The Corporate World

[tonywalt]

Is dreadfully Machiavellian.

[The Atheist]

Doesn't it depend which bit you're in?

I have plenty of days that I wish were boring.

Boring compared to what? Painting? Bricklaying? Neuroscience?

What kind of occupation isn't boring at least some of the time?

[osho]

In fact no jobs can incessantly delight you since human nature is so imbued with jaded impulses anything you do will be uninteresting in a while. Even if you have a very beautiful wife or husband in a while you become fed up or if you have a big bank balance this will grow smaller and smaller in your eyes.

You dream of being a boss in the organization you work for since to obey commands make you languid and you want to boss all. But in a while once you are the boss you craved you will find this job boring since there is nothing of the sort you always fashioned. There are challenges, deadlines, targets, strategies and the like and all these things are likely to wear you out in a while.

Tell me the kind of job you are doing and we will discuss

I am in the corporate world and it is not as boring as you deem nor as exciting as anyone may fancy. However it engages me and I often get drunk with the work and enjoy

[tonywalt]

The legal corporate/finance world (specifially in this case) is very Machivellian, Darwinian, and cut throat. That is the very nature of it. That is the essence. So, it's necessary to narrrow down what field I am in.

As for me, I have been in it at a number of firms for 16 years (I am not fresh out of law school) and the above themes are always there in medium to large degrees. Largely because it attracts the bloodless and ammoral in droves, more than any other sector.

Boss smosh. I'm a boss, who has bosses, and they have bosses.... We are one big cluster f#$k of Backstabbing. I would know all about it, as I have been in the game quite a while. Goes without saying that this is not my cup of tea, and never really was from the beginning.

There is no cure, I have to devise a plan and leave at a point.

The money tit keeps me, as it affords me to do quite a lot, but it's not worth it. Not for me. Not anymore.

To hell with this.

PS Yes, I am having a bad week, so the above is a bit louder than it should be, but there I did say it.

[blazeofglory]

This corporate world I too find myself in fortunately or unfortunately is part of my life and it is like my inhalation and exhalation and I cannot do away with this no matter how much I try. I enjoy though something here enmesh me and I feel delighted.

Life is like that my friend. You do not like those things which you use over and over again. You maybe fed up with everything you do it mundanely. If you eat the same foods again and again you do not like it but you cannot change your dish and you must learn to adjust.

[Alexander III]

I think the Wall street type, Yuppie life is anything but boring. As you have pointed out, it is highly Machiavellian, but that is what makes it fun. Everything is quick, and only the strongest survive and go places.

Have any of you guys seen the movie Wall Street with Michael Douglass ?

[osho]

It is totally Machiavellian and everybody contrives ideas to deceive their own fellow beings. Man falls and it is like Adam's fall when he is enmeshed in a corporate trap. Man for his materiel gain never thinks twice. He does the unthinkably undoable, immoral and impudent.

[tonywalt]

I think the Wall street type, Yuppie life is anything but boring. As you have pointed out, it is highly Machiavellian, but that is what makes it fun. Everything is quick, and only the strongest survive and go places.

Have any of you guys seen the movie Wall Street with Michael Douglass ?

Wrong word, I shall edit out boring and replace it with dreadful.

Ok. A Machiavellian world is anything but fun for me. And I am towards the higher percentage financially and physically. Just because I was the biggest kid in the class did not mean I exerted the power by beating and bullying and gaining advantage that way.

You are a fellow online lit member and I do not want to buck heads with a friend, but "everything is quick" "strongest survive". How old are you? Sounds young - imparting cliches like that.

[Alexander III]

Wrong word, I shall edit out boring and replace it with dreadful.

Ok. A Machiavellian world is anything but fun for me. And I am towards the higher percentage financially and physically. Just because I was the biggest kid in the class did not mean I exerted the power by beating and bullying and gaining advantage that way.

You are a fellow online lit member and I do not want to buck heads with a friend, but "everything is quick" "strongest survive". How old are you? Sounds young - imparting cliches like that.

It's ok if it sounds young, I am young, 18-19, but it is true - my dad was a wall street type and from what I have learned from him, those things may sound cliche, but they are true.

