When you finally land your first big boy full-time job, your degree, your institution, your hard skills…they won’t matter, not really, at least not in a significant way in the long term. Even more so if you’re a social sciences/humanities major just stepping into “professional life,” “corporate labor,” employment, etc. as a junior resource, an “associate,” “management trainee officer,” “account/sales/executive.”
You are finally part of the highly sought-after lightcone that will shape your experiences as a 20-something college-educated young professional. You’re going to make money, you’re going to be part of something greater than yourself again (and this time they’re going to pay you for it), you’re firmly on the road to “self-sufficiency”…you’re a rockstar, astronaut, you’re going to “revolutionize” industries, you’re going to “build.” Congratulations and welcome. This is not an “exit,” to appropriate VC parlance. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
This initial wave of euphoria can be breathtaking and last quite a bit before it starts to wane. Your first day, your first few days, then the week leading up to your first paycheck…this is the prologue, the foreplay before you get your first potentially one-shotting hit of dopamine, not unlike that of addictive substances. It’s exciting, can be incredibly fast because it may be entirely new to you; everything’s good even when it’s not because you know the prize is almost in your hands, you can almost taste it. If you’re a middle classer you’re already salivating about what you’re going to buy your mom/parents and/or siblings with that money. The biggest relief you’ll have is personally paying off your parents’ immense financial sacrifices…it might be better than anything you’ve felt before.
You’ll notice that I haven’t mentioned work even once in the above paragraph. It’s deliberate, because when you see the direct deposit message on your phone, you’ll have forgotten the small sufferings, the tiny indignities of work, the commute, the sheer mind-numbingness of most of what you did at work. It’ll be an undifferentiated blob of various types of shit, rubber stamped with a shining badge that says you’ve done it now, you have the money, you earned it. Congratulations. You’re a gainfully employed person, you contribute monetarily to society, to the economy, you are an agent of the flow of commerce. You might not necessarily be able to feel or articulate all these emotions, but you’ll feel good, dare I say in rapture, at least for a while at the start of your employment. Welcome to the humble beginnings of what is potentially a soul-vaporizing addiction.
This is what the office looks like when everybody leaves. These are the backrooms. The following should appear in a hover window when “the backrooms” is pointed on by the cursor: The Backrooms is a creepy internet myth about endless, maze-like spaces filled with yellow wallpaper, buzzing lights, and a sense of eerie emptiness. It originated from a 2019 post and has since evolved into a sprawling collaborative horror universe exploring themes of liminality and isolation.
If you’re not really interested in the work, but you know you want to do it well because you want to be a high performer, you won’t realize that the work is not important. It does not matter what you’re doing. If you’re really honest with yourself you’ll realize anyone could do the work. But the company won’t tell you this: They have no incentive to, and if the money’s good for you, you have no incentive either to ask this of yourself or the company. Of course you’ll learn things, polish your existing skills, and that will seem like progress, because after all you are doing something, 5 days a week, and you’re starting to be exceedingly efficient at it. All this is great.
But if you’re not careful and don’t pay attention, it’s also a veil designed to prevent you from really thinking about what you’re doing with your time, and consequently your life. The money’s steady, it pays the bills, Netflix, Spotify, YouTube Premium, gym membership, meals out every week, you’re successful now. You’re doing well!
It is incredibly easy to focus on the unimportant stuff. The definition of unimportant will vary from person to person, but a good heuristic for that is anything that is easily measurable and trackable, instantly visible, like your bank balance over a few months, the spending of larger and larger sums on what you don’t need, but really want because it’s either cute, cool, or your rich friends have it. A corollary is that it is even easier to mistake the work as the important stuff. “If I keep doing the work well they’ll notice me and reward me.” This is the default thinking pattern of conscientious, hard-worker, meritocracy-enjoyer young professionals like yourself. You think this is how the world should work.
If you’re seeking a promotion (most people are), here’s some advice: It is much more important to be seen than to do your job well. Companies will deny that’s the case, but it’s true, and in a lot of companies that have crossed the 5-year-old mark, it will be the norm. Companies may start out seriously with an important mission, but over time it is very likely for them to be obsessed with the irrelevant and the banal as they grow. Anything that is easily trackable in spreadsheets can be irrelevant and banal, because wowie big number increase, big line go up on bar chart is very satisfying to see.
In such cases the work takes a backseat, if not entirely thrown out of the car. What becomes important is the need for visibility, to appear as if you’re the one responsible for letting the company not explode, to be seen talking to the right people (the seniors who control the local office). If your goal is doing something wonderful by doing good work, then you may not find it in traditional employment. If your goal is to keep ascending the ladder they might just tip over whenever they feel like it, turn your invisibility off, start posting.
Here’s another reality: You will not notice all this. You’re too busy being the good performer they want you to be. At least until your first year/first performance evaluation cycle. If it’s good, then every little off thing you’ve experienced will be washed away in the haze of validation by the company. This is similar to getting a high GPA in college. They have noticed you, they have rewarded you, and you have dug yourself a deeper hole.
