Image header: Sascha Kohlmann, imported by the Archive Team, CC-BY-SA-3.0

It was just another day at the office.
I walked down a bright hallway on the second floor, passing small to medium-sized open-plan offices on either side.

After a complete renovation, three new office floors had been created in the listed building. Once a traditional printing plant in the early years of industrial expansion, it now housed an on- and offline media agency, a subsidiary of one of the largest publishers in the field of science and medicine.
Floor-to-ceiling glass panels in frosted steel frames created an airy transparency and let in natural light.
Lush green accents were provided by flowering philodendrons, rubber plants, umbrella trees, weeping figs and Swiss cheese plants that had only been introduced to the office environment recently.

Behind large desks and towering black computer monitors, I saw my colleagues. Their eyes fixed on the screen, their fingers moving over the keyboards.

Image: marsupium photography, CC-BY-SA-2.0

There was nothing unusual about the environment and the people. Nothing unusual about that day, and surely nothing unusual about walking down a hallway.
There was just nothing unusual going on, yet I saw myself from the outside.
With a sudden, blinding realization, it struck me: I was a bee in a corporate hive.
My life was mediocre. I was mediocre.
At the same moment, it was as if I woke up from a bad dream. It was as if someone had held my head under water for a long time and only now at the last moment released the firm grip. Mentally, I choked and gasped for air.

At that moment a story crossed my mind.

Once a young man approached the Greek philosopher Socrates and asked him how to acquire wisdom.Socrates took him to a nearby river and invited the young man to walk with him into the river. When the water was up their neck, Socrates suddenly took the young man by surprise and plunged his head under the water.The young man struggled for his life but Socrates held forcibly on. Finally, he released the young man. Gasping for breath, he asked Socrates in bewilderment why he wanted to drown him.Socrates asked him, "What did you want more than anything in the world when you were down there?"The young man replied, "Air."Socrates said, "When you want wisdom with the same amount of fervor that you wanted air, it is then that you will get it!”

Image: Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken, CC-BY-SA-2.0

Somehow it was as if I had known it all the while.
On the outside my air hadn’t changed.
I was calm and relaxed when I opened the glass door to the office space I shared with another colleague. On entering I smiled at him whom I liked to call teasingly “my favorite colleague.”
He smiled back at me. I walked over to my desk. From the neighboring office space a colleague I had befriended, waved at me. I waved back at her and sat down.

I put my hand on the mouse, a grey round shaped plastic device that was rubbed shiny on certain parts, and moved it over the pad. The screen turned on.
An excel chart that I had been doomed to deliver popped up. I looked at the black-framed cells, rows and columns, the bold-typed headlines, the color-highlighted numbers I had neatly set up.
Why did I put up with charts that were as exciting to me as the taste of plain, unbleached wheat flour? What on earth was I doing here?

Image: Texas State Library and Archives Commission, CC-BY-SA-2.0

I guess I am not completely wrong when I claim that we all have felt special, that once we all have felt like that. And I surely I was no exemption. I had thought of myself to be different.
But looking at myself now from a detached point of view I had to admit that – even if it might have looked different from the outside – fundamentally there was nothing more common, ordinary and utterly conventional than what I was and what I did. I was after all a regular girl on a regular schedule. I worked from 9 to 5 (i.e. I worked actually long hours like everyone else did, because it was implicitly expected and not regarded as after hours on a regular base.) I received regular paychecks, had regular weekends and went regularly on vacations. It was a live staked out between bureaucracy, dutifulness and pettiness.

Where did I become assimilated? Where on the road did that happen? How did the confusion creep in?

Back to NOTES

Corporate system office realization Socrates wisdom