And "dreadful" makes more sense. I guess it is up to personal taste. I enjoy the Machiavellian way of things, it seems so natural and honest, honest to our nature that is. But it's not just the corporate world, try getting anywhere in politics or science or anything without being Machiavellian.

[LitNetIsGreat]

The legal corporate/finance world (specifially in this case) is very Machivellian, Darwinian, and cut throat. That is the very nature of it. That is the essence. So, it's necessary to narrrow down what field I am in.

As for me, I have been in it at a number of firms for 16 years (I am not fresh out of law school) and the above themes are always there in medium to large degrees. Largely because it attracts the bloodless and ammoral in droves, more than any other sector.

Boss smosh. I'm a boss, who has bosses, and they have bosses.... We are one big cluster f#$k of Backstabbing. I would know all about it, as I have been in the game quite a while. Goes without saying that this is not my cup of tea, and never really was from the beginning.

There is no cure, I have to devise a plan and leave at a point.

The money tit keeps me, as it affords me to do quite a lot, but it's not worth it. Not for me. Not anymore.

To hell with this.

PS Yes, I am having a bad week, so the above is a bit louder than it should be, but there I did say it.

I can feel your pain brother. I don't work in a corporate environment but that doesn't matter, (almost) all work is incomprehensibly evil and morally degrading. I am being totally serious. Losing your time and freedom in exchange for cash can be little else.

Of course there is little to be done about it (for most people) and I suppose that having no job and being destitute is worse, but that often doesn't help much.

Never mind, try not to let it bother you too much. At least you have the intelligence to realise that work is absolutely the last refuge of the unimaginative as our Oscar so rightly understood.

Chin up.

[tonywalt]

It's ok if it sounds young, I am young, 18-19, but it is true - my dad was a wall street type and from what I have learned from him, those things may sound cliche, but they are true.

Torture is true, so is mugging for financial gain. Neither are pleasant.

And "dreadful" makes more sense. I guess it is up to personal taste. I enjoy the Machiavellian way of things, it seems so natural and honest, honest to our nature that is. But it's not just the corporate world, try getting anywhere in politics or science or anything without being Machiavellian.

Let me clarify further, as I romanticised it a bit too much. It's dishonest, backstabbbing, and lacks moral backbone. There is no denying that some may enjoy this environment. I am only saying that I do not. As far as natural goes, when you have a boot at the back of your neck one day, I doubt you will be singing the same song.

Again, me beating a smaller guy in the darwinian scheme of things may be natural. I gain. He loses, many things, but most of all he would lose social heirachy. I doubt he enjoy the natural and honesty of it all.

And again, I am part of the privileged social and economic class, within a privileged social and economic class. As such I gain to benefit from this. And yet still detest it.

[tonywalt]

I can feel your pain brother. I don't work in a corporate environment but that doesn't matter, (almost) all work is incomprehensibly evil and morally degrading. I am being totally serious. Losing your time and freedom in exchange for cash can be little else.

Thanks Neely. I mean this in a serious way. What do you do? I am looking at options:willy_nilly:

Of course there is little to be done about it (for most people) and I suppose that having no job and being destitute is worse, but that often doesn't help much.

Perhaps, I am sure you would know whether Oscar Wilde was destitute (my the definition of the day) in Paris - I think he came across as happy. Certainly, he kept his middle finger up..that's says something. And he paid a horrendous price for his own nature. Admirable. Braver then the 99 percent.

Never mind, try not to let it bother you too much. At least you have the intelligence to realise that work is absolutely the last refuge of the unimaginative as our Oscar so rightly understood.

Chin up.

Will do!

[Paulclem]

Quite often the worthwhile jobs which have a lot of job satisfaction are not highly valued in the pay stakes.

I do like my job, but it's not a hobby - I go because it pays the bills, and I happen to enjoy most of it.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Quite often the worthwhile jobs which have a lot of job satisfaction are not highly valued in the pay stakes.

I do like my job, but it's not a hobby - I go because it pays the bills, and I happen to enjoy most of it.

