Climb the Career Ladder or….Save the World?!
Climbing the career ladder does not make sense. At quarterly performance reviews, I think we need to replace all arbitrary targets and so-called S.M.A.R.T. goals to directing our attention to actually…saving the world instead?
The ‘performance review’ at companies is another jumping through hoops exercise. I’d play the game on my side by filling in the forms and justifying what I’ve been doing so far is sufficient to the job description. They would use this as a chance to ‘motivate me’ or in other words try to squeeze more productivity out of me, to increase profits, to increase shareholder’s wealth. How are you going to achieve MORE, as what you do is never enough. You feel the pressure to work more hours, get more done, and then you’d be in with the chance of promotion, which may not involve more pay, but perhaps a change in job title to something that sounds more important and fancy. Well done, you are now a Senior Executive Managing Director of Paper Shuffling Tedium. We already spend so much of our time at work, or preparing for work, or recovering from work, travelling to and from work, we have such little time and head space left.
We don’t have time to really do the truly important things. We are chasing our tails frantically, and forgetting there are some serious issues we must tackle. We read a news article about the state of the world, and think, oh how awful… We naively think, well, hopefully someone else out there is sorting it out. Someone else is campaigning about it, figuring out solutions to the problems. Surely all those clever people who studied the appropriate things can use their brains and fix it all. It’ll all resolve itself, cos we’re not stupid to just let the planet die, surely? I mean, I can’t cos I am too busy filling in this performance review form, the deadline is tomorrow.
And a lot of us are completely exhausted. So it is hard to consider how we can make adjustments to our lives by going plastic free, or sourcing ethical products, and ensuring we are there for our friends & families, never mind what we could be doing to help save our oceans, rainforests, soil, when we have all our work obligations to focus on. I watch documentaries on how badly we are messing up our environment and just think — but what can I do about it? Our mental capacity has been taken over by our jobs, climbing that darn career ladder… and we are sucked into it because we need the money to pay for our mortgages, bills and lifestyle.
For an authentic ‘performance review’ of my life, I sit with my pen and paper and think what REALLY is the most important thing? How to stop procrastinating on things that don’t matter? Where should I focus my time and energy, and get rid of things not serving me and the world?
Well there is nothing more important than… making the world a better place!!
I had an idea to set up a ‘SAVE THE WORLD’ club. And everyone needs to join it. We need to get together, talk about what is wrong, and then take action to sort it out! Just like that. Imagine if we didn’t have jobs taking over our time (I am talking about the pointless paper shuffling jobs, not the doctors, carers, essential people), we could have a huge army of people and go and… say… clean everything up, plant some trees, stop pollution? But then you realise the problems are so very complex. We have to overhaul all our broken systems and infiltrate all the bad practices of the evil corporations. No wonder those clever people still haven’t figured it out. Where to even begin?
I sometimes feel completely overwhelmed with the problems in the world, I want to scream out, “WHAT IS GOING ON?”
And of course the environmental issues are linked to the mental health crisis, because we are nature: nature is suffering and so are we. We are all so stressed, burnt out, exhausted, and also I see people around me with addiction issues, depression, anxiety, low self-worth issues and whatever else. I just want to go around hugging everyone and telling them everything is going to be OK, get them to listen to some uplifting songs to cheer them up. We used to look positively into the future, believing with every year that passes life is getting better, but just because we live in this ‘modern’ world, are more technologically advanced and further in time, does this necessarily mean it is a better time? What if the direction we are going as a species is totally wrong… just like my climbing up the corporate ladder was completely off my true path? We are behaving like sheep, getting lost somewhere far off course and about to fall off a cliff. What if I am here to wake people up to how everything is going terribly wrong and to change the course of humanity? What if my calling is to… errrr save the world? Through love, connection, community, going back to sustainable practices working with nature, getting everyone remembering their aliveness, to remind them to slow down and smell the roses.
UH OH, maybe I have some sort of a Messiah Complex.
And so what if I do? Maybe we ALL need to have a Messiah Complex! I would rather spend my years focusing on ways of making the world a kinder, loving, more sustainable, beautiful place, in any way I can, than climbing the corporate career ladder to nowhere.
