Corporate Life: The Circus We All Volunteered For

Who said life is easy? Definitely not anyone who’s ever worked in corporate. Yet somehow, we 90’s kids grew up fantasizing about it like it was Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory minus the chocolate, minus the fun, minus the magic… okay, so not at all like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory

Maybe it was the movies, maybe it was the glossy office buildings or maybe it was our parents who proudly wore loyalty like it was their second name. Honestly, they were more loyal to their companies than to their own bloodlines.

Fast-forward to today: Does corporate life look classy? Hell No !!!
It’s basically a burnout buffet with unlimited anxiety refills. Psychologists? Thriving. Counsellors? Blossoming. Hospitals? Building new wings funded entirely by us - “The Mentally Unwell But Still On Call” community.

We call it a 9-to-5. Corporate heard that and said, “Cute. Let’s make it 9 to whenever your soul leaves your body.”

And the irony…. I work in a team that preaches about burnout, work-life balance, taking leaves, mental health—basically all the buzzwords. But reality - The only thing balanced is my suffering; it's evenly spread throughout the week.

And all this… for peanuts. Literal peanuts.
My dad always said peanuts are poor man’s food, and honestly, looking at what corporates pay us, that checks out. Even carrots have become too expensive, so carrot is now replaced with a peanut dangling in front of us like “Work harder, employee. Maybe one day we will give you… a bonus.” (They won’t.)

So one day at 7 PM, I decided to step out because self-care. And by self-care, I mean walking into a supermarket and touching every item I don’t intend to buy. Thankfully, Lulu Hypermarket is basically my therapy center. On the way, I saw Westside and thought, let me just see if something new has come. Next thing you know, I’m in a trial room with six outfits, because hope is a dangerous thing. Five of them made me look like a potato. One was decent. 

At that exact moment, a Teams call pops up. I swear I wasn’t going to attend it, but Bluetooth said, “Not today, sis,” and connected automatically. This is at 8 PM, mind you. My boss immediately went full warrior on data. Since I wasn’t in front of my laptop, my colleague got sacrificed. I’m strolling around Westside, trying to sound smart while secretly wishing the fire alarm would go off so the call gets disconnected. Somewhere in between my corporate talk, I notice a security guard subtly trailing me like I’m Mission Impossible: Retail Edition.

I ignore it because honestly, I’ve got bigger problems like my boss asking me for details I stopped caring about few hours ago. Finally, the call ends and am emotionally dehydrated. I turn around and catch my reflection in a gigantic mirror.

And what do I see? A pant in my hand. Not mine. Westside’s.

Suddenly the security guard’s behavior makes perfect sense. I was out there attending meetings and committing accidental shoplifting. If I had stepped out of the store with that pant, the alarm would have screamed, the guard would have tackled me and I’d be explaining my plight like that one gujju lady who tried justifying shoplifting with a full fake Canadian accent.

So I quietly walked back, billed it and exited the store. This time checking all my limbs for extra clothing items.

And right outside, I saw a guy pacing on his phone, annoyed, muttering: “I’m not in front of my system, what do you want me to do?”

And that’s when I realized: We are all the same.

Corporate has turned us into mall-wandering, unpaid-overtime, Bluetooth-connecting zombies - the kind who join calls from basement, lifts, send emails from grocery aisles and discuss quarterly metrics while bargaining with vegetable vendor. We are everywhere, lurking around clutching our phones like life-support machines, pretending we have control while our MS Teams screams “Available” against our will.

We’re a whole tribe of tired professionals doing mental gymnastics to survive deadlines, managers and malfunctioning Wi-Fi yet somehow still functioning. We still show up, convincing ourselves, “Tomorrow I’ll log off on time.” Sure. Tomorrow, that never comes.