Digging the Corporate Dirt: A Day in the Life at a Global Conglomerate

It had come to be almost one hour before midnight. Immersed in the cold of a winter night that was reaching full strength, I sat in the dark, in a small spec of space not penetrated by the continuous movement of blue disco lights all around, and participated in card game with a heterogeneous group of men of varying ages and personal backgrounds, some of them known and others familiarly unknown. Heightening the overpowering atmosphere, the reverberations of the latest dance numbers bombarded not only our ears but our entire bodies. This, however, wasn't a nightclub.

This was routine, part of the ride I had to take for my daily commute from the office to my bed. A commonplace affair, the company sent a mini-bus to transport its employees, and this was the natural result. Our young bus driver sped recklessly through the streets, ignoring the painted lanes for the most part just so he might, if at all possible, grab enough sleep before he had to wake up to do it all over again for the employees of the next shift.



The chaos mesmerized me into an introspected state of deep thinking. I tried analyzing my newly embarked journey as a finance professional, a small cog within one of the largest conglomerates that has ever existed. Armed with two postgraduate degrees, I had entered the job market with an energetic hope as well as very high expectations. As the months evaporated before my eyes noticed, I became painfully aware that this reality did not resemble even a tiny fraction of what I had envisioned when I had graduated. And, to be frank, it had taken its toll on me, both physically and mentally. Exhausted, absorbed, and unfulfilled, a monotonous lifestyle had already overpowered me, as if with the commanding attraction of a siren. I could barely visualize a worthwhile future for myself anymore. How had I become a shell, a husk, a body moving asleep; how did it occur so quickly and without warning?

A coworker and I used to share the last row of the bus, perhaps in an unwitting attempt to hide, flee, or resist the overpowering ambiance within the mini-bus in order to preserve some peace of mind as our days came to a close. A senior professional, he had spent more than a decade in a similar industry. Perhaps strangely, we never spoke much, only chitchat related to our daily card game, a game which I initially hesitated to become involved in as I had never played earlier and I find that type of indulgence to be a waste of time. Our relation to one another had an alienated character, and on this particular day we were just having a short-lived chat about work. He was surprised to learn about my credentials and the kind of jobs I had had in the past. As our conversation moved along, I gradually opened up, sharing the misery that had been fermenting inside because, in part, the feeling that the day-to-day activity simply did not meet my expectations. Possessing only the hope of being listened to, to my surprise he countered with a short story that I shall remember until the day I die.

He began plainly enough by asking—"Have you seen a chicken?" Taken aback by the silly question, suddenly a feeling of being the object of mockery sunk in. Nevertheless, having been ambushed and considering his experience and age, the naive reply—"Yes, who hasn't?"—became all I could utter. He again asked me—"Have you ever noticed what they eat?" I was in disbelief, cursing myself for not keeping my mouth shut like always. Unwillingly, I replied again—"No. But they eat grains, I believe." He said—"Exactly! A chicken on a farm has access to free movement, and you would find it always moving around places you may consider unhygienic for a human. But these chickens, no matter where they wander, even if it has to be a pile of dirt, would end up consuming the grains from the dirt."

A rooster pecks at the dirt in the hopes that some grains
may be found so that it may nourish itself,

Perplexed, my mind wondered aimlessly yet determined to find sense in something so senseless. He must have noticed.

"This world is a large playground where you will encounter people of all kinds, opportunities of all types and situations of all difficulty levels. They will try to test you and get you thinking. But you need to realize that not all people you encounter would be your friends, not all opportunities you see might lead to a gold mine, and not all situations that you might encounter would be in your favor. You need to realize that you will always be offered a pile of dirt with gems hidden somewhere within that might fulfill your demands. But the real challenge is that you have to keep looking in this pile of dirt."

The world will offer this unhealthy dung heap every time, yet I can't help but feel that not every pile contains gems, no matter how much one struggles inside these to find them.

Some birds do best when they stop searching in circles and move on to look elsewhere. I no longer work there.

