Why is sitting in an office sipping your favourite coffee, answering emails, and filling endless Excel sheets while alienated from the product of your work considered the epitome of modern work-related suffering, while other types of (very demanding) labor are considered 'just regular jobs'? Are we treating some kinds of suffering as more 'prestigious' than others?
We all have a clear image of what a corporate job looks like, even if we never had one. The fluorescent lights, the endless lines of cubicles and desks, the greyish carpets, and the millions of people working hours on end on something they'll likely never see come to fruition.
For us, the corporate employee became the symbol of someone who sold their life to a company. This might be because an existential crisis is much easier to narrate when everything else seems fine: no obvious physical costs to our job, it looks comfortable, and it's financially stable. When we're still unhappy in a situation like that, it forces us to look underneath the surface.
This is where I think we go wrong. People actively participating in anti-corporate discourse online have had terrible experiences of alienation working in those companies, and they tend to idealize whatever lies outside of them.
It's very easy to quit and dedicate your life to ceramics when you have huge savings from years of financial stability and disposable income. Probably, someone who has worked selling ceramics from the start is having a much rougher time.
I think we have fallen into the trap of who gets to dominate a narrative online, a terrain that exponentially benefits those who can articulate their suffering in language that best fits the medium. We're simply not listening to those who are tired of making physical effort for way less money and are accumulating debt and stress, because they're not talking about their suffering on Reddit with words that resemble French existentialism.
White-collar workers are often depicted as people who betrayed themselves: they were creative before, and they 'sold their soul', but why don't we make the same association when we think about a construction worker? We tend to naturalize that type of labor and see those people as having way less potential to begin with.
There is a peculiar kind of doom corporate workers feel when they cannot really justify their work as useful. It's much easier to say 'I'm a gardener' or 'I'm a lawyer'. We can easily picture what that person spends their time doing, and what they produce. In corporate jobs, people can spend endless hours doing something that doesn't produce a specific product.
What does a 'Project Manager' actually do? Is it a real skill, or can anyone do it? Can they see what they've done at the end of the day? Or are they just a minimal fraction of a gigantic enterprise that could easily replace them with anyone else? If corporate jobs disappear, could those workers contribute to the world with any skill?