Monday to Fridayitis

But if even CEOs are victims of the unrealistic goals that are making us all so miserable, who is setting them?

Well, it is us, of course. CEOs and boards are answerable to shareholders and now that virtually all of us have superannuation, we are all shareholders. As shareholders we demand continuously improving returns on our investments, a constant, upward trend.

As nothing in real life actually increases like this, we, as shareholders, are placing inhuman demands on ourselves as workers.

The pressure is circular, of course, we are miserable in our jobs so hope to earn enough from our investments to escape from them one day. To that end we keep demanding more from the companies we invest in, which leads our bosses to demand more from us, as employees, and the whole damn cycle starts again.

What keeps us on this treadmill, when so many of us are so much richer than any other generation in history? Some say greed, but I think greed is a symptom not a cause. I think it is fear. We are suffering from free floating anxiety, the most dangerous kind. We don’t know what we are afraid of, so we don’t know how to fix it, instead we surround ourself with possessions, arm ourselves with prestige and status, in the hope that safety is a commodity like everything else, and can be bought.

The solution? I reckon we’ll all be waiting a long time if we think someone or something outside ourselves is going to come along and make us feel safer and happier. Perhaps my generation has finally reached the point in our lives where we need to face up to our own individual misery and risk doing something to change it.