The Workplace Prison …

Last week I noticed a clear and recurring theme emerging.

A disturbing one.

It’s around current work place culture.

The notion that you should constantly clamber the career ladder irrespective of personal cost whether to your own health or that of your intimate relationships. And that should you fail to do so, you’ll lose your place in the race forever.

A kind of keeping up with the Joneses, corporate style.

Where people used to obsessively compete and compare with their neighbours using their homes as a measuring tool, irrespective of cost, physical or otherwise, the Joneses approach has gone corporate by extending its reign of ridiculousness to the territory of the workplace. Culminating in a destructive culture of excessive hours and responsibilities along with poor personal boundaries seemingly all in a bid to prove you’re more able to perform in a robotic and inhumane way than the next poor colleague who has become ensnared in this life stealing mindset.

As a result of this, I hear of many people staying within jobs that actually result in their body’s physically manifesting illness, being unable to sleep, some are anxious to the point of throwing up as part of their morning routine and others can’t manage anything outside the office besides gazing at the TV.

Consequently, relationships falter, health deteriorates and overall quality of life disappears. Going through the motions like the living dead becomes the new norm. So subtly and so gradually that it often remains undetected for vast expanses of time. As in years.

Of course the same corporate institution can evoke different responses in all but for many the current workplace culture has become nothing more than a prison. One that can lead to burnout, breakdown or a gradual robotization of our humanity.

Remember the saying, ‘If someone told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?’. It seems we’ve gone a step further and that the revised question is, ‘if Society walks off a cliff, would you follow them?’

I’ve been hearing that this destructive ‘quality of life stealing’ culture is even rampant within universities where it appears to be largely accepted that to ‘do well’, whatever that may mean, is to accept that a breakdown under the pressure to perform, is an inevitable part of the journey.

Recent stats around mental health suggest the problems are actually starting in primary age children – passed down through the generations and aided by a culture obsessed with external productivity. As if we are merely machines without a heart, soul or spirit.

Shocking.

And completely unacceptable.

When did we reduce our young people to becoming academia producing robots devoid of a healthy inner or emotional life or achieving fully rounded humanity?

And when did we forget that even machines can crash when overloaded.

Maybe when the adults fell in to role modelling this by remaining in any workplace that has become little more than a prison.

Do people really believe that ‘just because everyone else’ is doing this, that it’s normal? Or healthy? Or can even be passed off for living?

Is this where fear of the unknown, keeps people imprisoned by that old lie, ‘better the devil you know’.

Is it the tormenting taunts of said devil who whispers, ‘but you know the inside of this prison, you don’t know what it will be like out there beyond these prison walls?’ that keeps so many committed to their prison of choice?

Is it familiarity that keeps people choosing albeit passively, to stay within these types of prisons that steal quality of health, life and relationships?

Does it matter if you don’t know what life beyond your own particular prison looks like if you know the current one is destroying you?

Has our society really been fooled in to believing that life is one long prison sentence whereby we merely get to choose what we will allow to imprison us. In other words which particular prison we will choose to inhabit? Whether the workplace prison or any other institution or even that of an unhealthy relationship?.

I’ve been hearing recently that when one person finally reaches breaking point within their workplace prison, opens their eyes and realises that looking after their own life and health IS an option and IS more valuable than continuing to allow it to destruct within such environments, they quit. At which point, they are clamoured after by all and sundry, to stay. Suddenly pay rises are possible and all the stops are pulled out to keep the one who has decided to walk free, from doing so.

I just keep hearing this right now. Just as one person discovers the courage to open their prison door and start to walk free, the other ‘prisoners’ clamour for them as they go, making vain attempts to pull them back. It’s as if without the courage to release themselves all they feel able to do is to try and stop others.

And that’s the thing about walking free, once you taste it and I mean really taste it, you want others to discover it for their own lives whatever that may mean or look like for them. It’s simply too good not to share.

I realise of course that we all need to earn a living. Absolutely true for us all. But what exactly do we mean by ‘living’ because any job or other situation that destroys your health, relationships or life in general doesn’t equate to living. More, perhaps, to dying.

It is only when people begin to realise that however far back it was, it was THEY who had walked in to their particular prison and therefore it is THEY who can also walk back out again.

In doing so, people tend to go through an often painful, lengthy re-evaluation process which has allowed them to come out the other side to re train or simply to work in a totally different area or way. It usually but not always involves a reduction in earnings. At least initially. Something many would rather run themselves in to an early grave before they would be willing to do. But those who are willing to go through this go on to reclaim their peace, joy, health, sleep, self-respect, motivation and life itself.

In other words, they start living again.

I’m fortunate enough to speak from personal experience as one who left my own workplace prison some thirteen years ago. I’ve walked the path. And I’m still walking the path. It’s long, hard, messy, painful, uncomfortable and costly. But not as much as avoiding it. And I am immensely grateful for the many who have and who continue to help me along it.

Once free, it’s a natural response to help others become free because you realise that you’re not competing with those around you but walking your own path. And you discover from hard won experience that when one enters freedom we all benefit.

Life is short.

It can end at any moment.

Is it really worth choosing to spend whatever precious moments we are given, living in a prison of our own choosing and creation?

Of course, I’m not talking here about situations over which we truly have no control. That’s a whole different area over which we can control only our response. After all, none of us are actually entitled to anything in this life.
I think it’s too easy to forget that anything we are given is a gift, be it health, life, relationships, time, money, or anything else.

But if we’re really honest with ourselves do we sometimes write certain situations off as having no control over them when this is not entirely true? But more the whisperings of our fear?

Do you have the courage to release yourself from your workplace prison?

Or to say yes to going in search of that which brings you to life and gives you a reason to live. A purpose. An enthusiasm for parting company with the duvet of a morning?

Or will you live, or should I say exist alongside that old adage, ‘better the devil you know’.

Now, I’m not talking about constantly searching for greener pastures. The grass will be as green as you are willing to invest in it becoming. But if you know you’re in a situation that’s crushing the life out of you, what are you going to do about it? Because change takes work and work takes time and effort and usually a lot of help. And these things don’t just happen by themselves.

There is of course no such thing as a perfect job or even a perfect anything in this life but if you know your workplace has become a prison and you’ve allowed yourself to stay irrespective of personal cost because you’ve been backed in to a corner by the taunts of the fear promoting what if brigade, it may just be time to re-evaluate.

Life really is too short to allow a workplace prison to stop you living fully.