Post No. 2,485 - Recovering from a corporate life - Episode 6: “moral injury”, and sleep

Posts in this series are now listed at https://gnwmythr.blogspot.com/p/recovering-from-corporate-life.html. 

PS - expect these to be edited fairly often. Writing these is part of the healing process, and will bring up more insights,etc.

At this stage of my transition to retirement:

• I am working around two days per week (I could do more if I had the energy, but I simply have driven my body as hard as I can over my corporate work life, and can do no more than two days per week); 
• most of my effort is in finishing training courses that I am preparing for others, and filing my reference material, so that I can pass on what I have learned to others - with a view to them taking that as a starting point and developing the knowledge further (I am getting some useful feedback from running through parts of this with my successors);
• I will be completing the rest of my employment on an entirely WFH basis - which is giving me more time for exercise and meditation (although recovering enough to be motivated/energised enough to do that is still an issue at this early [premature?] stage of my recovery), and reduces expenditure (no more commuting);
• there are still some challenging aspects to work (and to other aspects of preparing to retire), but those are increasingly being handled by my successors with gradually reducing input from me.
  

One of the major points I wanted to briefly touch on in this post is that my sleep is not longer now, but I am finding it is deeper - so I am waking feeling more rested, despite not having more sleep. 

I am, however, not leaping out of bed to do things (like exercise ... or meditate ... ), but that is not the motivation struggle: it is a change of attitude - I want to spend some time savouring the wintry pre-dawn from a warm, snug bed. 

So, again, although I haven’t fully stopped work yet, I am far enough along on the path to stopping that I am enjoying a change of attitude, and my physical body is ... anticipating the change. 

So that’s all good - so far. 

However, there is another aspect of the corporate life that I will need to deal with - probably progressively, meaning I will come back to this again: and that topic is “moral injury”. 

My motivation for getting into this area of work is technical, not financial - I didn't go through years at Uni and a demanding career so that I could achieve a bean counter’s idea of what constitutes “adequate” profit, or to achieve a specified utilisation rate, or to do all the cutbacks and compromises that ultra-competitive bidding forces companies to do in order to win work. 

There are plants I’ve designed, helped build and commission/operate that I know are cost effective, but that are so cut back I:

(a) feel no pride or pleasure in them; and 

(b) consider the overall or “whole of life cycle” cost NOT to be optimal - too many bureaucrats consider a dollar deferred to be a future bunch of votes for them to be re-elected ... and maybe a dollar saved.

On top of that, there is the injury of the high stress and workloads that the modern  neoliberal interpretation of capitalism (the old version was bad enough) has inflicted on society, and times when I feel my ethical/moral values have been compromised (not to the extent of breaking any laws, nor requiring a referral to professional body's ethics committees - although I came close on that once, about four decades ago now). 

I will get into that - perhaps - in future posts, but for now, Dear Reader, I wish to refer you to Jessica Wildfire’s excellent post on this topic - which was part of the reason for me writing this post. 

Her article is “There’s a Name for What You're Feeling. It’s Called Moral Injury. And there’s a way to handle it”.

As an example of what is in her excellent article, consider the following quote: 

“Our cultural norms almost never give us the time or space we need to process our emotions. Our leaders don’t give us the tools to deal with the tragic events in our lives. More often, they deprive us of those tools. They try to convince us to hide our needs and plaster over them with fake smiles. They urge us not to feel. ... It’s not a bad thing to stop and reflect on the moral injuries we’ve endured over the last several years. It’s necessary for us to heal. We can’t just do it once and then move on. For most people, it’s an ongoing process.”

One of the infuriating things about my area of work is the old dinosaurs (the last one retired several years ago, fortunately) who stand in a workplace and angrily - and thus, obviously, hypocritically - denounce any occurrence of emotions in the workplace. 

That is probably on a par with the problem of enforced, or at least presumed, friendships. 

There are positive matters related to those last two paragraphs, being: 

• being able to manage emotions is a necessary part of being able to cope with high pressure jobs, but manage does NOT mean pretend they don’t exist - in fact, you can ONLY manage emotions properly by acknowledging, respecting, and, in an appropriate time, place and manner, honouring them - which will be a key part of my transition, decompression, and healing; 
• being able to coexist with colleagues in a constructive way is often essential to team work, but that requires a collegiate atmosphere, not friendship - some of the people I have been able to do my best technical work with I either didn’t like or actively clashed with on non-work matters.
  I do have friends from work - people I will stay in contact with, but none of that is based on technical matters.
  

I am also writing some formal feedback on a number of matters. 

In doing so: 

• I am writing that feedback knowing it is, as Jessica Wildfire terms it, a cathartic process; 
• I will be sending the feedback only to people I trust; 
• in writing the feedback I am aware of, and pointing out, that many issues are actually problems relating to the industry generally, consulting generally, and our society’s economic systems - this not just a whinge about company matters (and even on the ~40% or the feedback that is company focused, I am suggesting ways to deal with the problems - which, apart from anything else, makes it more likely the feedback will be given some consideration).
  

So ... just a few more thoughts which I hope may benefit others.

Blessed be.

I am writing this series in the hope that it will contribute to a better understanding - or at least better research into the effects of - the so-called developed world’s economic systems - which are based on the world-destroying amathia of perpetual growth, and patriarchal oligarchical capitalism expressed as often expressed corporatism and neoliberalism.

 

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Finally, remember: we need to be more human being rather than human doing.