On Being Philosophical in a "Mindless" Job

By Sadhika on

There is a degree of absurdity in spending six or seven hours a day formatting spreadsheets that no one reads, replying “noted” to emails devoid of thought, and attending meetings where the subtext is always more telling than the agenda. And yet, here we are, well-fed, well-dressed, and spiritually undernourished. The mindless job: a phrase tossed about by twenty-somethings like an apology. “I work at X, but it’s just a job, you know?” We say it like we’re renting space in someone else’s life.

And yet, the question is not whether the job is mindless, but whether the one doing it chooses to be. Here, Nietzsche’s camel arrives, burdened and obedient. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, the camel is the phase of the spirit that says yes—to duty, to discipline, to the heavy loads it must carry across deserts of drudgery. Most of us were once camels at work, and understandably so. We endured the rules, the PowerPoint slides, the lunch breaks cut short by deadlines. We thought endurance is nobility. Perhaps there was some semblance of it, a certain stoicism in filing reports no one will read, or answering emails you suspect were sent just to prove the sender existed.

But the camel cannot stay the camel forever.

Nietzsche asks that we become the lion, roaring in the desert, saying “No”. No to nonsense, no to false gods of productivity, no to a life unlived. The lion is philosophical. It asks not how to do the job better, but why the job exists in the first place. It wonders aloud in the pantry, “Is this really necessary?” and is met with awkward silences and even more awkward laughter. But even the lion must watch its pride. If it only negates, only tears down, it too becomes trapped in a performance of freedom. I’ve seen this lion at office parties: the intern who rolls their eyes at corporate jargon, the manager who sighs and fancies himself Sisyphus, without knowing that the reader was asked to imagine Sisyphus happy. The lion resists, rebels, but it cannot create. 

And then comes the child. In a job that numbs you, the child invents private meanings. One must become childlike, not childish. The child does not ask whether the building blocks are “meaningful” in the adult sense. It creates for the sake of creation. It plays, not to escape the real, but to transform it. In the middle of a dry Zoom call, the child finds a poem in the way someone says “synergy.” It crafts stories out of watercooler conversations, reinvents routine into ritual, and smiles, not out of oblivion, but awareness.

Being philosophical in a job that dulls the senses is not about quitting it to become a monk or a barista in the hills (though both have their charm). It is about inserting soul into spaces where soul is forbidden. It is about noticing the quiet tragedy of the man who always wears the same tie. It is about secretly timing how long the manager takes to make a point that means nothing. It is about laughing, writing, wondering, even there. Especially there.

Nietzsche's child is not naïve. It knows the world is indifferent and the system can be uncaring. But it builds sandcastles anyway, because the act of building with attention, with delight, is resistance.

So, I sit at my desk and write this between updating a monthly report and pretending to look busy. The screen stares back blankly. But the mind is awake. And that, I think, is enough for today.


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