Spreadsheets and Rats and Bears, Oh My!
(If you have about five minutes to read a fractured fairy tale, written by a semi-coherent, middle-aged lawyer, you should check out Max's story before reading this entry. What follows will probably make a little more sense if you do that.)
Max's story is not strictly autobiographical. I never went to business school. I've never been a bear. And, to my recollection, none of my kids are named Calvin or Francis. Also, there are aspects of practicing law that I love, so I don't exactly feel like I'm digging through a garbage heap each day.
But there is a sense in which Max's story is my own. I think that I had the same innocent, but arrogant view of the world when I started working. I certainly shared some of his experiences as a young parent. And I carry with me a lot of the tiredness and frustration that he found in his middle life. But the story of Max is intended to serve as a reflection of the stories that I've seen on thousands of faces during my professional days, including my own. Its a story of hope, disillusionment, decay, shame, and lostness. And I think that there are a lot of people - a lot more than will admit it openly - that also find themselves in the middle of Max's story.
Somewhere along the way, a lot of young people get caught up in dreams of the stuff (or the retirement accounts, or the country club memberships, or the vacation experiences) they want, and they decide that they are willing to do things that they don't really want to do to get there.
I don't think that people's deals with the HR fairies of the world are quite Faustian, though they may have shades of that sort-of thing. They are more like a deal with Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light. They may not necessarily require us to do things that are overtly evil. But they make us miserable during the work day, and we soon discover that they still don't get us all the stuff we want. Or, worse yet, we get all the stuff we want and then discover that it doesn't make us happy.
Some deaths are slow. Some are sudden. The death of the bear-cubs inside of each of us is generally a slow one. It is death by cubicles, spreadsheets, file reports, emails, interminable meetings, evaluation interviews, coach class travel, rushed assignments, and florescent lights. In my profession, it is death by depositions, deadlines, stacks of phone messages, and cranky colleagues.
I was in downtown Dallas the other day, and I was looking at all of the homeless people on the street, and all of the young professionals scurring about the sidewalks in neat suits and jackets, and I was thinking about how the homeless folk were probably thinking that the neat suits and jackets had it made in life. About how happy they must be to have cars and air conditioning and money to go to restaurants and their own bathrooms. And all I could think was, a lot of these suits and jackets are also miserable, though maybe in a different way. How much fun can it be to fight two hours' of traffic each day, work under an overbearing boss in a sterile plexiglass building, taking care of people and things that you could care less about, really? But that is their reality.
I was in a Christian bookstore the other day and I picked up a book by a guy who was a successful executive in some large company. He was writing about how great it is for powerful executives to exert all of this influence over all of these people to advance the cause of Jesus. He wanted to talk about how his experiences in business had given him all of these great spiritual insights. I don't know of he got around to saying it in so many words, but the tone of the writing suggested that his spiritual wisdom was the key to his material success.
I wanted to throw up.
I was judgining the situation much too rashly and much too harshly, I'm sure, but I think it can be a huge mistake to hold up up the commercially successful folks in our midst as superspiritual gurus. And the assumption that commercial success is related to deep spirituality is just downright unbiblical.
You hold up people like this as spiritual leaders solely on the basis of their material success and willingness to call themselves Christians, and you make people like Max feel like dirt: "Great," they say to themselves, "not only am I a failure in my career, but I must be spiritually weak as well, or else I'd be successful like this guy."
I have to make a confession at this point. I'm not quite sure how Max's story is going to end. The truth is, I'm just a few paragraphs ahead of Max in my own journey right now. Far enough ahead to start asking some of the right questions, I hope, but not far enough to know all of the answers.
I don't know why Max's story came to me. I don't know why this issue has suddenly become so important to me. Maybe because I'm hoping I can help people like Max. But I'm going to be blogging about this subject for a while - about what it means to find yourself again when you're lost in the rat race.
