My Contempt for Corporate Life

The thoughts for this blog started when I was in one of those corporate meetings, and a person in a senior CXO position said, “I have been in the industry for 27 years.” Immediately, I was fascinated by the scale of time. A lot of topics started boiling simultaneously:

1. The big passage of time

2. The dryness in corporate

3. The trap of corporate

   
   

I asked myself if we might end up spending 27 years in corporate one day without realising it. Do we want that? There was this immediate repulsion, so meta in a way, a disgust so strong, a bad taste, an emptiness I felt imagining it, which led me to think about the condition of IT. But then I asked, Is it just IT, or is this everywhere? The answer was: everywhere. Then I asked, Is it something we dislike? The answer was yes. You see, I have been in this IT industry for three years, and there is this utter dread I feel, almost like each day passes by, a part of my soul and heart is eaten away. I think it’s a big fat Ponzi scheme. Hence, the thought of the soul’s condition after being eaten for 27 years made me sad, melancholic.

I am a very self‑immersed person; I like being in thought, exploring the corners of imagination, but that requires sitting in calm contemplation. And do I have time to sit? No. It’s as if my brain has shut down, with no thought other than work, or sometimes not even that. You see, the more we find ourselves “busy,” the further we move away from ourselves. The mind is at no rest. And then, isn’t it obvious that burnout, stress, anxiety, and panic attacks follow? Because the body has no time to rest. And with this endless day‑in, day‑out work, we lose all interest. I was watching a YouTube video where they said burnout is not because we work more; it’s because we work on things we don’t like without rest, in corporate life, in my case.

When I am producing music, I go into a flow state, losing track of time, hours upon hours locked in the studio, and when I emerge, I have never once felt tired. Then I asked: Is it just with music? Well, no; the same happens when I edit videos, create videos, write these blogs, so the answer is creative pursuits. Sometimes, even when I code for myself, I feel that same joy. So it’s not the task of coding that troubles me, but doing it for someone else, with no creative freedom and under a deadline, that is what fucks me up.

You see, that also stems from how you are treated and valued in the workplace. In the Indian IT field, we are slaves; hence, the term “Corporate Slaves” emerged and is extremely dominant in India. And this is not just in IT, but in every field with offices and hierarchy. It’s as if the manager or owner owns you. And oh, the labour cost: these “offshore” workers are so cheap. The workers are literally sold like human trafficking victims, handed over like slaves. And the condescending way onshore clients treat and speak to you, even though it’s “professional,” you can sense, “Oh, you peasant, you work for me.” That subtle tone of dominance, racism, and slave‑owner mentality comes through. And worst are the Indian managers. On a much larger scale, basic human rights are thrown in the garbage and incinerated, and people have become desensitised to it. Why, you may ask? Poverty, EMIs, and bills. For me, it’s the EMIs. Then I am reminded of the saying, “At every stage of life we are forced into traps: job, loans, wife, kids.” The more you are trapped in responsibilities, the better a slave you are.

Each day, I am terrified by the idea that one day, 27 years down the line, I will also be one of those herd animals, working on projects that are absolutely meaningless, with zero creative energy left to create. And I seriously don’t know the answer to this rant, this question, whatever you want to call it.