The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010)

by Michael Foley

  The New York Times offers this typically heart-warming story: ‘Soon after word spread that Sarah Kay and Matt Lacks were conducting an office romance, Ms Kay found herself in the office of the director of human resources. There was a time when such a meeting would have signalled a death knell for the relationship, and even jeopardized the employees’ careers. Yet as Ms Kay, 29, cheerfully recounted, the human resources director told her, ‘We’re just all really glad that you made a friend’.’232

  Who now wishes to bear in mind that colleagues are never chosen and that, if we encountered them away from the job, in the majority of cases we would run a mile? The work environment imposes a work persona – amenable, shallow, cheerful, gregarious and facetious. Often this persona is reinforced by conferring a new name, usually a monosyllabic diminutive – so the modern workplace is the habitat of Jo, Chris, Jill, Dave, Sue, Bob, Jen and Zak. Needless to say, I am known in work as ‘Mike’. As with the renaming of nuns and monks, the new workplace name signifies a renunciation of the old self and a dedication to the values and practices of the new community. Like Sister Perpetua and Brother Benedict, I was reborn as Colleague Mike. But, unlike religious rebirths, this was never officially decreed. No one announced that, henceforth, I would be known only as Mike. Nor was there any organized campaign of enforcement. In fact, it is likely that no one else was even aware of the imposition. The phenomenon was a perfect example of ‘anonymous authority’, almost impossible to oppose because there was no overt command or source. So I resisted ‘Mike’ for several months, but eventually gave in. And the new name did have benefits. It made me constantly aware that I was two different people.

  Nicholson Baker’s novel The Mezzanine captures the unique atmosphere of the contemporary office complex – a vast, corpo-rately anonymous space inhabited by people desperately anxious to be friendly:

  There are always residual people in an office who occupy that category of the not-introduced-to-yet, the not-joked-about-the-weather-with: the residue gets smaller and smaller, and Bob was one of the very last. His face was so familiar that his ongoing status as stranger was really an embarrassment – and just then, the certainty that Bob and I were gradually going to be brought closer and closer to each other, on his down and my up escalator rides, destined to intersect at about the midpoint of our progress, twenty feet in the air in the middle of a huge vaultlike lobby of red marble, where we would have to make eye contact and nod and murmur or stonily stare into space…filled me with desperate aversion.233

  Another pressure to conform is the recent development of constant visibility. Increasingly, employees occupy open-plan or glass-fronted offices so that there is nowhere to enjoy a moment of solitude or privacy except in the toilet – and even here the stalls have been cut away at top and bottom to minimise seclusion. Nicholson Baker points out that the only place in the corporate world where privacy may still be enjoyed is in an elevator – and in The Mezzanine his characters make the most of this rare luxury:

  Some of the elevator cars were filled with passengers; in others, I imagined, a single person stood, in a unique moment of true privacy – truer, in fact, than the privacy you get in the stall of a corporate bathroom because you can speak out loudly and sing and not be overheard. L. told me once that sometimes when she found herself alone in an elevator she would pull her skirt over her head. I know that in solo elevator rides I have pretended to walk like a windup toy into the walls; I have pretended to rip a latex disguise off my face, making cries of agony; I have pointed at an imaginary passenger and said, ‘Hey pal, I’ll slap that goiter of yours right off, now I said watch it.’214

  Certainly the idea of a secluded office is obsolete. Now there is nowhere to be alone and out of sight, nowhere to protect and nurture the secret self, nowhere to ruminate. Indeed, rumination has become so alien to the workplace that a ruminant expression is likely to be interpreted as a symptom not of pleasure but grief. Such detachment is so unusual and disconcerting that colleagues can explain it only as a consequence of grievous affliction.

  In the end this constant exposure makes a desire for privacy seem cranky, old-fashioned and even perverse, as though anyone wishing to be alone could only be jerking off to a child pornography website or worse. And, as for a few minutes with a book…though there is a simple but ingenious ploy in Joshua Ferris’s novel about a Chicago advertising agency, Then We Came to the End – an employee who is an avid reader arrives at work before his colleagues, photocopies all of a library book and then spends the day at his desk reading what appears to be a work document.235

  But it is increasingly difficult to avoid being exposed. Any attempt to block glass-office frontage, for instance with filing cabinets, posters, calendars or notices, will be spotted and forbidden by zealous safety staff – often the colleagues most likely to be Pharisees. It must be the petty and largely prohibitive nature of safety monitoring that attracts the small-minded and mean-spirited.

  I had a wonderful encounter with a safety guy after leaving a building heavily covered in scaffolding. He positioned himself directly in front of me. ‘You weren’t supposed to come out of that exit. There’s danger from falling building materials.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ve come through it and lived to tell the tale.’

  ‘No. No. You’ll have to go back and leave by the designated exit. There was a diversion sign.’ And he shifted forward a little.

  ‘Now, let’s see if I understand this correctly,’ I beamed with demented affability. ‘In order to protect me from falling materials you want me to walk back under the falling materials. Or have I missed something?’ And I beamed even more insanely.

  There was a long silence.

  Finally, he said, ‘I want your name and staff number.’

