[313] Undercover Brother

To be human is to struggle. It’s the core of life. You have to find food and companionship. You’re lucky if you’re entertained or just weren’t born with a particular defect. I’m shaken to my core when I see what people are meant to cope with. Everything about our psychology and decision making seems to be rooted in various coping mechanisms. We desperately need to escape; we absolutely need something to believe in that is greater than our current lot in life.

For the first time since it aired I started watching Undercover Boss. CEO’s taking on the minimum wage jobs and finding out the working world little resembles bitching people out over the phone and holding meetings. I’m disturbed by it because I find it emotionally jarring. It uses the emotionality of hearing about the health conditions of an employee’s family member, or will detail their financial woes. At the end the CEO usually gives a raise or a check, there’s plenty of tears, and we’re supposed to believe “things are gonna change round here!”

I read a critique of the show explaining that even if the CEO decided the employees needed higher wages or truly did find a new appreciation for what happens on the ground floor, the company the reviewer was talking about was publicly traded. The board decides just how much labor they think needs to be squeezed. The financial, business, and government institutions loom in the background despite the CEO’s “Christian principles” or how many tears they cry for their associates living in homeless shelters.

Everyone has that story though. Everyone has a sick relative, is in massive debt, or found an asshole to marry or knock them up. Everyone needs just a little bit more money, a little bit more time, just one person to look out for them. I feel like it’s dumb to even ask “are people happy” when the closer you look you wonder what would ever give you the impression that they should be. Are these CEO’s not small-minded enough to realize that no matter how much money thrown at specific employees they met, they’re not fundamentally changing the lives of thousands of other employees? They’re not changing the business culture, they just went into it to find out why Connecticut stores were failing only to be blindsided by real people with real problems.

If all you can do is cope, how insultingly silly does it sound to try and talk of happiness? So many, too many people are willing to work ridiculously hard to even scrape by in life. I don’t see a culture that respects or understands that. These businesses all talk about their hundreds of stores and how their poised to get even bigger. I know the amount one store can waste, let alone what’s just numbers on a balance sheet when you manage hundreds. But that’s business culture. Get bigger, make more money.

One of these CEO’s turned alcoholic before we switched to a new CEO role. Even at the top you can find time to ignore your family and get down on yourself. But I wonder what “hell” he had to go through being able to afford the kind of health services that would allow him to carry on in life.

I try to get people to focus on the reasons they should be happy. I want someone to actually espouse something. I don’t want to hear a survivalist mantra; I’m fairly convinced that’s more genetic code than positive philosophy. But how can I expect it? What tools besides my “ignore all the fucks guide” to my thoughts can or should I contribute?

But this is why I’m after culture. I think there are a lot of people with a lot to give and that the better demons of our nature, when ignored, carry on in a demonic fashion. It’s not just equal pay, it’s a fundamental understanding and respect of what it means to be human and work hard. What it means to earn something and respect that someone deserves it. These CEOs can’t operate a forklift, but because they can bitch a little louder about shipping discrepancies, they deserve 100 times more an hour?

As someone who considers himself always happy and always angry, I feel like a fool. If both make sense conditionally, and the conditions exist at the same time, how could I ever advocate for one without the other? If the happiness and pride you take from your shitty job keeps you going back to it every day, and you stay fed, or your kids are provided for, what else should I expect? But what does it say about life that we’re, theoretically so advanced, that we still have to treat our special times as “an escape?” Nothing in my life compares to the average person’s day to day level of bullshit, and if it does, I’ve somehow managed to boil it down to something or another about balance that shuts me up for a few weeks at a time.

This feels disconnected. There are so many angles that speak to the culture I want changed; the shitty ideas of growth “because,” the fact that you can’t shoot a t-shirt into a crowd and clothe a stadium, the idea that because people are sick it should cripple you or your family’s life. You can have a full time job and still have to live in a homeless shelter. You can know the inside out of your factory and get paid like you genuinely aspire to nothing more than being “kind of homeless.” These are systemic problems, these are culture problems, and they are universally understood as something people wish would change.

You have to undermine the power, provide an alternative, and market ideals that speak to more than the desperate part of a human’s psyche. The bad they’re swallowing isn’t what rounds out the good they teach and preach. So maybe the happiness they muster comes from many places. Maybe there’s an appreciation for their ability to feel it at all. Or maybe it’s just where you go when you hit the bottom. I mean, desperation can be a motivator, but it shouldn’t be an institution.