The Man Who Nearly Woke Up.

Narrative found hidden in an HR Textbook.

The following text was passed to me in PDF format by an anonymous subscriber, together with a note saying that it had been found tucked into a copy of a Human Resources textbook, one of several hundred intended for pulping and recycling. I print it here without comment, since I am in no position to evaluate its origins or its content.

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As always, thanks to those who tirelessly supply translation in other languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and some Italian versions of my essays are available here. Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know. Now then, here’s the text as I received it:

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It’s a hot, sultry day in late August, and you are sitting alone in your office, in the last hours of the last week of the last year of your professional career.

The corridors are quiet: many of your colleagues are on leave, several have taken advantage of a public holiday to disappear for a long weekend. One or two have mumbled “have a good retirement” as you passed them in the corridor on your last visit to the toilet. But no-one has come to say goodbye. Which is not surprising: there is no special warmth between you and your team, and the department itself is an unpopular place to work. You’ve just received an email from the secretary to your immediate boss, who’s a pleasant woman about to retire herself. It says that your boss was too busy to see you before he left on holiday, but hopes you enjoy your retirement.

You have no work to do, for once, or at least none that has to be done now. In a small gesture of rebellion, you have left your successor a few things to do on their arrival. But your successor is also on leave and was too busy to see you, or to find out much about the job, before departing. You don’t know much about them anyway:—young, thrusting, politically-minded, ambitious, it’s said.

Because you have no work, you should really go home. But that means leaving the room, shutting the door, taking the lift three stories down and leaving the building. And what are you then? Nothing. So long as you stay in your seat, in your office, you are in your current role, you retain a tiny shred of authority, and you can theoretically use that authority to get people to do things, and be treated with a modicum of deference by others. In a few minutes time, you will have no status, no authority, nothing. If you ever come back to the building it will be as a member of the public, with a temporary security pass and needing to be escorted everywhere. Not that you can imagine you ever would.

This is not the organisation you joined a long time ago. That organisation—part of national government, maybe, a university or other public institution such as local government—seemed to be doing something important, then. And when you joined, it really did seem that the people at the top knew what they were about and, in spite of the usual complaints, the organisation was quite well run. Administration was simple and procedures were fairly transparent.

You can’t say exactly “when” it changed, any more than the famous frog slowly boiled in water could. For your first decade, a young potential high-flyer, your gaze was fixed on the future and on your career. When top jobs started to be cut, when people were brought in from outside at exorbitant salaries, when departments were closed and merged, when the amount of work seemed to increase every year as the number of staff declined, you began to wonder. Top people you knew talked about “necessary adjustments to reality” and “trying to preserve the essence of our work.” But then those people retired, and their successors just told their staff to put up with it or leave. And indeed good people you knew did leave, and other good people just gave up, and decided to do their jobs; go home on time, and forget about a brilliant career. For a long time, you couldn’t make up your mind what to do. Something—residual loyalty, perhaps, fear of the unknown, an unwillingness to admit defeat—made you hang on, and after a while it was too late.

The organisation you joined is unrecognisable today. Things that used to be simple have become baroquely complex. Nobody understands how salaries are calculated any more for example. Getting money for anything takes forever. Getting back money you have spent is almost more trouble than it’s worth. Promotion, which used to be based on merit and seniority, is now all decided by some mysterious cabal that meets from time to time. And it’s not promotion any more, it’s “contextual re-grading,” which can work both ways. If you don’t please your superiors, or there are no other jobs at the same grade going, you could lose your grade and the money and status that go with it. You could even find yourself working for someone who used to work for you. It happens.

Of course you’ve thought about leaving. Who hasn’t? In fact the official aim of the organisation is to have “fewer but more committed staff.” They’ll even pay you to go. But to do what? You thought about this seriously a few years ago, and recoiled in despair. What do retired people do, anyway? It used to be different: one senior manager you worked for left to run a small charity on retirement. You couldn’t remotely imagine doing that. So what would you actually do?

You used to listen to the morning news, but now it just makes you angry. You used to read the morning papers, but they aren’t delivered these days, and trying to read them online is tedious and off-putting. You could walk the dog, except that you and your spouse got rid of the dog because you could never agree whose turn it was to take her out. You could take up gardening, which you dislike, or you could do “odd jobs around the house,” which you are no good at and usually leads to arguments. Washing the car once a week, fine, but then what? Going to the supermarket? A restaurant occasionally, maybe? You and your wife decided to have one last decent holiday, if you could actually agree on somewhere to go for a change.