  And the pressure to conform is maintained by team-building breaks and away days. As if it were not enough to see colleagues all week at work, it may also be necessary to bond with them by exploring an abandoned mineshaft together over the weekend. At the very least there will be an away day, where a venue is hired, at considerable expense and usually more difficult to access than the workplace, so that everyone has to consult maps and timetables and make expensive new travel arrangements, only to end up in a conference room identical to those at work – the same dog-eared flip chart, pull-down screen, front workstation and corporate seating, and, of course, the same people dominating the proceedings with the same talk for the sake of talk. In the religion of work, those who insist on talking in every meeting are the equivalent of the righteous faithful who always sit at the front of the congregation in church. The workplace is the habitat of the contemporary Pharisee.

  On an away day there is only the free lunch to look forward to, but even this is depressingly familiar – the standard corporate cold buffet, with the same tasteless sandwich quarters and Asian finger food for exotic effect, and the same fresh-fruit platter with pineapple and melon slices and the two strawberries no one ever has the nerve to eat. Yet a manager will sit down at the front workstation and, with a meaningful eye roll, cry fervently, ‘It’s so great just to be out of that place.’ For, of course, the real point of this exercise is to give the impression that no one present is bound to the workplace and that, since the cheerful harmony persists in the outside world, it must be authentic.

  Then, as the long, sluggish afternoon drags on and, in desperation, you seize and devour one of the two strawberries, the company is split up into small groups for ‘breakout sessions’ of SWOT analysis to identify Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Each group draws up lists, brings them back and reports to the plenary session.

  As the presentations continue, an eager new recruit leans over and asks me, with genuine interest, ‘What do they do with all these reports afterwards?’

  The mini Danish pastries have been finished, some bastard has even eaten the other strawberry, the remaining coffee is lukewarm and stewed, and ahead lies the ritual of ‘the web’ – so I am possibly a little blunt: �
��Fuckall’

  He pulls back, profoundly shocked.

  These are supposed to be cynical times – but there is surprisingly little cynicism in and about work. The Joshua Ferris narrator says disapprovingly: ‘We didn’t have much patience for cynics’236, so even the mildest scepticism about redundant meetings or unnecessary admin or the futility of throwing a ball of twine around is likely to be dismissed as outrageously cynical. Similarly, there is little overt despair at the prospect of spending so much of life in a partition-board cubicle trying to keep the number of unanswered emails to fewer than five hundred. There is of course always whingeing – about overwork, poor support services, misguided management and so on, but this frequently has a ritualized, cosy feel, as though there is no real sense of grievance behind it. Even the whingeing is a form of happy bonhomie.

  Only rarely are the unconscious adaptations revealed. In work I drink cheap instant coffee, whereas at home I grind French beans and then use an Italian machine to make strong espresso with a proper, thick crema. The instant stuff has always tasted fine at work and once, when I was out of beans, I tried it at home. It was absolutely undrinkable, shockingly vile. But back at my desk next day it was once again acceptable. So at work even my taste buds renounced complexity and depth.

  The problem is that work involves not just the activity for which we are paid but the maintenance of the simplified persona, a constant performance, ceaseless acting. This is why colleagues spotted outside work, for instance in the lunch hour, so often seem shabby, diminished and furtive. They are temporarily off the set, so the artificial vibrancy has been extinguished and only a husk remains. Worse, we are acting without even being aware of it, even believing this to be natural behaviour – and entirely sublimating all negative feelings. This may explain why so many professionals with well-paid and apparently satisfying jobs are suddenly and for no obvious reason struck down by depression. The problem is the loss of identity involved in surrender to the group – the mask has fused into the face. The staff in the ad agency in Joshua Ferris’s book are all mad about each other (‘Most of us liked most everyone’), all clever, creative, witty, lively – and all on antidepressants (‘We fought with depression…We took showers sitting down and couldn’t get out of bed on weekends. Finally we consulted HR about the details of seeing a specialist, and the specialist prescribed medication’).

  Once I devised a course with the skills employees really need for advancement. There were four core modules:

  Professional Humour

  Theory and Practice of Professional Esteem

  Neology

  Mentoring

  Professional Humour (PH), a more sophisticated form of Professional Cheeriness (PC), is the key core competency, a universal facilitator and lubricant, but confusing to the untrained because, although the jokes must always be rewarded by hearty laughter, they must never be actually funny. This is because Professional Humour is not humour but facetiousness. Humour is a way of engaging with reality; facetiousness is a way of evading it. For instance, Professional Humour should always sound wickedly subversive while offering no threat whatever.

  Established Colleague (with hearty roar):

  ‘Are you behaving yourself?’

  New Colleague (lamely, not yet facetiousness-trained):

  ‘Yes.’

  Established Colleague (with even heartier roar):

  ‘What a shame!’

  And it should sound like savage abuse while remaining entirely innocuous.

  First Colleague at meeting:

  ‘So I attended that conference…’

  Second Colleague (incredulous):

  ‘You mean they let you in?’

  Third Colleague (even more incredulous):

  ‘You mean we let you out?’

  Entire meeting, but especially the First Colleague, laughs uproariously.

