than 50% of the waking hours that are yours.
  • Financial – The reality is the vast majority of us needs money to pay for necessities and wants. In our society this can be of paramount importance for many people. Your servitude in the matrix, pays your bills, and may provide a little left over for savings, but your likely not to become super wealthy. Realize that making finances a priority isn’t necessarily advocating for staying in the matrix, as it is very possible that your lack of financial success may be attributed to you being stuck in the matrix in the first place.

Let’s say for fun I decided to rank these items using the following ranking scale:

  • 1 – not important
  • 2 – important
  • 3 – very important

My guess that if you are considering escaping the matrix just about every one of these factors would be ranked at a 2 or 3. Is your decision getting any easier?

Maybe you love your job, have a good work life balance, and no other aspirations outside of your career. But be honest with yourself, you would be a very small minority of those that exist in the matrix. Most of us dream about a greater purpose for out life. We seek some degree of freedom to make choices on how we spend our time and with who we spend our time with.

By now you have probably made your choice, and like all restless prisoners you are contemplating an escape. Depending on your finances and the amount of planning you have already done you might just jump and sever your relationship with your employer. Just do it and escape approach, which is highly recommended if you ready.

The second approach is required if money is an issue, and you haven’t planned what you will do when you break free from the matrix. This approach means you need to plan your exit before jumping. If you decide you need a little more time before making your escape from the matrix, be wary setting that date too far into the future. It is better to take a leap of faith too early than to allow the matrix to destroy your decision to escape. This then becomes the I’ll work one more year syndrome that I mentioned earlier. This one more year can turn into multiple years of bondage.

I won’t try and kid you, there is an element of risk in making your escape, but there is a wonderful new life that awaits you when you walk out that door. Envision what that new life will be like as you finally have time to pursue your interests, give back to the community, restore your health, become more mindful, and have the time to create better relationships. Unlike a real prison, in the matrix the door is wide open. No one will shoot you as you walk out. In fact after a few months they won’t even remember who you were.

In my next post I will discuss how sometimes remaining in the matrix may make sense at least for a while. This can give you time to plan your escape and make the preparations needed.

Go ahead and comment if you have escaped the matrix or are contemplating it.

Namaste

Please check out my companion blog InspirationalBookReviews.com

“Copyright 2023 TheStoicBuddhist.com. All Rights Reserved”

The Matrix

Not to be confused with the movie “The Matrix” staring Keanu Reeves. I’m referring to the corporate matrix that many us spend much of our life toiling away. Having worked for corporations for over 40 years I have experienced very good organizations, average organizations, and well really messed up ones. Generally there are certain relationships that exist between a characteristic and the functioning of a corporation. In my experience most smaller companies are less dysfunctional and the larger companies are more dysfunctional. This is not a hard fast rule, but there does seem to be a correlation between the size of an organization and its level of dysfunction. You might also draw a correlation between the age of a corporation and level of dysfunction, but many corporations try to re-invent themselves periodically so this doesn’t always hold true. An example is McDonald’s that was founded in 1940 and Google founded in 1998. McDonald’s has been around 58 more years, but one might say it is no more dysfunctional than Google. Another correlation can exist based on the type of industry / sector that a business is categorized. For instance a insurance company will not survive unless it is very efficient versus a technology company that may have higher margins, which sometimes encourages reckless behavior from a business perspective.

Over time as a company grows, it begins to implement an increasing number of processes and controls. In my experience many of these processes have not been vetted against the simple equation comparing the ongoing cost of the process versus the value it provides the organization. This kind of process creep exists in almost all businesses, as the company seeks to create greater control over the workforce. Often times the corporation does not want to leave decision making to employees but instead implements a process that it hopes controls costs or improves compliance in some way. Examples of this include simple contract changes that require three levels of approval, instead of just empowering the first level manager to approve the change, or having painful promotion processes that require committee’s to make the decision instead of an employee’s manager.

