The Matrix and the Madness of Levee
It all started with The Matrix although I didn’t know it then…
Back in 1999, I had just started in my current job, and was hungrily pursuing a corporate lifestyle: introducing new technology, writing management reports, answering calls for support. In my private life, I was following the six-step Social Expectations programme : graduate, get job, buy house, get married, have children, work until retirement or death.
In 2001, something happened which has been gnawing at my soul ever since. Our daughter was born the month after 9/11.
It’s hard to explain the effect this had, but I ended up questioning the world we had brought our child into. Essentially, I didn’t want my child to have the same predictable life mapped out for her, to become a societal drone. Can you imagine bringing a child into this world, full of potential, a blank canvas, and then painting the same dull grey life that everyone else lives?
And after a few years of corporate life, the soullessness of this existence has left me feeling empty and unfulfilled. I sit in on office meetings and breathe in the hot air of self-important middle-managers, marvelling at the pure absense of passion in their lives.
In the last couple of years, I’ve become aware of a growing movement of people who are starting to challenge the accepted route through life. The most powerful statement I’ve heard asserts that if we’re all individuals, then it is not possible for a 9-5 lifestyle to suit everybody. You know, trail yourself out of bed, go through the motions, work for 8 hours or more, go home have dinner and watch Emmerdale, blah, blah, blah….
The Tailspin
The end result of this questioning has me in a complete tailspin recently. But at the center of it all, there’s one question to ask: am I happy?
Fundamentally, no. I’m in a dull, unfulfilling job working for employers that couldn’t care less if I lived or died (I have my suspicious about their preference though!). I had a few job interviews recently, and as I walked out of the latest one, I knew that moving jobs would only be moving the problem. Too many companies are like bureaucratic in a negative way these days.
And so I’m at a very interesting point in life which is both terrifying, but exhilerating. I feel a tiny bit insane with a combination of opportunities and fears. I want to spend my life doing something worthwhile, that I enjoy and that means something to other people. I don’t think I was cut out to be a drone!
Where Does The Matrix Fit In?
The central premise of The Matrix is that there are two worlds: one is the complex social model that we have been taught and indoctrinated with and through which we filter all our life experiences, and the other is how things really are. So, in their heads, people are running around living normal lives, but the reality is that they are all drones powering a giant machine.
Society can convince you that just about anything is acceptable: the clamour for more and greater riches, buying a Land Rover when you could get by with a Ford Fiesta, two parents working full-time while someone else raises their children.
The reality is that more and more people are chasing fantasies instead of cutting back the crap in their lives and enjoying the simple things. What hurts is that most people are still unfulfilled and unhappy. Even more so, because they’re in debt to the eyeballs, but that’s a discussion for another day.
Here’s something to end on a bright note.
Many thanks for pointing me towards those articles. I’m intending on working on enjoying the rst of my life. I dislike my job too so I think I’ll start with being more positive there and seeing what transpires.
Read Fight Club, then watch Fight Club and pretty soon, all will be clear.
“Stuff you own, ends up owning you”
Interesting article!
I have also tried to stem discussion on the points you have raised but perhaps have not expressed them so eloquently!
Mary: Glad you liked them. I think there’s a real shift happening in the way people approach their work life. I remember seeing a recruitment ad a few years ago with the line: “When did your career become a job?” That said it all for me. Good luck at work, by the way!
JP: Seen it, read it, must revisit it someday! I don’t know about you, but I can be deadly obsessive about ideas like these - once I latch on to an idea I can see it reflected all around me. Fight Club was definitely like that for me.
Palahniuk is a genius writer, especially for writing that turns society on its head, but that’s a discussion for another day…
Elizabet: Not sure about the eloquence, but thanks! For me, it’s an overwhelming sense that something is fundamentally wrong with my life, but I’m stuck in a transitory place between ‘conventional’ living and the way I want my life to be.
Hey Mr. Levee,
I find myself rooting for you to, if not be impossibly happy all the time, then to bear more straightforwardly onto the right track of weaving across its path more often; be in the sunlight of it more often than not. I think I went through something simliar a while back.
I was also working at a job in which I felt like a drone. Something finally made me bolt away. I was sick of it! I’d had unexplored options that had been set aside for years, some idea of talents woven against my half-educated mind. I figured that if I was going to starve upon the wages I was offered ad infinitum, though more or less consistently employment, I ought to at least be starving upon my own terms. And a lot of that had more to do with a mind starving for something new to learn than my stomach literally shrinking. It’s been only a year and a half since I made the break, but in that short time I have garnered some technically anachronistic work that no one was willing to do, and have garnered some more work from making an exposition from it on a weblog. Things keep changing all the time in that now. Some may mistake me for unhappy, but I truly am not! Learning, like wearing shoes that don’t fit, should be uncomfortable. If I stop learning I imagine it’s over. Cut the headstone at that point.
Now I am set to travel for a job within a firm again, and part of this makes me reticent and anxious. It is only by the promise of the proprietor’s observable creativity and easy humour in an interview that I trust it will not be a wild goose chase. Plus, as usual, my attitude is that I can write about it, and still lose nothing.
But anyway, just wanted to let you know that someone is rooting for you out here. You’re a man after my own heart.
~Andrew
Andrew: Thank you for sharing your thoughts here. Your initial statement about being “impossibly happy all the time” is interesting: I find that I am truly happiest at the moment when I focus on the present. You know, just taking some time - not to relax, but just to enjoy my surroundings, breathe in the air around me and be at peace.
I read today (via Digg) about a fella getting out of the IT industry. This suits my school of thought completely - there’s a Buddhist idea that your work should be noble, and I don’t think IT Support for a company such as mine is particularly noble or decent.
In an ideal world, I’d like to be helping other people (I’ve recently rediscovered that I like people!) and possibly doing something positive for this place I live in.
Does this mean your restoration project has finished up and you’re moving on? Whatever it is, good luck in the new job Andrew!
My restoration project was completed in late April this year. Pestering Steve Brenna, co-owner of Milestone Ltd. with his wife, Melody, about a mouldmaker’s job paid off. My use of a weblog chronicling my work and illustrating my techniques made him curious enough to want to see it on a trip to our state. Previously I had been looking for similar work in your neck of the woods! I’d advertised in a forum called Edinburgh 24/7. An IT man looking to make the break away from his home trade made an offer to employ me in a cast stone manufacturing start-up ostensibly to be located in Ballycastle. We wrote e-mails over the late summer/early autumn and then he faded away. I had my hopes up that I would be getting to stop at McDonnell’s pub after work everyday!
Living in the moment I did make the adjustment quickly. I honestly think that he had unrealistic expectations in that he said he would shut his doors if he did not turn a profit in one year. Is that what is expected of IT business? In working with Haddonstone, the British cast stone company with an American plant in Colorado, we were informed that after four years our first profitable month was observed.
Keep an eye out for this tall fella around there named Mike Houston (the “wannabe ex” IT man). Last I heard he was trying to to start a broadband company. He had half the money and was looking for investors. More power to him says I. I only wish he had notified me of his change of plan. I have always landed on my feet here.