The Alienated Worker

Every weekday, a man wakes up before the sun rises just so he can shower and prepare himself for work. He eats the same breakfast meal, a mint protein bar with an apple, paired with a glass of water. Stepping out the door, he begins his journey to drive to his corporate office. After his arrival, he toils for eight hours without implicit reason, he works in ways without explicit reason, and he repeats social ceremonies without conscious intent. He leaves work, arrives home, and eats dinner with light leisure before going to sleep. He spends his weekends believing that he does not have a job, that some aspect of his being is explicit, that he is truly free. Like the agitating wriggling of tinnitus, he finds himself in despair Sunday evening: his fantasy returned to reality. He works so he may eat, he eats so he may work, but there is no nourishment in his labor which will dominate his life. The difference between a man who accepts this crushing contradiction and the man who does not is that the former is bound to profound alienation and the latter a glimpse of redemption in the eternity of his toil.

The root of his pain is twofold. On one hand, what enables his suffering is entirely, without exception, the result of his consciousness. Of the constitutive material things that happen to him: his wife divorcing him; his child abandoning him; his girlfriend of three years cheating on him; his bank foreclosing his home, his consciousness derives meaning for each thing: she never understood me; he never understood my love; I was never good enough for her; I was never good with finances. He implicitly understands that another calculus was possible, the one that belonged to his life before these events. Breaking down in his car after his divorce, the past feels as close as the present, such that the world without this awful event slipped between his fingers. On the other hand, his desire itself for a different reality, like a lighter to dry grass, ignites himself to unadulterated suffering. He wishes nothing more to live in a different world, and this only inspires more pain because the imaginary gap between fantasy and reality is tangibly insignificant. A rodent on a wheel.

Modern labor for the alienated worker can only be described as a man walking on a circular path: once attached there is no end to meet, no redemption, no truly real moment to say "I made progress." Such illusions are crafted in anything which works towards crafting that fantasy reality: I will retire early at 45, I will buy a nice car and a large home, I will build a large stock portfolio. This act of world-building is the opiate of the modern worker, for the imaginary becomes as real as the world at his feet; and, for once, he has prescribed a higher meaning or the blindness of the tracks attached to his feet. Desire itself, or the yearning to fill some perceived lack, is his temporary cure to his ailment also caused by desire. His meaning-making becomes as circular and real as his material reality.

This is the same as a disease, and it spreads across American culture. Americans judge another through the lens of who is closer to retirement, who has the nicer car, who has the larger home. Achievement is measured by who has the largest void to fill.

Indeed, most laborers of this era find behind the material veil a void in their being: they toil, they withstand absurdity, they navigate systems which only exist to maintain corporate kingdoms, but for what? They work, but for what?

They work so they may live.

Only the worker who surrenders to these contradictions, which Weil described as "the criterion of reality", will he realize that the circle he finds himself on is not merely the absurdity of modern labor but rather the eternal human destiny. Of his painful daily life, the instantiation of his reality is a derivation of previous instantiations, from the beginning of mankind to the present day. Only necessary derivations are in this shared destiny: the inevitability of suffering, the need for natural bread, the yearning for providence or eternal justice. Unnecessary derivations, like material ranking of peers, the material ranking of himself, or the belief in higher purpose for his labor are not in this shared destiny. His work undoubtedly is full of both derivations, and the desire for reconciliation on the social realm will become his own lighter. He must not desire the things outside his control. In only emptying himself of everything and becoming nothing will his anguish find something resembling hard-won peace.

Such an endeavor is hardly possible insofar as he refuses to recognize his eternal destiny. How can you expect a disenchanted man to find the very fuel of his pain enchanting? The alienated worker must look beyond the horizontal realm of material events and towards the vertical realm of grace. He must find within his being the vitality to see his existence and consciousness itself as perfection, regardless of contingent and painful circumstance. He must, through natural willpower or supernatural bread, understand that his life itself simply is. The difference between between belief in life as doomed and belief in life as transcendent is that of meaning-making: his freedom from suffering is in the vertical axis.

The struggle to perceive higher order in a painful life is scarcely found and wrenching, but if he, even for a single second, glimpses God in a spreadsheet, then nothing of his life was lost from his alienation.