Complicit

In the years I have worked in corporate America I have worked with some of the most brilliant minds I have ever encountered. They’re capable of conducting elaborate research to find solutions to complex problems, they’re diplomatic when there are difficult points of contention within a team, and they’re creative when problems or issues arise that all their experience and knowledge had not prepared them for. These people get shit done.

When I contemplate how amazing these people are I get sad. We sit in meeting after meeting brainstorming, debating, arguing, trying to find the best possible solutions to problems that ultimately amount to nothing. While the uselessness of our work can be depressing, this is not what troubles me the most.

It hurts me to think about, and causes moments frozen by frustration, that every single person in these meetings, including myself, would be happy to work on issues of much greater importance than the sale of some gadget or the availability of a service of little consequence. If given the opportunity to flourish while using their amazing abilities to improve the lives of their neighbors in fundamental ways, none of them would turn it down and I’m positive they would be quite successful.

Instead of getting to choose every morning to go out into the world and complete works of substance they go to their jobs and sit in cubicles while human progression stagnates. They are wage-slaves working their precious lives away to pay for insurmountable debts, for food that kills them slowly, and for pleasures that keep them sedated and distracted from the fact that life doesn’t have to be like it is. They are sleep walkers surrounded by nightmare.

I get sad when I think of all this, not because of the time wasted, not because the great things we are capable of and are not doing, but because I can’t seem to wake up as well.