Jul 22 2008
Living in Reaction: Who’s Pushing Your Buttons?
BY THEBOSTONBACHELOR.COM / July 22, 2008
It starts with the email.
We wake up in the morning, stumble to our desk, and click the Outlook icon in the taskbar to sort through the day’s digital deluge. And as much as we hate it, it makes feel important in a certain way. Someone out there knows I’m alive. Someone out there cares about me.
Soon the minutes turn into half-hours, then hours. Due to corporate politics, 3 line thank you notes to Managing Directors turn into 40 minutes of rewriting, proofreading, spell-checking, and BCCing. Welcome to productivity in the 21st century.
Email. The news. Phone calls. Conference calls. Reminders. Angry clients. Worried clients. Bored clients. Meetings. Questions about software usage. Letters of intent. Advertising. You need to do this. You need to buy this. You need to worry about this. You need to not do this. The messages come from everywhere. Oh, there’s always something there to remind me… sing it with me.
The fact is, we have all been trained to live in reaction ever since birth—and this especially applies to the average American male.
The journey goes something like this:
Ages 4-14: If you don’t study, then how are you going to get good grades?
Ages 15-18: If you don’t get good grades, then how are you going to get into a good college?
Ages 18-22: If you don’t graduate from a good college, then how are you going to get a decent job?
Ages 22-Eternity: If you don’t have a decent job, then how are you going to find a girlfriend? If you don’t have a decent job, a condo/house, and a relatively new car, then how are you going to get an attractive wife? If you don’t get a pay raise, a bigger condo/house, and a new car on a regular basis, then how are you going to keep that attractive wife of yours?
Everything is laid out, step by step, piece by piece. A trail of bullshit the length of five football fields. Climb the ivory ladder. Laugh a few seconds longer at your boss’ jokes. Ask your coworkers every Monday morning how their weekends were. Gossip with “the boys” about the hot new secretary. Ogle the airbrushed photos in Maxim during your lunch break. Get the promotion. Buy the house. Buy the car. Buy the ring. Buy that feeling of self-worth. Feed the white-picket fence arms race. Love the system, and the system loves you back. Follow all the steps, and you can finally call yourself a success.
And isn’t that what success is after all? Getting that 5% pay raise every year so you can spend it all when you’re 65? Going from a workstation to a cubicle to an office to a corner office? Or shimmying up from an analyst to a senior analyst to a consultant to a senior consultant to a manager to a senior manager to a managing director to a senior managing director to a partner? Now if that doesn’t get you excited, then nothing will.
So… how was your weekend?
-The Boston Bachelor
