Another one of ‘those kinds’ of cross posts from Marc Goldberg’s blog Marc’s Words
I am a frustrated man. I look around me and I see things, I often don’t understand them but I see them nonetheless. I see people talking about how much work they have, I see people talking about…well they are talking.
Sometimes they are talking about me. They are looking at me and whispering, my back may be turned but my ears can still hear. The hairs on the back of my neck can still stand on end when the room gets cold.
There’s only so long you can run around trying to squeeze yourself into a life that doesn’t fit you. I have tried.
I have tried to live the easy life, the one that states which hours of the day are for working and which are for playing, the one where someone else tells you what your value is.
The one where the life you lead is dictated to you by an executive.
I have watched people play the game, the game where if you talk about how busy you are people will believe you, if you attend enough meetings and tick enough boxes, if you spend enough time making spreadsheets, if you send enough emails. If you boss people around enough. If you devote yourself to the corporate entity then you’ll end up living the corporate dream, you’ll have an office, a nice car, a nice house, a bored wife and kids. You’ll be able to spend as much money on their education as your fellow executives.
You will all be able to meet up on your large lawn over a bbq and complain about things like how much money you pay on your mortgage and how much the tax man takes out of your salary. You can compare your new sports car with theirs.
You can imply to each other that your kid is smarter than theirs.
Your whole life can be middle class heaven.
If you can stomach it.
If you can keep getting into the office at nine and counting the seconds till you can leave without raising the eyebrows of the people around you. Every day of every week of every month of the year. When you can’t get out of bed anymore you call in sick hoping that the reprieve of a single day will re-energize you, allowing you to continue the charade. It likely will.
And after the years of your life have dissolved away into nothing and even the memory of them has passed from you like a cloud blown clear away. When you sit in a chair waiting to feel the cold, boney hand of death upon your shoulder with nothing but time to wonder, why you did it. When you finally understand the futility of it all, death will have his final laugh.
Because your epiphany comes too late and by the time you understand the only people who can hear you are the clones of yourself you created and they’re too busy showing off their new sports car and talking about how much taxes they’re paying to listen.
And when the grim reaper finally shows up to harvest what remains of your soul and takes you to the pearly gates and they ask you what you did with your life you can tell them that you were a Human Resources expert, or perhaps you sold more houses than anyone else, you will tell them that you had little incarnations of yourself whose expensive education your wasted life paid for.
And tears will fall down your angelic face when you are sent back down here to do it all over again.
