I absolutely relate to you. I’m in the legal profession and am so disillusioned with how crooked and corrupt this profession is, like yours its portrayed as glamorous, but is anything but that. I have seen so much dishonestly and back-stabbing, and professional ethics and respect is a rarity, if they actually exist at all. Its all about money, not upholding the law, and people in the profession seem to think that as long as something is done in the name of business and money-making, it justifies treating other people like absolute crap and walking right over them.

Perhaps some of us are just not made for the dog-eats-dog, money chasing life that is the corporate world. I’m realizing that for myself, and like you, every day in the profession seems to sap my soul, and I’m looking at getting out of it.

• This reply was modified 10 years ago by Sweetiepie.

Thank you for sharing your story. I have experienced the same in my career. I have been a software architect for 33 years. I have changed jobs many times thinking and hoping it would be different. I haven’t found a company that provides an environment that encourages creativity or quality. All companies I have worked for have focused on money and the people focus on power/titles. Recently I took a big cut in pay for a job to do technical training. I enjoy teaching others. I took the job because I thought it would be fun and less stress. The company said “What crisis can happen in training?”. I was sold. It took me 4 months to realize that they were the same as all the other companies – all they wanted was money. They didn’t care about the quality of the training that was provided to client. The next sale was always the focus. I created 15 new courses for them in 3 months, but there was no thanks for all the additional effort I put in to create high quality training courses, but every week a spreadsheet was sent out to everyone in the company on how all the trainers measured up to their quota (in training hours) – how much money they brought into the company that week. No long-term vision.

I am the sole provider for my family, so I have to keep working. It is getting harder and harder to tolerate an environment where people are focused on themselves and money. I want to be productive, add-value, and help others.

Sorry for rambling about my own situation. I wish I had a solution. You are not alone!

Hi again Rose Lynn,

Thank you for your kind words. Yes. Of course it is possible to learn and even to practice wisdom teachings without labeling yourself as anything. Just go for it. There are many wonderful study tools available on the net, including right here on this web site.

Many of the teachings you are very likely already aware of. It is just hard these days to reconcile any wisdom teachings with the “rat race” that our work environments have become due to extreme greed at the top end of the economic gestalt. I have found for myself that in fact, there just is not a way to reconcile them at all. That means that I must either stop working for companies that hurt others or the environment for their own profit (which is what I have done) or somehow compartmentalize my work life as something that I only do under pressure for my survival (to buy my room and board and such) but that my real life is actually against what I believe has become bad for myself and others.

Until we change the intentions of our workplaces out of the profit above all else mentality, I am afraid we must learn to live in an uncomfortable kind of hypocrisy. To spend the majority of our waking lives doing something that is counter to what all wisdom teachings point to is the reality that we are living today.

You are not your job. You are something much bigger than that. Farmers are not the weeds that strangle their crops, and you are not the regulations that strangle creativity in your work.

What if you used each of the instances of incompetence to remind you of a wisdom teaching? So, when some know-it-all makes a particularly obnoxious remark, you could use it to remind yourself of this conversation and how very different real life is than whatever he/she is pushing. It might just take some of the sting of it out.

Many blessings,

Smigs