Muffled Screams and Broken Dreams: The Great Corporate Time-Heist — Part 6: Escape

Welcome to the fourth article of our multi-part series affectionately titled Muffled Screams and Broken Dreams: The Great Corporate Time-Heist. You can find the other articles here:
1. Intro: The Aworkening
2. Part 2: Reconnoitering and Shit
3. Part 3: Survival — MVP+1
4. Part 4: Evasion — Counter-Strategy Strategy
5. Part 5: Resistance — Spite of a Warrior
6. Part 6: Escape — Fleeing the Scene <- You are here

We also have a twitter where we tweet our most profound ideas, discoveries, and failures. We keep it over here @MinimallyUseful. She’s not much but we haven’t abandoned it yet, unlike our hopes and dreams.

Part 6: Escape — Fleeing the Scene

What are we doing — A Haiku Journey

Kind-of helpful things
Poorly executed thoughts
Trying to change things

Go to our website
Earn your certification
Do better business

Last of the series
Learning to take back your time
From the M-B-M (Malevolent Business Mindset)

Preface

We’re on the last turn of the racetrack little baby bird, and we just want to give a big thanks to you for sticking around up until this point. We’ve talked about surviving with MVP+1, evading pitfalls that attempt to drag you back into the MBM (Malevolent Business Mindset), and resisting in the corporate environment. Now we’ve got to talk about one last thing. Escape. At the beginning of this series, we told you:

“This is not like other guides where we say “Leave your mundane-ass job and follow your passion”. Nope, because a lot of you, like us, just aren’t equipped for entrepreneurship or even a career change. This is a guide for those who elect to stay in purgatory, and some people can have trouble with not reading the traditional self-help “Leave your job and follow your dreams porn.”

We plan to stick to that line — this is for the people out there who can’t find it in themselves to leave the corporate purgatory (which is totally fine). So this last article will talk about the art of escape without leaving, and finding meaning in that.

Escape

This being our final article of the series, we thought it might be prudent to go all out on the quotes to 1) Illustrate that you aren’t alone in trying to escape, and 2) Illustrate that people FAR smarter than us had similar sentiments on the issues that we’ve laid forth in our article series. So, here’s a few that stood out to us.

On our duty to escape:

…If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?… If we value freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape and to take as many people with us as we can.
- J.R(owdy).R(oddy). Tolkien

On our duty to have empathy for our fellow corporate drone as we attempt to liberate ourselves:

Those faces you see every day on the streets were not created entirely without hope: be kind to them: like you, they have not escaped.

- Charles “The Big” Bukowski

On our duty to see this time robbery for what it is, and to educate others on the danger of maintaining the MBM (Malevolent Business Mindset).

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

- Mary “George Eliot” Evans

Strategy Core Concept: Tiers for Fears — Escape at Different Magnitudes

Escape without actually leaving the corporate purgatory manifests in a lot of different ways. You’ve earned your time back from the corporate productive-time robber barons, but there’s a catch. The vast majority of you out there still have to be at work. All is not lost. It’s still time that you’ve claimed, and technology has made it easier than ever to discreetly disguise your daring declaration to derive from drudgery.

Escaping work is important because allowing your mindset to drift to things other than work grounds your reference points for maintaining a resilient mindset. The MBM will have its actors constantly trying to drag you back into work. The more you allow yourself to leave that (even if it’s just mentally), the more powerful your resilient mind becomes to the traps the MBM will set to get you to do more.

Below, we’re going to talk about the tiers of escape, and what you can do at each tier to find some time for yourself.

Tall — Getting to the end of the day
You built your bullshit boundary map in article 2, and you quantified / defined your MVP+1 model in article 3. Having a detailed knowledge of these two tools will allow you to determine how much time you have, on any given workday, to escape work. You may already be doing some of this via your cell phone and discreet bluetooth headphones. As we talked about in the MVP+1 article, the key is to find ways to make it seem like you’re working. This will minimize the scrutiny you receive from your peers and others who may be in the MBM. You can use things to get away like bathroom breaks, made-up meetings, or creating a “work group” of like-minded individuals.

Some escapes that we’re fond of:

• Listening to music / podcasts / audiobooks
• Writing for fun
• Doodling / Drawing
• Reading books / magazines

Really, anything that removes you from the pressures of the MBM qualifies as this most granular version of escape. Sometimes, even a really nice shit can relax you and put you into a meditative state of mind.

Grande — Finding greater purpose
Take all of the free moments from the section above. Each little moment of free time at work adds up. So if you were to put some sort of purpose behind those moments, you might be able to find some greater meaning there.

You could take discreet lessons for a skill on YouTube. Imagine watching a video here and there on blacksmithing, sailing, or the art of Japanese joinery. By stacking all the small moments you get with a purpose in mind, you can create the next level of escape — developing additional skills.

The coolest thing about humans is our never-ending capacity to learn new shit. It’s a damned travesty that the expectation is that we use all that time to make ourselves more productive at shit that only serves a purpose to make money for the MBM industrial machine. No accounting firm is going to allow you the opportunity to get better at watercolor paintings on their dime — even if you’re holding up your end of the productivity agreement. No, they want you to get better at accounting, and that’s a damned shame. A lot of us will die being SEVENTH LEVEL BLACKBELT SUPER SCRUMDOG MASTER PLANNERS when that ultimately adds fuck-all to our lives as far as enrichment goes. So, we suggest devoting your time to enriching yourself, improving yourself, and learning something cool.

