Corporate culture asks that your personal goals and sense of purpose change when you pull into the office park, but most people just don’t feel that passionately about their jobs, being asked to fake it will eventually grow tiring for most. And in the internet age, our tolerance for the latest workplace slang is lower than ever.
When I first read Virginia Woolf’s dictum that “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” I was homeless.
Being compelled to sit at a desk for 8 hours a day affects me in a lot of really negative ways. It makes me feel stifled, trapped in my own head, and thoroughly drained by the end of most days. I don’t feel cut out for the whole “having a job” thing at all (judge away, baby boomers—we’re all just the products of our genetics and experiences), but like many of you, I feel financially tied to my employer because America doesn’t give a shit about people having health insurance and my company gives me great benefits and good pay.
Last year I quit my well-paying city job to go back to school and work in retail and my mother still hasn’t gotten over it. To her my decisions seem like symptoms of mental illness that plagued my grandmother and great grandmother. It’s hard to explain why I needed to leave the world of business casual clothing and passive aggressive emails to feel sane again.