That's about as good as it gets. Really that is about as good as it gets.

To work is to give up your very limited time on earth for money. It's that simple.

Great if your own personal prison sentence is not too bad, and actually mine could be far worse, but even so, only fools see it as otherwise.

I have absolutely no time for people who come into millions of pounds and still go to work everyday. What losers. The money should be taken off them or they should be regularly subjected to beatings with big sticks. What losers.

Just checking my wed lottery ticket. I'll post an edit if I have won...

Edit: not a single fookin' number and mathematically furthest away for even getting close. Oh well, I'll just read a bit and distract myself from the prospect of work in the morning before going to bed.

[The Atheist]

Wrong word, I shall edit out boring and replace it with dreadful.

Ok, so your OP should have read:

The world of corporate finance in dreadful and full of amoral charcters.

I'd go along with that.

[OrphanPip]

To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, I'd like to be rich, but I do not want to do what you need to do to be rich. If I wanted to be rich I would have studied engineering or medicine at university instead of a basic research science. Eventually, I'll probably cave and try and get a higher paying job in the corporate world in food safety management or such, but for now playing with animals suits me fine.

[JuniperWoolf]

Me, if I wanted to be rich, I would have gotten a job as an instrumentation apprentice right out of school getting $40/hour at age eighteen to look at big, boring machines. I'd rather live in a tiny appartment, take classes and eat an inordinate amount of pasta for the rest of my twenties. At least school is thrilling.

[osho]

We all are not devoid of the Machiavellian kind in our encounter with people in every society. People deceive and manipulate others for their personal gains. We all have that trait in varying degrees. We want to rise stepping on others' toes since we are power mongers and power ensures the fulfillment of our material need. With power or money you can achieve most of your objectives. You can have sky-high mansions, limit powers and gain uncountable wealth. You will be a lord and you can have as many wives as you want and can have control and influences over most resources and can influence drafting laws. As Christopher Marlowe in one of his famous tragedies the Jew of Malta said religion is child's game and there is no sin only ignorance. It is our nature to rise over and above all and rule over them. In ruling you need craft and duplicity and if you are too generous and kind you cannot stick with power and you must knock somebody down and in a real corporate world saintliness and benignancy does not work. There is a deal, a kind of contract and compromise. You have to pay a heavy price for the luxury you want in life. You will have to retreat to a world where you will incarcerate yourself in a cell and you cannot go out. If you want to climb the corporate ladder since the rungs there are too narrow to accommodate many you have pull down your competitors. In real life your friends are compatriots and you work in a win-win environment but in a corporate world you will have to go through a cutthroat competition and might rules prior to the law.

Imagine you are working in an American bank and you are a honest employee and have no nepotism or connection. You are a hard worker. Yet in a while you be under a provocative circumstance and some others people maybe watching you enviously since you are a hard worker you have a better prospect of getting a raise or promotion. The rest of your friends are not hard workers and resent your hard work and start grotesquely campaigning against you. They indulge in bad-mouthing against you before your boss. Though you have some weaknesses as everybody does and work hard to overcome them you will find no circumstances to circumvent them. As a result you wile be humiliated and dishonored. This is the corporate world and people talk about corporate governance. This is nonsense in fact.

[Buh4Bee]

Tony- Get out! and work for yourself. You may make less, but you'll eliminate some of the boss thing. If you are willing to have less, its truly amazing how much less stress you can have. Start a second career, do some on-line class. Open up a bar on the beach- I know you like to drink.

[tonywalt]

I can blend all of the above, all very valuable.

I no longer have the necessary personal distractions to offset work namely a long term relationship. This is a cliche, but a damn true one. Time alone is resulting in a lot of self examination - all kinds. This on balance for the better, but sometimes it has a bit of a sting.

[Emil Miller]

The legal corporate/finance world (specifially in this case) is very Machivellian, Darwinian, and cut throat. That is the very nature of it. That is the essence. So, it's necessary to narrrow down what field I am in.

As for me, I have been in it at a number of firms for 16 years (I am not fresh out of law school) and the above themes are always there in medium to large degrees. Largely because it attracts the bloodless and ammoral in droves, more than any other sector.

