The third week of January I went on a trip for work. It was about four days long and left me with very mixed feelings. The trip was to San Francisco, a city I already wasn't very fond of anyways. I arrived on Monday and had to go straight to HQ to meet my boss, meet all the people *he* wanted me to meet, and see all the places he wanted me to see. I work remotely, so being around coworkers - so many of them - was downright exhausting. And the funniest part was that I had to actually *work* for the last few hours, despite having spent the whole day traveling. By the time I was done and checked into my hotel, I was getting ready for bed in record time. And that wasn't even the actual reason for the trip! The next day was when things really began. Despite having worked for my company for a while, I had never been officially onboarded. So I got lumped in with a bunch of the new employees for the year and did it with them. This meant two days of 8 hours worth of presentations about the company, our function in our particular branch of the company, and all that jazz. I'm glad I'm medicated for my [[ADHD]] now, or else I probably would have slept through half of it and gotten into big trouble, lol. It was so bland, boring, and dry. But it was also worse than all those things. You've probably noticed that I rarely talk about work, whether on this blog, the websites I hang out on, or otherwise. This is partly for privacy, but more because work isn't even in the top 3 things I truely care about.[^1] It is a means to an end, my necessary nod towards the systems of oppression that have been designed to generate profit for a billionaire that will make more money in the time it took to write this paragraph than I will ever see in my life. And yet. And yet! The people around me were enraptured. 8 hours they barely broke eye contact. They asked questions about how to maximize profit and their "value" to the company. They ran over to executives to shake hands and gain face for their future career endeavors. It was baffeling to me. Truly. I couldn't believe that they were so gung-ho about the whole process. But then I remembered something that's easy to forget when you're working from home, something that made me feel more lonely than I am getting stuff done solo in my office: I'm the *minority* in this situation. It made me think, for just a second - sometimes I wish I loved capitalism. Sometimes I want to just give in to the profit cycles, the ass-kissing, the idea that work becomes my entire identity. It's such a tantalizing thought sometimes, because it would mean that I get to feel "normal" surrounded by my peers - who were by all accounts, very nice! I had great conversations with the people at my conferance table...until they all started talking about work again. Imagine sitting and looking at a man drone on and on about how remote work sucks because you need to see people like him, who brushed our org's massive layoffs from his shoulder like it was nothing, in person. Imagine sitting and looking at all 14 presenters and realize that every single one made "network with people because they might become your boss" a piece of advice. Imagine doing that and not having a breakdown. Sometimes I don't know my own strength. I often joke about how my life is a constant battle between wanting to become an anarchist and having to grind the corporate ladder because I'm brown and my mom didn't immigrate to America for me to fuck up all the opportunity I've managed to get. I'm lucky to be able to live comfortably and take care of her despite the struggles we've experienced. But I don't think I can peak much higher than this. Every rung on this ladder requires me to love the idea of work more and more, and I just don't. I never will. That's more isolating than I expected. On the last day of the trip, my boss, a pretty chill dude, noted that it's hard to want to talk to people at work because it always feels transactional, but it didn't have to be. I disagree. Every conversation in an office is transactional unless it's about starting a union or something. But a bunch of tech nerds aren't interested in any of that. They want to be the one giving these presentations in the next few years. I'm glad I'm back home. [^1]: I do not dream of free labor, yadda yadda yadda