Welcome to the Hustle

PC powered on immediately upon returning from a morning run. VPN connected. An onslaught of unanswered emails. Microsoft Teams messages requesting answers to urgent questions. Everything is pressing, everything is dire. The careerists will rest when they’re dead, and if their sleep is any indication, that may sadly happen sooner than they’d like.

I prepare a smoothie and a coffee. In those minutes spent preparing breakfast, the emails continue piling. Performance is on the line. Schedules must be finalized. People must have answers.

I sip my coffee slowly and read a little Orwell. I mute the abrasive Microsoft Teams sounds. Peace is my preference.

The screens glow, but it is nothing like the soft and soothing incandescence of a firefly at night. It is an intrusive glow, a glow that disrupts rest and shortens breath, a glow that sends the blood pressure steadily up. It is an artificial light from an artificial app, rife with artificial messages that are plagued with artificial pleasantries.

There is no empathy for my own personal interests in this screen-plagued environment. I am a cog in the wheel. Should I break, another cog will quickly replace me. I am one bullet point in a list, somewhere in a section within a procedure. My replacement would likely be bought at a cheaper price. If I exercise routinely or eat well, the other cogs scoff; they are content to just sit, log in, turn the wheel, and be careerists. They don’t prioritize movement, long meals, sunshine, or conversation. They prioritize work.

Health is nothing in the eyes of the false idol that is careerism. This false idol demands you sit, obey, and devote yourself at the altar of the corporate ladder. If you are not a team member, by golly you must be selfish.

The adherents to careerism answer emails well into the evening hours. They do not read a bible before bed; they check emails. They do not take a walk through the park unless they can multitask it with conference calls. They do not see meals as festivities; they seem them as necessary acts of binging that could potentially impede productivity.

I ignore my messages for a few minutes and take a walk outside; it’s 9:00 am. Patience is not a virtue in this place; it’s an interference. You need goals, I’m told. I have a goal though: to enjoy my day. The sun still shines outside. Microsoft Teams will be obsoleted long before the sun collapses. A mere hundred years from now, most career roles will be obsoleted and their participants likely buried. Yet trees will still grow at that time. Birds will still lay nests. The earth will continue its revolutions around the sun, and careerism will have not even managed a blip on the radar of the universe.

I salute you, quiet quitters.

Conversion to Machine

I enter age 37 with a desire to take a trip and get lost on a random adventure. In a banal daily work routine, which can feel like a constant slideshow of indistinguishable and bland virtual meetings, interactions seem progressively colder and more detached. Work hours pass in purgatorial fashion. All smiling is off-camera. All laughter is on mute. There is an agenda and we must tackle it. We must perform. There is no time for small talk. No time for warmth.

The conversion to machine is gradual and is predicated on the need for comfort.

I try to counter these dark feelings, which I write about freely here, with cycling. Cycling is purely for me, the most selfish of hobbies. Adults generally don’t give a damn that I can ride a bike really far. There’s no one to impress. It’s not like my old days as a swimmer, when I won to gain the adulation of everyone around me. I just find cycling fun. Adults are often too consumed with their own consumption to be concerned with activities involving movement. Cycling is my antidote to the soul sucking virus that is careerism.

Is there still a ghost in the adults of today, or has the spirit left the shell?

Virtual work means that jokes are followed by silence and emails are followed by a false sense of urgency.

“This is the new trend!” I’m told, but I note that the general population has gained misery, weight, and anxiety since the pandemic. There is always a trade-off for convenience. Faust doesn’t grant wishes without taking something in return.

Years ago, I was lost somewhere in Russia. It was a random trip I took while living in China. It’s a coastal city with a relatively friendly atmosphere.

Getting lost is actually pretty fun; cycling reminds me of that when I take a wrong turn. Trips remind me of that when I meander aimlessly through the foreign city streets. Adults hate being lost, but kids generally love it. Adults prefer predictability and assurance. A destination is the ultimate form of salvation for the worker. They want a linear path without bumps. Point A to Point B, and not a minute to waste.

Yet the white rabbit is always a slave to the queen, as Alice in Wonderland showed. But the modern adults wants pavement, an air conditioned environment, and a to-do list that forever grows, forever demanding haste. I cannot relate: I find solace in the rocky terrain of a faraway trail, where haste is revealed to be arbitrary.

I remember hiking Eagle’s Nest Hill in Vladivostok and quickly getting lost, somewhere off the trail due to a lack of focus, and not really caring. Time ceases to matter when there is no agenda. Can adults abandon agendas for awhile? Who cares if the paved route is far away? I remember being somewhere high, on a bluff, overlooking the city. So I still arrived at some interesting destination. It’s the randomness and unpredictability that I prefer. I was on the opposite side of the world, which is both thrilling and terrifying.

The computer, and its primary appendage the phone, is placed at the altar of the modern posh careerist. It demands of its flock a new form of faith and a false set of promises. Mortality can be avoided, it says, with the swipe of a credit card, the pop of a pill bottle, or the adherence to a politician. Swiping requires money, which requires work, which requires sitting and staring and hurrying.

May we all be lost somewhere, in a strange city we’ve never been to, and wander aimlessly, without an agenda, in search of new adventures. Maybe somewhere, in the midst of that wandering, we’ll reencounter our long lost inner child.