  And Professional Humour should always make the workplace seem intolerable chaos made endurable only by the bright insouciance of the employees. Support staff for once provide crucial support by decorating their workstations with posters and cards:

  You don’t have to be crazy to work here – but it helps!

  Blessed are the cracked for they let in light!

  Situation Worsening – Please Send Chocolate!

  I cherish all of these – but this is my favourite: Only Robinson Crusoe got it all done by Friday!

  A key book for the PH module would be The Levity Effect: Why It Pays to Lighten Up by the employee motivation consultants Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher. As Gostick tellingly explains, ‘We define levity as more of a lightness, more being fun than being funny.’237 The goal is a ‘lighthearted workplace’. Another set book would be Fish! A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Lmprove Results. This expounds ‘the fish philosophy’ of ‘lightening up’ by adopting the practice of Seattle fishmongers, who maintain high morale by throwing fish at each other.238 Real fish would, of course, be too smelly for the office so the corporate equivalent is throwing around a soft toy called Percy the Perch.

  And Professional Humour may itself offer a career path. Some organizations have an official Levity Manager and Levity Team, for instance the advertising agency Iris North America, whose LM defines his team as ‘the Smile Squad’ and their function as promoting ‘general well-being and serendipitous happenings’.

  The module Theory and Practice of Professional Esteem (TPPE) is largely about flattery which, like Professional Humour, is more complex than it appears. Many believe that anyone can easily kiss ass. But bosses are connoisseurs of flattery. They receive it constantly every day and are unlikely to be impressed by anything crass – which may well produce annoyance rather than gratitude. It is important to remember that flattery is an art. Firstly, it requires attention, understanding and perceptiveness to identify exactly the praise each boss yearns to hear. Next, it requires delicacy and tact in choosing the right moment to deliver this customized praise. Then, it requires language skills to phrase it properly. And finally, of course, it needs facetiousness to disguise the flattery as banter. All this is necessary for successful flattering upwards. Though just as important is flattering down. The common mistake of bosses is attempting to wield naked power. But, in the contemporary workplace, where everyone is a buddy, flattery is infinitely more effective than intimidation. Rather than issuing a command, an astute boss will gain more cooperation by hand-wringing and wailing, ‘Mike, I hate to dump this on you – but it’s important and I just can’t trust anyone else here to do it properly.’ This fosters the illusion employees cherish most – indispensability. Ferris’s narrator admits: ‘Each and every one of us harbored the illusion that the whole enterprise would go straight to hell without our individual daily contributions.’ In fact, no one is indispensable. Every worker is replaced and forgotten as swiftly as the anonymous slaves who hauled blocks for the pyramids.

  The Neology module studies the creation and use of the new terms, titles and language constantly required by all specialists – and the discipline’s own revered specialists will be known as neologians. It is crucial to be able to impress meetings with statements like, ‘We need to get out of these vertical silos and provide more opportunities for synergy and cross-fertilization’. ‘Synergy’ and ‘cross-fertilization’ are among the most currently exciting workplace terms because they imply new forms of collaboration, cooperation and communion. ‘There’s so much talent in this organization. If only people could break out of their silos and get together.’

  ‘Innovation’ is another key concept and itself constantly needs innovative terms such as ‘pushing the envelope’, ‘thinking outside the box’, ‘blueskying’ and ‘reaching beyond the low-hanging fruit’. But there are always new terms for every occasion – ’ There’s no smoke without salmon’, ‘We’ll just have to Box and Cox’, ‘It’s not my home competency’ (so much more satisfactory than saying, ‘I know nothing about that’).

  Finally, the development of resonant new titles is crucial in
maintaining morale. One of the most successful title changes in recent times has been the rebranding of ‘Personnel’ as ‘Human Resource Management’, though, in conversation, the HR guys describe themselves facetiously as ‘the people people’.

  The last of the four modules, Mentoring, is about selecting and bonding with those most likely to offer career advancement and, when this is accomplished, becoming a mentor in turn to those most willing and able to provide useful service. The essential tactic is drinking with the potential mentor after work and making use of recently acquired flattery and facetiousness skills. It may also be necessary to develop new interests and sporting activities. I once ruined my prospects by admitting to a sailing-obsessed boss that I was comfortable only around canals where the water had been stagnant for at least a century.

  Surviving work requires hypocrisy. Many thinkers have attacked this vice – and none more consistently and vehemently than Christ. But Christ never had to earn a living or endure colleagues (disciples are very different). Honesty at work is a dangerous luxury. It would be foolish to reveal one’s true feelings – and even more foolish to become involved in the great eruptions, the disputes and feuds and simmering animosities. It is useful to remember the Stoics on the futility of anger and especially Seneca who wrote extensively on the subject.239 Quarrelling is a form of emotional involvement that establishes a relationship – and there should rarely be a genuine relationship at work. But an attitude of surly superiority is just as bad – professionally untenable, damaging to the character and far too revealing. The secret of workplace detachment is to understand your colleagues while preventing them from understanding you. One technique is to use all the cheerful conventions but with an elaborate, ironic courtesy so that you are neither breaking the rules nor playing by them. This creates useful uncertainty. What is his game?