The man weeping in the parking lot, dreading another day at work

The tragedy that is a pre-determined life.

I have been that man.

A couple of years back, when I worked in the HR department of a large multinational corporation. Fresh out of college, full of energy and ambition.

There I was in the parking lot, grabbing my wheel, failing at holding back anymore. I remember it being terribly cold that day; it was winter, hard, bleak, and relentless. There was a fresh pack of snow outside and it was still dark — I left home in blackness, and I returned in blackness. The remaining frost in the corners of my windshield substantiated, in a way, what I felt: utter indifference toward my job, dark depression toward this, my life.

I gripped that wheel like it was my lifeboat, my beloved, my way out of this madness, and began crying hysterically. I didn’t know why, exactly. It felt like a long-suppressed wave, a tsunami of despair rising from my inner depths, finally breaking free and swallowing me whole. Then retreating, leaving emptiness behind.

I felt trapped. As if my every move, my every decision, every fucking day, was pre-determined from the beginning. I had no agency, no control over my own existence. The one thing I got, the one thing I would ever get in lack of a belief in the divine, felt… wasted. Useless.

Was this to be it, then?

Every day, I would commute to this place of sorrow and broken dreams, park my car, get out of it, fake a smile and a couple of ‘Good mornings,’ make black coffee, and then sit down in front of the computer, arranged neatly in an open office plan with no privacy but lots of pressure, log in, begin my work. Recruit more eager souls, to be ground into the machinery. Featuring long and dire meetings, longer and ever more dire telephone calls, emails, so many emails, and an endless array of the same interviews, over and over.

A: “Why did you become a XYZ?”

B: “I have always been passionate about XYZ!”

A: “Why did you apply for this job?”

B: “It is my lifelong dream to become a XYZ in the XYZ sector!”

A: “Why do you want to work for this company?”

B: “It is my lifelong dream to become a XYZ in the XYZ sector for this company!”

Do that, again and again and again, until I’m too numb to care anymore; until I’m too old to change, too depressed and apathetic to consider a different life.

Every day would be the same. A perennial waiting line for better times — 5 p.m., weekends, holidays, brief respites in the colossus of obligations, alcohol, drugs, retirement only decades away, yay!

Arrive at home, be too tired for interests and hobbies, too tired for socializing (except the necessary, obligatory, essential beer or two or three or sometimes five, mostly alone, occasionally work-related). Turn on Netflix, grab your phone — too broken for video games even — and escape the world for a couple of hours until eyelids turn heavy and bed calls. Deep, dreamless rest, then, but always too short.

Don’t forget to do laundry, and clean, and cook, and maintain, maintain, maintain, just so much maintenance. Your job provides the money, and out of a curious sense of obligation you begin accumulating stuff and people, but the more you accumulate, the more you have to maintain! Curious that! And the more you have to maintain, the more money you need, the more you need to work.

Consumerism is not a personal fault, in my opinion. What else have we got? When the winter is long and hard, as it often is, one welcomes every single hormone of happiness. You accumulate stuff to accumulate dopamine, really, and what is there but dopamine? You cuddle for dopamine, you kiss for dopamine, you fuck for dopamine, and so you consume for dopamine. What is there to judge?

Back to my steering wheel.

I remember grabbing it so hard and then just letting go, drifting off to the place where rage resided. Nobody could hear me. The huge, grey, hideous parking lot around me was full of empty cars, for I was late that day. Ahead of me loomed the office building, an atrocity of glass, concrete, and stale humans. So I screamed and sobbed. Interestingly, this brief breakdown of reason filled me with renewed energy. Hatred fueled the rest of my day, week, month, year… I wondered if all the others did the same — cry in their cars until they were ready for the day?

Anyway, I walked inside, faked a confident smile, said ‘Good morning’ a couple of times, logged in very hard, made the strongest and blackest coffee of my lifetime, did my interviews, spoke up in meetings, annihilated my lunch, socialized, then drove home to my little flat in a soon to be gentrified city block. Damn, how much longer can I afford rent? — I’ll need to work harder. I forced myself to the gym, made dinner, consumed a bit, slept, then, on the next morning, cried in the parking lot again.

How invigorating! This is a life of gusto!

I am convinced that sooner or later we all arrive at a point in our lives when the tragedy of our lives briefly, so very abruptly, becomes too obvious to ignore. Then, one is presented with two options:

1. Ignore the tragedy. Continue.

2. Fail to ignore the tragedy. Suffer.

This point appears periodically and we like to call it certain names: quarter-life crisis, midlife crisis, failed suicide attempt.

Either way, the important thing, then, is to swallow your prescribed pills and get your goddamn brain chemistry in check you FUCKING failure! How is Tim over there so much more successful than you are?! Guy is two years younger and already married with a child in the pipeline. He’s up for promotion, goddammit, ahead of you! He’s more charming, in better shape, and recruits way harder than you ever could!

The important thing, then, is to hate Tim very hard. Alternatively, you can concentrate your hatred on something else: people of other nationalities, skin colors, religions, gay people, trans people, anything really, as long as you do not gaze beyond the system that trapped you in this bowl of stagnation and affluent misery.

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” said Albert Camus and captured the absurdity of our lives perfectly. I like his conclusion more: live in passionate rebellion.

So, there is always a way out. You can swallow the stoic pill and keep your emotions in check while accepting that life, indeed, is mostly suffering, or, else, you can live despite the suffering, never accepting, always rebelling. If you believe in an afterlife, then this life doesn’t matter much anyway, and if you don’t, even less so.

Conclusion: live your goddamn life the way you see fit. Fuck expectations.

Want a comfortable desk job? — Don’t let anyone dissuade you. We are all different. This was just my unimportant experience.

Want to live a vagrant’s life? — Go for it! Write about it!

Don’t want to think about any of it? — It doesn’t make a difference, so go ahead. Live and die, as everyone else does. Living consciously does not necessarily make anything better.

The main reason I so very much despise capitalism and the status quo is its constraining nature. Its annihilation of freedom and self-determination. The State. Corporations. Anyone having power over anyone else. The tragedy of living a life you do not want to live. The tragedy that is a wasted life.

Is there no way out?

Antonio Melonio

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