You’ll be seeing more of your daughter and her noisy, aggressive children, and hearing more about her endless marital problems. She and her husband are both insecure middle managers at an investment bank, forever afraid their jobs will disappear. And your son, who’s a science teacher, lives at the other end of the country, and loves his job but complains all the time about the brutalising load of administration and bureaucracy.

Oh, there are things you’ll be pleased to miss. Crawling out of bed, often in the dark, hurrying to the station, hoping to get a seat, watching the half-asleep commuters compulsively scrolling on their phones … but then you do that as well: after all, you get messages from people who seem to be in the office while you are still in bed, and others in the evening at home. You’ll miss that in a good way, you suppose, but on the other hand who else ever sends you messages these days?

Your father, you remember, was happy enough to retire. he’d been an electrical engineer—no degree, unthinkable in that age—but lots of study and practical experience. He could do anything technical with his own hands, and tried to teach you about electronics, but you weren’t interested. When he retired he took up building electronic models and began fiddling with computers. Your mother was a Junior School teacher—she taught you to read—and she kept herself busy later in life doing things around the community. But you hardly know your neighbours, who all work long hours far away, and you can’t think of anything to offer the community anyway.

It strikes you that everything you have, everything you are, is bound up with the organisation that you work for, and that you have come to hate. But what counts in the end, it turns out, is not your opinion of them, to which they are totally indifferent, but their opinion of you. You want to be valued, praised and rewarded, even by an organisation you despise. Quite how that started you can’t really remember, but there was perhaps a time when the endless barrage of management psychobabble finally crushed you into submission. You remember that you began to sit quietly at meetings rather than objecting to lunatic proposals, that you gave less flippant answers to senior managers abut their ideas, and even got your Personal Individuation Strategy submitted on time.

So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that one of the senior managers cornered you in the canteen: there was a new Director-level job opening up, would you be interested? Of course you said yes: more money, bigger office, more staff a secretary of your own, at last. What you had always wanted. It turned out to be the new Department of Performance Evaluation Evaluation. You see, said the senior manager, there were all these systems of Performance Evaluation in the organisation, but we didn’t really know which of them were effective. So they had to be evaluated, and new systems introduced if necessary. Your job was to ask people and departments who had been evaluated to evaluate the evaluation and the evaluators, and then to evaluate the results and produce a report, with proposals for additional systems of evaluation to evaluate better.

You were hardly listening. At last you thought. It was close to the end of your career, but it was something. It was recognition at last. You kept on telling yourself this when people quietly mocked the new department, or when they complained furiously about all the extra bureaucracy. But you worked all hours making sure your team produced evaluation reports, even if you were never sure who read them. You even went on a course run by a professional clown to teach you how to create a “fun atmosphere” in your department. You were then invited to a Command Cadre Brown-Bag Day at a nice country hotel, to rub shoulders with the truly great. You almost died of boredom listening to them witter on, burying their audience under piles of Powerpoint slides, but at least you could feel you belonged. And then quite casually it was announced that, as a cost-saving measure, secretaries for all except the top people are being abolished, and the organisation is giving up one of its two buildings and moving to an open-plan system where only the most senior will have their own offices. (Fortunately, that scheme is never put into effect, because it turns out that the building they want to give up is full of asbestos and can’t be sold or demolished.)

And then a couple of years later you get a call from the Deputy Controller of Human Asset Management: could you come for a word? Your initial excitement turns rapidly to fear. Your department is being abolished. There’s always early retirement, or a job at a lower level for a couple of years … or, well, there is a post coming up, but maybe it’s not for you. Tell me more, you say. Well we’re setting up a large new Department under a very senior person to try to squeeze more savings out of the organisation, and that person will need a deputy to coordinate all the staff and the consultancy teams. Would you like to be Director of Devolved Budget Optimisation? Of course you say yes.

It’s a job that should never have existed, you finally decide. Back at the start of your career, procurement was handled centrally, and you got what you were given. Now departments had to buy all their own supplies and negotiate their own contracts. In those days as well, although you never travelled a lot, you remember that the organisation just gave you a flat sum to spend, and a travel department (since abolished) handled the transport. Some time ago (you must have missed it) departments were “empowered” to make their own travel arrangements, and everyone now had to produce endless receipts for everything.

