corporate america malaise

cubicle amnesia

i think about my life before working as a series of memories interspaced by the styrofoam filler of all that wasn’t worth remembering. the filler being the absence of memory. it’s the liminal spaces, empty hallways, and outlines of experience that my brain decided were not worth storing.

what disturbs me the most about my time working in a corporate job isn’t so much about pain and suffering. i won’t bore you with truisms about soul sucking cubicles and selling yourself to the man. i’m talking about a subtler phenomenon, an aching realization that nothing is happening, that nothing has happened.

it’s human nature to associate memory with what is real—remembering is a kind of knowing. i can say with certainty that something has happened when there is evidence for its existence. it’s being able to recall timelines, faces, names, and details. the equivalent of using the scientific method but inverting it inwards. a process of proving to yourself that the narrative of the past you’ve constructed is real. it’s a self-affirming process. you start with a hypothesis, recollect fragments of memories, and depending on whether these fragments align with your initial theory, you can assure yourself that you’re not crazy, that you are seeing things the way they were.

but recalling a memory isn’t like hitting play on a remote control and watching the episode you recorded project in your mind. it’s a reconstruction of details that ebbs and flows, an ever-changing mass of play doh that morphs itself into narratives and identity. memory is not a static set of archives in cold storage. it’s an organic process subject to the pains of time—decaying and decomposing.

forgetting is a strange thing, because forgetting is a kind of losing, a losing of the evidence that we use to prove truth and realness. these moments make themselves known purely by what they lack—established not by their presence, but by a vacant sense of absence.

and the line between forgetting and remembering is hard to decipher. forgetting is binary—either you remember X or you don’t. but once you forget more and more small moments and details, what’s left is hazy recollections, blurred stretches of time. as Daniel Schacter describes in Seven Sins of Memory, there is “incomplete rather than total forgetting that leaves in its wake scattered shards of experience. Vague impressions of familiarity, general knowledge of what happened, or fragmentary details of experience.”

since the first day i sat at my cubicle two years ago, my internal sense of time has become more confused, more uncertain. time takes on a strange rhythm, stretching and contorting. the clock on the wall seems to trudge through its duty, ticking reluctantly as if burdened by the weight of the mundane. meetings blur into one another, while the cadence of routine transforms hours into elongated echoes of themselves. time becomes both a relentless force and a sluggish companion.

sometimes, i try to journal at the end of the day, as if to prove to myself that my time hasn’t been wasted, to avoid forgetting. i record the events of the day, creating a body of evidence for the future me—a version of myself that will have to grapple with the amnesia of where my days have gone.

yet there’s an inherent flaw to this ritual of recollection. why should i preserve and resurrect moments i’d rather not relive? i’m left realizing that i can’t tell whether my fear lies in these memories fading or that perhaps i get a perverse comfort from the act of forgetting it all.