You are no longer a freshie. You are now experienced, armed with an entire year of coming in to the office every day: You are well-versed in coffee break banter, shifting alliances between colleagues, a “furtive” cross-team romance…you’ve gone out for team lunches, participated eagerly in 1:1s with your manager, company all-hands meetings, someone’s even given you a shout out in the company-wide Slack channel. You’re killing it.
You think you’re doing such a good job you can start some serious responsibilities now, start to “grow.” You have ideas about the work, the business; you want to be team lead. But you realize, slowly, and painfully, that no one takes you seriously or engages with your ideas that threaten to even slightly change how operations are done, or that involve certain changes on a different rung of the hierarchy. You want things to be done in a way that, according to you, is much better. And of course it might be better for the business. But others, the seniors, don’t think that way. You’re not a manager. You probably will not realize these things: most people don’t, most don’t even know how the company is making money, let alone if it’s making money at all.
This is the invisible hand of the market. It’s not a hand, as you can see. This is the sense of guilt that eats away at you for not doing what you really want and doing what you really want at the expense of not having a job.
Despite all this, your salary arrives on time, you have something to do every day, your parents aren’t finally breathing down your neck all the time, maybe just a little about marriage. Life is better. And you’re surviving Pakistan, we mustn’t forget, with its ridiculous tax increases on the salaried class (that’s you), insanely high electricity prices, no hope of being able to construct a house without a loan in the next 10 years, disgusting air quality, some other weekly bullshit that life throws at you…you’re also always looking at grad school to get out of here. You’re still able to save some money, though. You’re thinking about a local trip up north, if not a foreign one to Baku or Bali. Perhaps get the iPhone or a PS5.
If you haven’t been laid off or stagnated by the end of 2 years or left the company because of a “better” offer from somewhere else, you’re fully addicted to the hit of the direct deposit message on your phone at the beginning/end of the month. You’re not really doing good work. You don’t really realize you’re not there to do the work at all. You’re there because the company bought your time, not you. It did not hire your potential, only your current output that increases at a much faster rate than your salary. This is how the company makes money, depriving you of your time.
Anyone could do any part of the company. Of course some people can do some parts better than others, but most people can do most things. Even if badly. And this is what most companies are ultimately, average people doing average things averagely. It doesn’t matter what you do better than others if the company already has some people to do the parts it thinks are important. If you try to do those yourself, you are stepping on other people’s toes and neglecting your own duties. You are not an agent, you are a function. You will do as you’re told, and only according to what the manager can quantify in their spreadsheet, not what you think is good, necessary work.
After a while you start to care less and less about what’s going on with yourself and the company…you’re now around 26–27 years old, your prefrontal cortex has fully developed, you wade quietly and half-consentingly into society’s expectations…you’re looking at plots, you’re looking at rents, you’re looking at a small car, you’re looking at your wedding, wife, children. And if you’re not careful you are now 30, at least spiritually, and you’ve accomplished at most what Pakistanis deeply crave…stable mediocrity. And that’s enough for most Pakistanis.
That’s not to suggest that this is a bad thing. This may in fact be a perfectly good thing for you, you’re finally stable after 4–5 years of college education that’s a whole set of other problems and making up for lost time you wasted in high school. However, like Madonna said, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and so is the road to beginning to care less and less about what is really important, your time and how consciously you choose to spend it.
Because around 30 you now have kids and schools and you want the best for your children, you will start them on the same track and start competing again…vicariously through your progeny. The cycle has begun once more, the ouroboros of time has triumphed yet again, leaving us behind like dust, specks of dust.
We have very little time on Earth and it is the easiest thing in the world to spend it unconsciously, in the service of what we may not fully believe in or have taken the time to really understand, how powerful (and terrible) its effects on us and those we care about. Like Don DeLillo said, “Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live.”
All we have is now.
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1 “Success” meaning “sudden possibility/rapid achievement of upward mobility” is a very recent phenomenon in world history, beginning in earnest after the Industrial Revolution and then again with the emergence of the internet and web software companies. We have movies like The Social Network(2010) and The Founder(2016), TV shows like Silicon Valley (2014) and Super Pumped (2022) that dramatize seemingly sudden and rapid success. If you were in high school or college around this time, you were certainly very impressionable, and some of that impression has definitely burrowed deep in your worldview.
2 ” Make Something Wonderful is a collection of writings, speeches, and photos from Steve Jobs. It was compiled by his friends and family, and published posthumously in 2023 https://book.stevejobsarchive.com/.
3 ” This is Water is the commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace to Kenyon College’s graduating class of 2005. The same themes of life after college and work are explored with great warmth and fondness for the human condition.
Transcript: https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/.
Audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCbGM4mqEVw/
4 ” From The Gay Science, Book IV, Aphorism 341 by Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882.
5 ” From Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, 2003.
