I think you’re right, it’s best to treat a corporate role as training for what you want to do later in your career when you are ‘Outside the Walls’. Once you are in your forties, you should always have a ‘non-corporate’ escape route, a fallback if you get made redundant or burnout (the combined chance of which is much higher than staying there until you get your pension).
I’ve been ‘Outside the Walls’ for 20 years and it’s been a real struggle, partly because I was mentally unprepared for it (and partly because I was so damaged by my experience inside the walls).
The more people I talk to about this, the clearer the issue becomes. Corporations exist for the benefit of shareholders, not society, or their employees. It's not because they're bad per se, it's more that they are performing as designed.
It's not a comfortable story for those running them, as they realise they are not much more than machine minders, with very little real autonomy.
For those of us who have learned the truth of this the hard way, it asks some hard questions of us. How do we learn from this, and how do we make those lessons accessible to those entering the machine?
I think you’re right, it’s best to treat a corporate role as training for what you want to do later in your career when you are ‘Outside the Walls’. Once you are in your forties, you should always have a ‘non-corporate’ escape route, a fallback if you get made redundant or burnout (the combined chance of which is much higher than staying there until you get your pension).
I’ve been ‘Outside the Walls’ for 20 years and it’s been a real struggle, partly because I was mentally unprepared for it (and partly because I was so damaged by my experience inside the walls).
The more people I talk to about this, the clearer the issue becomes. Corporations exist for the benefit of shareholders, not society, or their employees. It's not because they're bad per se, it's more that they are performing as designed.
It's not a comfortable story for those running them, as they realise they are not much more than machine minders, with very little real autonomy.
For those of us who have learned the truth of this the hard way, it asks some hard questions of us. How do we learn from this, and how do we make those lessons accessible to those entering the machine?