• A Brief Aside
  You *could* also use this time to get your vindictive on and learn a skill that is both enriching to you and provides you with a skills safety-net as far as employment goes. There’s a million resources out there to teach people programming. It’s a cool exercise in logic, math, and really tickles the logical part of your brain. For you more creative types — you can use programming to create sweet art shit too. The added upside is that, there’s almost always open positions for programmers of various skill levels to keep that cash flow coming in, in the (HOPEFULLY SUPER UNLIKELY) event that work puts you under the microscope, or takes the nuclear option and fires you for not doing enough to please the MBM. That way, you take away the MBM’s power because you’ve got the skills to walk, and the MBM can’t dangle shit like continued employment over your head. Just a thought.

Venti — The noble sacrifice
This last version of escape is the most dangerous, doesn’t have a guaranteed payoff, but is the most noble use of your free time — acting as a liberator for others. Since the creation of the corporation, the exploitative nature of the business model and the MBM (Malevolent Business Mindset) has seeded itself into the core of our societies. The trades are dying because children are being guided towards menial desk jobs with decent pay and marginal benefits. We’re told to do our time, waste some of our best years toiling away for the advancement of the very thing that is draining the life (and time) from us. Who can blame anyone for staying though? Stability is important, and there’s worse things one could be doing with their time — like writing a Cop Drama where the Easter Bunny is an ex-grizzled cop that’s been hired to look into an insane murderer chicken serial killer that leaves eggs she laid at the crime scene decorated with her victim’s blood. He’s got an in with the cops, but they don’t like that he’s sniffing around. He’s a really good detective, but he went off-rails and beat the shit out of a perp or something.The REALLY crazy part is, that this crazy chicken serial killer wasn’t always crazy. She was just a normal chicken until one day when her whole chicken family was taken and turned into marshmallow peeps — so she goes all bonkers and is ACTUALLY exacting vigilante-style revenge on the people responsible for her family’s brutal kidnapping and murder. She tried to get justice through conventional means, but she was largely ignored. So the Easter Bunny, after doing some amazing detective work ends up finding out the chicken’s back-story and motivation. HOWEVER, the Easter Bunny also finds out that the employer who hired the services of the world’s greatest rabbit detective IS ALSO THE SAME COMPANY THAT MURDERED THE CHICKEN SERIAL KILLER’S FAMILY. Let that shit sink in. Now the Easter Bunny has a real conundrum here — and it opens up a whole world for dramatic character development. The Easter Bunny will have to decide what form of justice to dispense and to whom….

We take it back. That’s actually awesome. Hit us up Netflix if you’re trying to make magic happen.

Annnyway. If you’ve got the moxie to take it on, liberating others from corporate purgatory is a noble use of free time, but it comes with its dangers. It opens up your exposure to getting found out (the agents of the MBM will be pretty pissed). It’s not entirely on you, but if you’ve got the skills and the desire, you’d be a huge help in liberating your fellow humans from toiling over endeavors that are ultimately un-enriching and worthless. That’s pretty fucking cool in our book.

Life in the Wild

Here at Minimally Useful Industries, new concepts are rarely understood without an accompanying picture book or shitty animal analogy. So, due to us being functionally illiterate and a distinct lack of artistic ability, here’s a shitty animal analogy for Escape:

The Honey Badger. Ho-lee-shit are these a bunch of bad ass mofos. Here’s some of the talking points:

• They are nearly indestructible and have bones that are practically made of adamantium.
• They are strong as hell and (borderline) impervious to venom.
• Their favorite snack (bee larvae) involves them taking on entire colonies of bees.
• They are clever problem solvers, and frequently escape whatever enclosures humans use to imprison them.
• They fear nothing. We’re not sure if they’re not wired to feel it, or if there’s just nothing on this Earth that they’re afraid of. Personally, we hope it’s that they can’t feel it, because we wouldn’t want to meet whatever the honey badger is afraid of.
• We’re entirely convinced that if honey badgers decided, they could just take over the Earth.

This is your new spirit animal. These animals could rule the world if they wanted, but they choose the simple life. They are driven with a purpose (we assume to be super-rad), but they do not allow themselves to be driven by outside factors. No one controls the honey badgers, they simply allow any perception of control over them to exist until they no longer deem that control acceptable. This is the new you, an unstoppable force where you wont allow yourself to be controlled by the MBM. You’re a corporate honey badger. Play on playa.

In Closing

This is bittersweet. Goodbyes suck, but we’re so fucking proud of you taking your time back. We’ve given you a primer on what it takes to liberate you (and potentially others) from the MBM (Malevolent Business Mindset). Here’s a brief recap of what we covered in each article — in case you want to revisit:

1. The Aworkening: An introduction to the corporate pickle we’ve gotten ourselves into.
   2. Reconnoitering and Shit: Prep for corporate SERE training and developing a mental bullshit boundary map.
   3. Survival — MVP+1: Doing a little bit more than the acceptable minimum.
   4. Evasion — Counter-Strategy Strategy: Developing a resilient mindset to strategies your employer will use to bogart your time and effort.
   5. Resistance — Spite of a Warrior: The artistry involved in weaponizing compliance to over-do or under-do tasks.
   6. Escape — Tiers for Fears: What to do with your liberated time when you’re still confined to being at work.

This concludes our last article in our series towards professional certification. If you’re interested in getting the cert, head on over to www.minimallyuseful.com. We’re going to keep doing what we do, so don’t be surprised if we meet again. Farewell for now.

With all the love in the world — Godspeed fellow shitlords.

-Minimally Useful Industries