Corporate slavery is a term that has been thrown around for the past few decades. Whether you’ve heard it from anti-capitalism socialists, revolutionary young individuals or just whining divas; the term often refers to how someone’s job takes-over their entire life, leaving them with barely enough time to sleep, eat, or even drop a deuce.
However, nothing really defines the line between someone who’s working long hours because they are a corporate slave, a workaholic, or – God forbid – someone who actually enjoys what they do. Since we live for generalizations in Egypt (which, by the way, we should absolutely stop doing), anyone that works for a company that’s not their own, and has non-flexible working hours, qualifies as a “corporate slave.”
So why am I giving you a 101 lesson on corporate slavery? Because there is one thing I have never gotten the grasp of. Since when has slavery become a choice? I mean, Kanye West and his unorthodox beliefs aside, if you have the choice to quit your job and find another one, or not work at all, you’re not really enslaved are you? So why do we stick to jobs that we dislike so much? That’s one question that has been tickling my mind, and every single day I find myself with the same endless answers. The car, the house, “financial security,” getting married, buying new clothes, or going on a nice holiday.
Not once have the answers been: to leave an impact, make a change or have fun, come to mind. I mean, yes of course a source of income is necessary to survive. The only problem is that we all lose focus of what is necessary and what is not. I mean, if you ask me, I would probably only need a portion of my salary to survive.
So why do I choose to do what I do? Because no one wants the job that will help them just survive anymore. We all want (or most of us at the very least) the job that will give us the car, the house, the nice fancy dinners, you know the drill. I’m not saying we should all quit our current jobs and find nicer ones that will help us survive on the bare minimum, but I’m sure as hell that there is a lot of room in the middle, for an equilibrium. Until we figure something out, let’s stop blaming our nine to five jobs for the so called “corporate slavery” we claim to suffer from. This suffering, is in fact, coming from being a slave to the materialistic world.