So your staff made unexpected visits to other departments with lists of questions. Why did you buy those chairs when there were cheaper ones available? Why did you travel on that flight last year when there was a cheaper alternative? Can you prove that you didn’t have an alcoholic drink on that evening you spent away? The result was screaming matches, people breaking down in tears and threats of legal action. Somebody scrawled “Gestapo” on an office door near you, and for a week you had police hate crime investigators tramping the corridors. But higher management were very keen on the results of the work, even if they carefully avoided giving you any public support.

And now it’s all over, for better or for worse. On Monday, there will be someone else sitting behind the desk, and you suddenly realise that it won’t make any difference. The new person will say the same things as you did, make the same decisions, obey the same rules and instructions as you did. In all the time you spent in this job, you might just as well have been a robot. You close your eyes for a moment, overcome by a feeling of something like despair.

And then you are somewhere else. Or not exactly you, because you seem to be hanging from the ceiling of a different room, a study with a large desk, lots of bookshelves and a couple of armchairs, one of which is occupied by someone who looks astonishingly like you, even down to the shirt and tie. The other chair is occupied by a wise-looking late middle-aged man with a carefully trimmed beard, who vaguely resembles a picture you once saw of Freud, or maybe it was Jung. But somehow it’s as if you are not there, you are only a distant spectator. The You in the chair looks startled.

—Where am I? he asks plaintively.

—Inside your skull, where do you think? replies the other with a slight accent, that sounds vaguely Central European.

—And who are you?

—Oh, I’m another part of you, to put it simply.

—And why am I here?

—Well, I’m going to put three questions to you, just like in a fairy-tale, and when you have answered them you can wake up and go home.

—But how will I know what the right answers are?

—Don’t you think it’s interesting that you want me to tell you what the right answers are? I think that’s part of your problem. In any case, there are no right answers as such. It doesn’t work like that.

The You down below looks around for support, or guidance to follow, but there isn’t any. And whilst you are there, you’re not really there: you are just a passive observer of the You in the chair. Eventually, that You mutters

—Well …what’s the first question then?

—It’s a simple one. What are you most proud of in your life, and why?

There is a long silence. You see the You is struggling to come up with an acceptable answer, and wriggling uncomfortably in his chair. The bearded man (therapist?) looks at him sympathetically.

—It can’t be that hard. Do you really mean to tell me that you’ve done nothing to be proud of in your life? Let’s take the obvious things first. Do you think you have been a good parent?

—Well … you know … both my wife and I, we had very demanding jobs. We tried to spend more time with the children but somehow the years passed…

—I’m not asking you to defend yourself. Everybody has problems. I just wondered whether you were proud of the parent you’ve been.

—As I said there were a lot of problems…

—No, that’s not the point. Let’s think of something else. Are you proud of anything you accomplished in your work?

—Well, I didn’t do too badly, I suppose. I didn’t make it right to the top, I didn’t have the career they promised me, but then a lot of other people didn’t either. Perhaps I wasn’t ruthless enough. Compared to some other people—

—No, look I’m sorry, you are trying to answer a different question. I’m not asking you if you are pleased with your career, I’m asking if you did anything during your career, one particular thing, which you can be proud of.

—Maybe, in my last job, I realised we were being unfair to people sometimes. I did try to do something about that. I tried to avoid hurting people if I could. That’s something I suppose. But too many of my staff were like dogs after a bone, looking for something to criticise.

—Couldn’t you stop them?

—Not really, I mean we had a job to do, we were expected to find things to criticise, after all.

There’s a pause as the bearded man drums his fingers gently on the arm of his chair. You look at You, wondering what on earth is going to happen now.

—So then, what about outside work? The rest of your family, friends, acquaintances, people you met. Can you think of something you did that makes you proud?

—There wasn’t a lot of time, really? I suppose I tried to be a good person. Whatever that means. But with the job … I didn’t have a lot of time for other people.

A silence that lasted an uncomfortable period of time, then the bearded man nodded to himself, and set off on a new track.

—Maybe we’ll come back to that later. Let’s move on to another question. Is there anything you regret in your life? Is there anything you would have done differently, given the chance?

—Look … it’s easy to… everybody has regrets. But tell me, how much of a choice do we really have in life?

—More than we realise, usually. For example, you could have gone home at lunchtime today, but you didn’t. You could have just not decided to come to work today, for example.

—I couldn’t do that.