Still, even though I feel that I lost a part of my life, of myself, riding that minivan and struggling at what is to all eyes the ideal first job in the private sector, I learned a valuable lesson. Sometimes you dig deeper; sometimes you jump elsewhere. Success doesn't lie in the eyes of others. It is of utmost importance to struggle harder, so long as you don't lose your health and happiness in the process since losing either invariably leads to losing the other. This world has infinite grains and millions of gems, but you won't ever live this present again. Make sure you live it first.

Some rooster may end up living a long life where they get to breed and explore their surroundings. Other roosters end up with another, less fortunate fate.

Sold all over the English speaking Antilles,
Grace's cock flavoured soup mix comes in many
forms, the above being spicy.

Ressentiment in the Present Age, by Søren Kierkegaard

Excerpt from - Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age, translated by Alexander Dru with Foreword by Walter Kaufmann, 1962, pp. 49–52.



It is a fundamental truth of human nature that man is incapable of remaining permanently on the heights, of continuing to admire anything. Human nature needs variety. Even in the most enthusiastic ages people have always liked to joke enviously about their superiors. That is perfectly in order and is entirely justifiable so long as after having laughed at the great they can once more look upon them with admiration; otherwise the game is not worth the candle. In that way ressentiment finds an outlet even in an enthusiastic age. And as long as an age, even though less enthusiastic, has the strength to give ressentiment its proper character and has made up its mind what its expression signifies, ressentiment has its own, though dangerous importance. […]

The more reflection gets the upper hand and thus makes people indolent, the more dangerous ressentiment becomes, because it no longer has sufficient character to make it conscious of its significance. Bereft of that character reflection is a cowardly and vacillating, and according to circumstances interprets the same thing in a variety of ways. It tries to treat it as a joke, and if that fails, to regard it as an insult, and when that fails, to dismiss it as nothing at all; or else it will treat the thing as a witticism, and if that fails, then say that it was meant as a moral satire deserving attention, and if that does not succeed, add that it was not worth bothering about. [...]

Ressentiment becomes the constituent principle of want of character, which from utter wretchedness tries to sneak itself a position, all the time safeguarding itself by conceding that it is less than nothing. The ressentiment which results from want of character can never understand that eminent distinction really is distinction. Neither does it understand itself by recognizing distinction negatively (as in the case of ostracism) but wants to drag it down, wants to belittle it so that it really ceases to be distinguished. And ressentiment not only defends itself against all existing forms of distinction but against that which is still to come.

The ressentiment which is establishing itself is the process of leveling, and while a passionate age storms ahead setting up new things and tearing down old, raising and demolishing as it goes, a reflective and passionless age does exactly the contrary; it hinders and stifles all action; it levels. Leveling is a silent, mathematical, and abstract occupation which shuns upheavals. In a burst of momentary enthusiasm people might, in their despondency, even long for a misfortune in order to feel the powers of life, but the apathy which follows is no more helped by a disturbance than an engineer leveling a piece of land. At its most violent a rebellion is like a volcanic eruption and drowns every other sound. At its maximum the leveling process is a deathly silence in which one can hear one’s own heart beat, a silence which nothing can pierce, in which everything is engulfed, powerless to resist.

One man can be at the head a rebellion, but no one can be at the head of the leveling process alone, for in that case he would be leader and would thus escape being leveled. Each individual within his own little circle can co-operate in the leveling, but it is an abstract power, and the leveling process is the victory of abstraction over the individual. The leveling process in modern times, corresponds, in reflection, to fate in antiquity. The dialectic of ancient times tended towards leadership (the great man over the masses and the free man over the slave); the dialectic of Christianity tends, at least until now, towards representation (the majority views itself in the representative, and is liberated in the knowledge that it is represented in that representative, in a kind of self-knowledge); the dialectic of the present age tends towards equality, and its most consequent but false result is leveling, as the negative unity of the negative relationship between individuals.

It must be obvious to everyone that the profound significance of the leveling process lies in the fact that it means the predominance of the category ‘generation’ over the category ‘individuality’.

---------
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like:

The Transmutations of the Human Spirit, by Friedrich Nietzsche