Your Boss is Watching: Why am I working…?

So yeh, my boss comes into my office late Friday afternoon and is trying to get my opinion on the best technique to work around some system flaws to do some data migration. After talking to me in circles for about twenty minutes, he turns to me and says “I need you to put on your ‘thinking cap’ for a second” Are you serious? Am I in third grade? It really irks me when people insult my intelligence, intentionally or not. Then I thought to myself, “Why am I working?” No seriously. I think I may actually hate people, but somehow I hate bosses even more. It really doesn’t matter if they’re the nicest boss in the world, they’re still a boss. I’ve never been a big fan of working for people and am anxiously waiting for the day where the only person/people I will have to answer to is my family, the government (selectively of course), and myself.

Back to the story. So I’m in this confined ass space that he’s making even smaller and he’s demanding my input on how to resolve these incompatibility issues. Of course when I immediately give him three different solutions and a sorted order of their difficulty and stability…..he doesn’t listen and says “Yeh…..tha’s not really what we’re tryina do!” Had my suggestions been wrong then I would have easily took the criticism and started thinking about an alternate (and correct) one. 45 minutes later, he calls me back into his office and shows me a paper w/ three different solutions that “he” came up with and an ordered lists of their complexity. Same shit as I said almost an hour ago.

Now I’ve worked in several different positions throughout my professional and academic career and with several different people as well. However as diverse as these environments have been, I’ve always somehow surrounded myself with folks who may be more academically advanced than myself but lack basic ass reasoning. I am frankly getting sick and tired of working for people whom I am obviously smarter than, at least logically. The fault really falls on my head though. So the natural question one would ask at this point is, “If I’m so great then why don’t I have a business?” That’s actually a good ass question though. But I think this problem or question is really a challenge. A challenge that we all have to ask ourselves one day.

When you work for someone or a some company, you are assisting them in doing their will, not your own. Usually people use work as a means to an end, which I fully understand; however, I feel as if over time that “end” becomes less and less defined. As we work the day-to-day grind, we easily become consumed with the pressures of societal expectations and ever-watching eyes of Big Brother and his minions - bills, credit, taxes, etc. - whom I call “Little Brother” (write that one down, you’ll wanna use it later). These things make it easy to be so scared to make a move or, even worse, establishes a false sense of “comfort” or normalcy. In that state, none of us’ll ever pull the trigger.

My parents have worked the same job for the past couple of decades for the same employer. They did that because they are trying to ensure that I have the basic tools I need to establish my own independence and become successful, and I love them for that. However, this is not everyone’s story.

As an educated, single brother w/ no kids or record (don’t clap for that, that’s not an accomplishment), if I were to work at the same job, for the same employer, etc. for the next n +1 years, then wouldn’t I be shitting on what my parents have sacrificed so that I would not have to do the same thing? I want to work towards my own dream and yes, jobs here and there will help me/you get there, but at what point does one break off from day-to-day and clearly define a plan to establish their financial independence?

I haven’t figured that out, in finite terms at least, but please believe that I’m trying to. I hate bosses.

Discuss…