—Why not?

—Well, I’d have had to explain to my wife, and people would have wondered where I was, and maybe there were people I wanted to say goodbye to…

—No, you could have decided not to come to work. You only had to stay in bed. But you felt pushed into coming to work, and staying at work, because you didn’t want to feel uncomfortable about not doing so. It wasn’t really your decision.

—I suppose so.

—Did you ever regret not leaving when you had the chance, moving to another job, or just retiring?

—It’s easy for you to say that, but of course then you have to admit that the system has beaten you, that you weren’t strong enough to hang on until the end. Anyway, my wife, she’s a couple of years younger, she’s grimly hanging on to a job she hates, so that she gets a bigger pension and helps both of us. I couldn’t, you know … what would I have said to her?

—But do you regret staying to the end? Supposing you’d found a really interesting job at a good salary, oh, maybe ten years ago. Would you have made the change then?

—Maybe. But then it would still feel like failure, being beaten by the system, that kind of thing. I always thought, one day they’ll have to recognise how good I am.

—Do you think the system was right to treat you the way it did?

—No, obviously.

—So why does their opinion matter? Why did you want their approval? Or aren’t you confident about your own opinion of yourself?

There was another long silence, as you watched You stare fixedly at the floor while the bearded man waited patiently. Eventually, You said

—It’s … hard …

—It’s very hard. That’s why most of us spend our lives living for others, wanting approval and admiration even from people we despise, why we worry about what other people think, and let them dictate how we live. Believe me, there’s absolutely nothing unusual in your case, so don’t beat yourself up about it. Look, you read a book on Buddhism, once, didn’t you?

—Yes, the Chief Happiness Adviser wanted us all to read it. I’ve forgotten what was in it now.

—Well, one thing it said was that most of us lead our lives asleep. We are like robots, we behave automatically, we never see things as they are. It wasn’t a very good book if I remember—written by some Californian—but it said at one point that apparently you can translate the “Buddha” as “the man who woke up.” That’s a nice idea.

—Maybe. But I’ve also seen people who spent all their time yelling about how different and unconventional they are, how they aren’t taking shit from anybody, that kind of thing. The Chief Happiness Adviser—the woman I mentioned—she came to work in ripped jeans and a biker jacket and told everybody to chill out all the time.

—Don’t you think that’s just a caricature? Is there anybody more pitifully conventional than the person who always wants to be seen as independent and different?

—Maybe, but yes, I can see I went through a lot of my life not thinking very much—that happens when you’re too busy—and OK, I see what you mean by being asleep. But my parents, they were old-fashioned socialists, talking all the time about the good of the county. My dad was a strong trades unionist, my mother was a teacher … I think they were right, you can’t have a society where everybody just does whatever the **** they like you-got-a-problem-with-that?

—No indeed; Then you don’t have a society at all. But how many people in your life have you known who were actually different? I don’t mean had a minority opinion or something, I mean, really stood out on their own, and actually, genuinely, had their own opinions.

—Not many, I suppose… maybe none.

—That’s most peoples’ experience, I think. You have to genuinely not care what other people think of you, and that’s hard, because we are social people and we want to be liked and valued. And that doesn’t mean the majority, or even the minority, but literally everyone. Have you noticed how you can take a complex subject—Covid, maybe, Ukraine, Gaza, whatever—and there’s a majority view and then there are lots of people claiming to be rebels, and iconoclasts independent thinkers, alternative opinions you won’t find anywhere else and I don’t know what, and they all say pretty much the same thing?

—Sure, we had a Break All the Rules seminar where everybody broke the rules in the same way. But you can’t spend your whole life disagreeing with people can you?

—No, of course not. And society doesn’t function without a bit of hypocrisy and a bit of tact to keep things moving. At school you read a play by Molière called Le Misanthrope about a man who tells everybody exactly what he thinks about them all the time. It’s supposed to be a comedy but it’s more like a description of a man in Hell.

—I’ve forgotten about that. Look, I’m tired. Can we talk about something else? You said there was a third question.

Another pause, as you watch You sink back wearily into his armchair. The bearded man waits a few seconds, tapping through fingers of both hands on the arms of the chair.

—We’ve almost finished but let me just ask you this: do you think that the life you lived was authentic?

—Authentic? What’s this? You’re saying my life was fake then?

—No, but many years ago you read about the idea: living for yourself, and not for others. Sartre of course, Heidegger and his idea of resisting what “one just does.”

