Office Inferno: Why Aren't We Happy At Work?

I just finished watching “The Office”. Funny on the surface, but very satirical and even dark once you go a layer below.

The show tells a story about the celebration of the ordinary life, randomness and all the hidden gems that lay within. I struggled to appreciate the theme for the first couple of seasons. I couldn't completely relate even though I endlessly admire the lives of depicted characters. After all, I know so many similar people IRL. That’s why I was trying to shake off my irrational fear of drowning in mediocrity for the whole time.

In season 9 - episode 13, a freshly blooded millennial salesman named Clark hit the chord for me with this line: 

“This sucks, you know? You put in 12 grueling weeks at a company, and what do they do? They make you compete for a promotion, like an animal. You know, I thought this was an office, not the Thunderdome.”

Never satisfied with anything and always expecting too much from everything. That is my borderline disillusionment. This is how I roll. It also might be a generational thing, I don’t know. Some say millennials are “premium mediocre” generation and if so, I’m a proto specimen.

As I’m slowly approaching the ten years milestone of my “professional career”, I’m constantly rethinking all the past and future moves. What could have gone better? Why I made all those mistakes? How can I improve? What should I do next? Am I ready for that? Will I spend the rest of my life in some office? The last idea scares the hell out of me.

A dear colleague of mine likes to say: “We humans work too much”. Although funny, this is very true. We wake up, dress up, go someplace and do our jobs. To our kids and pets this must seem like we were summoned by some magical place. But unfortunately it’s just a routine. Routines are in our nature. There are good and bad ones.

But there’s this notion of us distilling all of our potentials to basic routines in favor of comfort. We like being comfortable as comfort is probably the strongest human construct. Some people go so far, they even jeopardize their own health and security because of it. It is crazy how we became like this in such a short period of time. We managed to drop our evolutionary legacy so quickly. But who knows, maybe the evolution worked so hard for so long just so we could now move at such a speed.

The more I’m learning about various esoteric disciplines and eastern philosophy in general, I can't help but wonder how to get “beyond” this whole funk. By “beyond” I mean pushing myself out of physical and mental comfort. Maybe even going back, getting a bit feral or even primal.

Why? Just stating the obvious here, but the predominantly accepted frame of living created a net of weird to negative effects on our bio-psyche. We sit a lot — our back and leg muscles lose their strength. We “never have time for anything” — we eat shitty fast food. We have state of the art communication tools — we feel lonely like never before, etc. We evolved to run long distances, eat what we find around us and live socially. And even though today we statistically have a better quality of life than ever before, we mostly feel unsatisfied and unhappy.

I fell for this clickbait “Firefighters Are the Happiest Workers in America”. My first thought was how can someone find happiness in such a dangerous line of work? I was so pumped to learn the answer to this puzzle, but I had no luck. There were 0 answers to “why”. I got so irritated that I decided to find the answers by myself.

Here’s what I plotted so far in no particular order:

• Fire is imprinted in our DNA the same way dogs, bears and snakes are. We have a special connection with it. It’s the subject of our worst nightmares but also the happiest memories. It destroys, but also creates. It protects from cold and darkness.
• Office work is complex and abstract — which makes it hard to grasp, but easy to do. Firefighting is relatively easy to understand but very hard to do.
• We evolved to handle bursts of high-intensity, rather than continual jerky low-intensity stress.
• Abstractions of the office work are keeping us in a constant state of stress where our mind - biology pathways are checked out from reality. We think we are in danger when we actually are not. This confusion is triggering false positive ”fight or flight” loops. Firefighters are facing life-threatening situations so their glands are in sync with their instincts.
• Firefighters have a lot of downtime but are always on the front line, whether there's a smoky shed or nuclear reactor meltdown. Office workers are expected to always be working, available after the regular working hours and during holidays. Days off are a matter of prestige.
• When you survive a bunch of horrifying stuff, you start to appreciate life more. Besides getting more grateful, your mind becomes more flexible and resilient. You get sharper in unpredictable situations. Knowledge workers are expecting strictly defined career path milestones and are fixated by them.
• They are disciplined.
• Mental and physical health is mandatory. Exercising is mandatory. Exercising makes you more content. In contrast, a lot of office people have lots of unhealthy habits and I don’t even want to start here.
• When there are lives on the line you need to trust, rely on and care about each of your teammates. Which is not always the case in an office. When you care about your team members, team biology changes — it deepens up. The same way a bad apple can bring the rest of a good team down, the opposite is true as well. When you are happy, strong and healthy, you radiate positivity and affect people in your surroundings. The more exposure to the sources for a longer period of time the better.
• Firefighters understand the importance of their work and they have the first-hand impact. They save lives. They protect nature and homes. This realization must be very self-empowering. Office workers can’t really relate to this level with the mission of their companies for example. Those are often vague and meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
• Helping the ones in need increases our wellbeing.
• Each of the firefighters has full ownership and responsibility for their actions. Office workers can’t really fully understand the consequences of their actions or the lack of thereof.
• Firefighters have a clear sense of purpose. For office workers, it’s hard to be motivated when they don’t feel a purpose. Having a purpose is different than feeling purposeful.
• When not fighting fires they do other good deeds. Like getting a cat from a tree that will make someone happy. Spreading good vibes nevertheless.
• They are recognized by the public. The truck, the uniform, knowing that you are doing something good but risky is somehow heroic. Heck, even dedicated emojis. All of this makes you a little bit proud of yourself.

So there you have it. The answer is simple. Firefighters are the happiest workers because the rest of us are constantly trying to go against our nature by burning ourselves out inside of our tiny cubicles.

Originally published in my newsletter here ✌️