You Can Slay Your Dreams but They Will Come Back Seeking Revenge

I’ve heard the platitude “I love my job” a million times from a million mouths.

Well, maybe not a million but metaphorically a million; from the mouths of executive assistants to IT middle-managers, from marketing assistants to HR business partners, even from management consultants with their own businesses who earn a stack load of cash and work 70-hour weeks.

I’ve heard it and heard it some more: love, that single word reserved for our deepest and most passionate levels of affection, admiration, care and attraction... used to describe a corporate job.

Does this feel genuine to you? It doesn't to me.

I’m putting it out there now and declaring this loving-your-job nonsense is a pernicious lie we are complicit in. We are all enablers, peddlers of deception, playing a game to kid ourselves into happiness.

I suggest very few people love their job, and that's that. Get over it, suckers.

Instead, most of us "love" the compromise we've entered into; sacrificing potential and self-actualisation for security and risk-minimisation. Look, that’s fine, I understand the trade-off, I've done it for years myself and I'm sure you have too, but let's be truthful. It is compromise, nothing more, nothing less.

Why, then, do so many deny this compromise and claim they’re living their best lives (that just happens to be found in various corporate offices in a 10-mile radius from their house). Why, when challenged, do these people gnash their teeth and insist “No! I love my job!” as if they're teetering on the pinnacle of Maslow’s Hierarchy of What-fucking-ever.

I’ve thought long and hard about this question, it bothered me for the longest time, more than you’d think something so seemingly unimportant could bother anyone.

It kept me awake a night.

I knew I was compromising when I worked in the corporate world for 19 years. If I could admit it, why can't others? Or are we meant to believe their childhood dream was to be an operational manager in an accountancy firm?

Why the pernicious lie?

I've come to an answer and it's terrifying. It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers terrifying. It’s Truman Show terrifying. It’s 1984 terrifying. It’s Rosemary’s Baby terrifying. It's Stepford Wives terrifying. It's the bit in Robocop when Ed-209 kills the young executive and everyone just laughs it off terrifying.

The answer is people refuse to see the truth right in front of them. They willingly live a life according to what they want to be true, not what is true, simply because it's convenient.

Isn't that alarming?! It is to me. I want rational truth-seeking people, not those prepared to toe the line of deception because it makes their life easier.

They say the truth will set you free but first it will piss you off. I guess most people don't want to be pissed off. A cosy prison is better than uncomfortable freedom (there's that compromise again).

What bothers me most is when I spoke about this matter, I was always shot down.

I had an unnerving dream about it the other night. I was lamenting my (old) IT project manager job and no matter who I talked to, no one would accept my point of view. I was met with a blank veneer on the faces of everyone I addressed as if I was talking gibberish.

I felt like Patrick McGowen in The Prisoner (look it up, kids).

The thing is, that dream is frighteningly close to reality.

When I worked for 19 years under those suspended ceilings I expressed my ennui to colleagues over and over again, only to be greeted with similar reactions to those aimless faces in my dream. No one could bring themselves to admit they'd made a compromise.

I partly thought everyone else was mad, but mostly I felt the opposite; that I was an oddball, an outlier, or at least I was failing life while everyone else had seemingly nailed it.

They say most men live quiet lives of desperation but when it came to my job, I lived a noisy life of desperation. I assumed reaching out to others would ease my burden, but no. Fucking nope.

Yet as the years rolled by, I developed a keen sense for spotting incongruence in other people. I began to see through their masks. I could spot denial. As Navy Seal David Goggins once said:

“A lot of people are going through shit but they just hide it better than you.”

This denial is easy to spot, found in overt celebrations of Friday afternoons and lamentations of approaching Mondays. People who claimed to love their job while simultaneously drinking heavily at the weekends and celebrated a forthcoming week off like a World Cup victory.

This isn't a judgement, we are mostly all in the same stupid boat. But the truth never goes away. You can slay your hopes and dreams but they will come back, seeking revenge.

There’s a genuine existential horror to be had when you come face to face with who you could have been if you just took a risk.

It might seem easier to muffle desires under a mountain of duty than it is to listen to their screams, it might seem less painful to let society give you plaudits for corporate adherence than it is to gamble on who you could be, but sooner or later we all have to pay the piper.

I've heard a definition of hell is dying and then meeting the person you could have been.

Who would you meet?

A corporate title or drip-feed pay packet might keep you afloat but they won't save your soul.

If you kill who you really are, if you turn down the volume of your intuition, if you ignore your gifts and potential and instead walk a road society has constructed for you, you will have to answer for your spiritual crimes sometime.

That person you can be has been shot and wounded and they're mighty pissed off. They'll be back. Maybe not now but they’re coming. And you can choose to shoot them again. And again. But they’ll never stop coming. They’re real, more real than your corporate job title, more real than your appraisal rating, more real than your board reports.

The truth is inescapable and the sooner you meet it head-on, the sooner you can start to be who you really are.