—OK, now you’re kidding. I never opened a book on philosophy.

—Well, I’m just you, and if I remember—

—Oh, wait. There was a girl at University I was trying to impress. I started to read some stuff…

—Obviously, it made no impression. By the way, why didn’t you try to impress the girl with what you actually were?

—I don’t know. We all do silly things at that age. I mean, are any of us anything much then.? We’re just kids.

—A fair point. But it’s interesting nonetheless, if you think about authenticity for a moment. But can you think of a choice you made that was actually authentic?

—I … suppose I’m pleased I did what I wanted to do instead of following my parents. My dad wanted me to be an engineer but I found maths boring. My mum wanted me to be a teacher. I studied history instead and wound up here. There. Wherever.

—Did you like history?

—Not really, well, not specially. But it was my choice.

—But weren’t you just rebelling against your parents then? Some people spend their entire lives doing nothing else but that.

There was another silence where you saw You seem to subside deeper into the chair. For a moment you thought You were going to, cry or something.

—Look, I’m really, really confused and miserable and I want to get out of here. Give me this third question and let me go.

—Fair enough. What would you like to be remembered for?

—I … I suppose people will say I was an OK person. Just like most of us.

—You’re answering the wrong question again. I asked how you wanted to be remembered. For what?

—Never thought about it. Look in ten, fifteen twenty years at most I won’t be around any more. Why should I care? What difference does it make? Can I go now?

—Just a moment. Wouldn’t you say you are starting to wake up a bit, I mean in the Buddhist sense?

—Who cares? I mean, I was pretty tired and depressed when I found myself here. You’ve just made it worse with all this waking-up crap. Actually, no, if you want the truth. Maybe I was asleep. maybe I was deluded or something, but I’m a lot more miserable now. Why is all this stuff supposed to make me happy?

—I never said it was. Going through life in a dream all the time can be a lot more comfortable—-

—Well then—

—But it’s not your life you’re going through, is it? It’s just a set of conditioned reflexes and reactions, just a set of passing thoughts and impressions that you somehow stitch together and call a Self or an Ego. And in the end most of us secretly know this, which is why so many of us are unhappy.

—Whoa! If you’re me, then when did I come across something as weird as that?

—Twenty years ago, in a lifestyle magazine on an aeroplane. An article on non-duality, the idea that consciousness is the only reality, that we don’t exist as separate beings at all. It frightened you for a week.

—No wonder I forgot it. Can I go now?

—Yes, but you have the right to one question before you leave.

—I’m not sure I … OK, let’s be fair. Is there any way I can use all this to make myself, well, happier, better, something.

—I can only tell you what you know already. Try to wake up, try to live a bit more consciously. Notice things, notice how you act and why, notice whether you’re living for yourself or for others.

—Is that going to make me happy?

—I can’t promise, no.

—So why?—

And You are you again, back in the stuffy office. You feel groggy and disoriented: not sleepy but like you once did when you had an attack of arrhythmia. After a couple of minutes, though, you feel well enough to stand up, and you make your way automatically, for the last time, out of the door and down to the lifts. In the lift, you suddenly realise that you should have handed your security pass in this morning. But the Secure Environment Operational Facility closes early on Fridays, and there’s no-one there now. What to do? Eventually, you find a security guard watching TV who reluctantly agrees to take the pass, and lets you out into the warm stickiness of the evening.

Your wife will still be at work, and you promised to text her to let her know when you would be back. Flicking through the messages you see that everyone on your address list except your immediate family is from the organisation. Even now, you have half-a-dozen messages to which you will never reply. You realise then that one reason you didn’t want to go home today was that you had no idea what to say to your wife when you walked in. And she would probably have no idea what to say to you either. You had lain awake for hours last night, trying to think of the right thing to say today that wouldn’t sound too flippant or insensitive, when she still had to work for a year or so yet. And what are you going to do on Monday when she has to get up to go to work and you don’t? What will you say then?

You find your way automatically to the station, and manage to get a seat on the train for the last time. A reply comes from your wife. Scrolling down, you see that all the messages to and from your organisation have now disappeared and, checking, you see that your work account has been remotely deactivated. Well, that’s the end of that.

It’s a hot day and the carriage is crowded. People are silently scrolling through their messages, some mouthing the words as they go. You have nothing to do. Imperceptibly, you start to drift off into a kind of shallow sleep.