When a company is initially created, it will depend on people to make decisions, and does things in a lean fashion, but as it becomes larger it begins to hire more and more employee’s, many that do not contribute to the bottom line (cost management or revenue generation). My experience is that lots of new roles are created for what I call bullshit jobs, essentially non essential work. Well if you have a lot of time on your hands, then you begin creating your own organization and start building new processes. Unfortunately the people in these bullshit jobs don’t understand process design and the cost versus value equation. Over the course of 20 years or so there is a process for everything and each of them has a corresponding burden that is foisted on the employee, and competes for their time, which initially was dedicated to their primary job functions. A couple things begin to occur, the first being the employee becomes more and more dissatisfied with their role as they must adhere to this overload of processes that they are asked to perform. The second thing that happens is they have less time to devote to their core job functions and the company must hire yet more employees to do the work and becomes even more inefficient. Remember some of this occurs because it is human nature to build your own little empires, thus adding more bullshit jobs and people to do those jobs, which then makes it more difficult to pursue the real goals of the company. All this results in less autonomy for the employee and an erosion of job satisfaction.

The point of all this is that there are corporations and there are people that work for them. Eventually the goals of the corporation and the employees begins to diverge in kind of a Grand Canyon way. If you need any evidence of this look at the layoffs at Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Salesforce, and on and on. Either in anticipation or as a reaction to some sort of slow down in the economy, a recession if you will, these companies have slashed in some cases pretty high percentages of their workforce. The thinking was something like this. Well we better proactively cut costs in the event our sales decline or our cost of goods sold increases. A corporation does not possess human qualities like compassion, loyalty, empathy, love, or pain. This dichotomy between the corporation and employees is the world we live in. Actually this is really not something new and has been going on for the past 50+ years, probably becoming more common in the 60’s and 70’s as we began to offshore manufacturing decimating cities like Detroit Michigan and Cleveland Ohio. This trend continued throughout the Midwest and the rest of the United States. All for lower costs, resulting in higher profits and cheaper products.

If this is the current state of the matrix then you have to ask yourself, do I want to play this game? Finally you come to realize that the rationale thought you have cultivated all these years, makes it almost impossible to continue living in the matrix. Some of you may escape, but for the majority the matrix will lure you back offering riches that you can’t seem to walk away from. You have then resigned yourself to this life, convincing yourself it really isn’t so bad, but in your heart you know you have made the wrong choice. Money or Freedom?

In the next installment “Escaping The Matrix” I would like to make a case for choosing freedom.

Please check out my companion blog inspirationalbookreviews.com

“Copyright 2023 TheStoicBuddhist.com. All Rights Reserved”

Fitting in

fitting in

I find it ironic as companies search for talent to fill roles in their organizations they tout a culture of innovation and risk taking. It amuses me that leadership espouses these principles, but the reality is often a culture of conformity. We hire for cultural fit more than looking for individuality. We want to find people who believe the same things we believe, and act the way we want them to act. What most organizations want more than anything else is people that will fit in and not question the most recent management fad implemented in their companies. Gone are the minuscule privacy afforded by the cubicle and in its place we now have the open office. Note that anyone that actually did any real work would know that open offices are a joke.

open-office

Now this is awesome, sitting right across from someone all day. 

It is no small miracle that employee’s search for solitude to work in a conference room or god forbid working at home. My guess is that any company that summons its workers to come to the office each day is losing anywhere from 25% to 50% in productivity and on top of that they are pissing off the workforce. Brilliant!

I predict that this conformity imposed by many employers will drive away the most intelligent people to somewhere else. Where will these individualist land; that is difficult to know. There is certainly a trend towards people leaving large corporations and striking out on their own, becoming self employed, but not everyone is inclined to do so. Is it possible that there are some intelligent enterprises that can allow an employee be an individual and work when and where they are most productive? Maybe but I wouldn’t look to an employer that has more than 1,000 employees and in most cases around 500 or less.

Asking people to conform to every rule or adhere mindlessly to every stupid process does have ramifications. Let’s just say you throw lots of money at your people so that they feel they really can’t leave because the golden handcuffs have them immobilized. The dirty little secret is that the primary incentive for them is financial, and the quality of the work suffers as the employee becomes increasingly resentful. Again brilliant!

Instead of a team of inspired individuals you now have a pack of financially driven robots that follow every command. Think of it, you got what you wanted, all your people fit in, follow your processes, and believe what you believe. One little problem is that all  this conformity and culture fit has left you with a workforce of zombies where the only differences are gender or ethnicity. Good luck being innovative or dodging the next bullet that the business world has just around the corner.

If every day you have to hold your tongue, swallow hard, and kiss the ass of some moron then good. You now have a reason to do something better with your life. Quit fucking yourself over; you have one life and you don’t need to spend it subjugating yourself to someone or someplace that tries to turn you into something you are not.

Think about it.

Namaste