Boss smosh. I'm a boss, who has bosses, and they have bosses.... We are one big cluster f#$k of Backstabbing. I would know all about it, as I have been in the game quite a while. Goes without saying that this is not my cup of tea, and never really was from the beginning.

There is no cure, I have to devise a plan and leave at a point.

The money tit keeps me, as it affords me to do quite a lot, but it's not worth it. Not for me. Not anymore.

To hell with this.

PS Yes, I am having a bad week, so the above is a bit louder than it should be, but there I did say it.

This is the kind of thing that almost everyone comes up against at some time in their working life. Even if a person is working in a well paid job, the sheer mundanity of work, let alone any chicanery among the staff, is enough to drive some people to the wall. My way round it was to have a variety of different jobs so that I didn't get stale and bored out of my mind. Also, apart from learning about different aspects of society, I also met a lot of different people, which is great for sizing up human nature. I never wanted a career as it would have meant staying in the same work for the duration and a more soul destroying existence isn't worth thinking about.
Of course a rolling stone gathers no moss, but if you respect money enough to make it work for you rather than flinging it about ostentatiously, it's possible to come out of it reasonably well. The important thing is to get out of the rat race as soon as possible, only a fool stays in it unnecessarily.

[virginiawang]

I never undertook a stable job that requires me to work from morning till evening, perhaps due to my health problems. I prefer working like a vagrant. Now I am looking forward to doing translation and interpretation from Chinese to English, and I've been sending letters to some of those companies since a few days ago. Still I need the best wishes from all of you.

Tony, if you do not like your work and your boss....I do not know what I should suggest you here because people do suffer in a limited reality. You will have to decide what you value most, money or something more abstract, and come to your own conclusion.
Once I worked for an English institute as an editor. I rewrote some articles online for an old teacher who once taught me when I was a child. He did not want to pay me, so my friends did not let him read what I wrote. I was very angry because of what my friends did, and I was fired. Perhaps it was not done by my boyfriend, but by an enemy, who has been there over the years. I am still angry now.

[osho]

Working where it matters


I throw in this amidst you
Have you savored the pickle of a corporate world?
The one who had the tang of it understand it

This world where you break away from yourself to be in
To adjust and profit from the situations you remain hemmed in

Be a chatterbox if you or backbite or go gibberish
You have to prove to be what you are not
Supple, domiciled and modifiable
By precipitating from the height of your distinction

You are a specter, masquerade in every new situation
For you have a chain of bosses
Or else you get crushed into the petites of pointlessness

This corporate world downsizes you
You will be reduced to the vermillion of the Metamorphosis
You will lose your stature, baptized into a corporate self

You as a man do not stay alive but subsist as a cog in the larger mechanism

Of the reality you cannot decipher

[Cunninglinguist]

What kind of occupation isn't boring at least some of the time?

Indeed! I bet James Bond has to file a ton of paperwork every time he kills someone.

[tonywalt]

I would not say that every job becomes mundane-quite a minority of people love their vocation.

I could even say the same of people in the corporate/legal world. The retention and accumulation of power gives them joy. They are not introspective and sensitised (unlike the sweeping majority of the forum members here) so they don't think about the matter in terms of damage to others or the sheer fact that they will likely 'die' by the same sword. I know they don't think or care about it-cuz I know them.

I don't know if anyone saw the senate hearings after the 2008 financial crisis, and listened to the people before the senate form Goldman Sachs("GS"). At one point a GS employee was asked whether he felt sorry about something written by email, and said he was "sorry, it was emailed" - a flagrant freduian slip, and he corrected himself unconvincingly.

[Melysnl]

I believe you have to be either an a$$kisser, a liar, or politically correct to excel in the corporate world. Or you have to keep quiet to the point of being irrelevant in order to fly under the radar. Neither of those categories describes my personality which is why I've achieved my greatest successes when I've gone out on my own as an entrepreneur.

I have a theory that the truth is never told during the 9 to 5 hours.
-Hunter Thompson

[tonywalt]

What type of business do you do?