And I hope that, if you feel a little like Max yourself, you will have the courage to comment or send me an email during the next few days/weeks. Tell me about your own rat race, about what you really wanted to be when you grew up, and about how you hope to get there.
Max's story is not strictly autobiographical. I never went to business school. I've never been a bear. And, to my recollection, none of my kids are named Calvin or Francis. Also, there are aspects of practicing law that I love, so I don't exactly feel like I'm digging through a garbage heap each day.
But there is a sense in which Max's story is my own. I think that I had the same innocent, but arrogant view of the world when I started working. I certainly shared some of his experiences as a young parent. And I carry with me a lot of the tiredness and frustration that he found in his middle life. But the story of Max is intended to serve as a reflection of the stories that I've seen on thousands of faces during my professional days, including my own. Its a story of hope, disillusionment, decay, shame, and lostness. And I think that there are a lot of people - a lot more than will admit it openly - that also find themselves in the middle of Max's story.
Somewhere along the way, a lot of young people get caught up in dreams of the stuff (or the retirement accounts, or the country club memberships, or the vacation experiences) they want, and they decide that they are willing to do things that they don't really want to do to get there.
I don't think that people's deals with the HR fairies of the world are quite Faustian, though they may have shades of that sort-of thing. They are more like a deal with Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light. They may not necessarily require us to do things that are overtly evil. But they make us miserable during the work day, and we soon discover that they still don't get us all the stuff we want. Or, worse yet, we get all the stuff we want and then discover that it doesn't make us happy.
Some deaths are slow. Some are sudden. The death of the bear-cubs inside of each of us is generally a slow one. It is death by cubicles, spreadsheets, file reports, emails, interminable meetings, evaluation interviews, coach class travel, rushed assignments, and florescent lights. In my profession, it is death by depositions, deadlines, stacks of phone messages, and cranky colleagues.
I was in downtown Dallas the other day, and I was looking at all of the homeless people on the street, and all of the young professionals scurring about the sidewalks in neat suits and jackets, and I was thinking about how the homeless folk were probably thinking that the neat suits and jackets had it made in life. About how happy they must be to have cars and air conditioning and money to go to restaurants and their own bathrooms. And all I could think was, a lot of these suits and jackets are also miserable, though maybe in a different way. How much fun can it be to fight two hours' of traffic each day, work under an overbearing boss in a sterile plexiglass building, taking care of people and things that you could care less about, really? But that is their reality.
Max's experience - or at least something similar to it - will be the experience of most graduates from law schools and business schools and medical schools and colleges who choose what they do in life to maximize their income. It is a path that will lead to much misery when you find out you can't get as far as you wanted, you can't have all the money you wanted to get all the stuff you wanted, and/or that all that stuff doesn't translate into joy.
I wanted to throw up.
I was judgining the situation much too rashly and much too harshly, I'm sure, but I think it can be a huge mistake to hold up up the commercially successful folks in our midst as superspiritual gurus. And the assumption that commercial success is related to deep spirituality is just downright unbiblical.
You hold up people like this as spiritual leaders solely on the basis of their material success and willingness to call themselves Christians, and you make people like Max feel like dirt: "Great," they say to themselves, "not only am I a failure in my career, but I must be spiritually weak as well, or else I'd be successful like this guy."
I have to make a confession at this point. I'm not quite sure how Max's story is going to end. The truth is, I'm just a few paragraphs ahead of Max in my own journey right now. Far enough ahead to start asking some of the right questions, I hope, but not far enough to know all of the answers.
I don't know why Max's story came to me. I don't know why this issue has suddenly become so important to me. Maybe because I'm hoping I can help people like Max. But I'm going to be blogging about this subject for a while - about what it means to find yourself again when you're lost in the rat race.
And I hope that, if you feel a little like Max yourself, you will have the courage to comment or send me an email during the next few days/weeks. Tell me about your own rat race, about what you really wanted to be when you grew up, and about how you hope to get there.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home