I. Our Culture’s Holy Men

In this entry, I want to expand my thinking on a damaging frame of mind that I subscribed to for years.

When I was 20 or so - it must have been then because it coincided with my enthusiasm for David Lynch’s Twin Peaks - I picked up a copy of David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, his first (and best) essay collection. I had already read and loved Infinite Jest in high school, so I figured I would enjoy it.

I loved it.

I’ll focus on the second-to-last essay in the book, whose theme is captured by its characteristically Wallace-ian title: tennis player Michael Joyce’s professional artistry as a paradigm of certain stuff about choice, freedom, limitation, joy, grotesquerie, and human completeness (otherwise referred to as “The String Theory”, readable in full here)

Michael Joyce, at the time of writing (July 1995), was the 79th ranked men’s tennis player in the world. Wallace’s assignment was to cover the qualifying rounds of the Canadian Open. Joyce was playing in the qualifying rounds since his ranking was 119th when the seeding for the tournament was determined, and Wallace was attracted to Joyce because Joyce seemed delightfully human out on the court. They got to talking, and, it seems, Joyce agreed to be the focus of Wallace’s piece.

The “certain stuff about choice, etc.” mentioned in the title is captured most succinctly in footnote (this is D.F.W. we are talking about) #42, which I’ll reprint in full:

Sex- and substance-issues notwithstanding, professional athletes are in many ways our culture’s holy men: they give themselves over to a pursuit, endure great privation and pain to actualize themselves at it, and enjoy a relationship to perfection that we admire and reward (the monk’s begging bowl, the RBI-guru’s eight-figure contract) and love to watch even though we have no inclination to walk that road ourselves. In other words, they do it “for” us, sacrifice themselves for our (we imagine) redemption.

Note here that, at this point in the essay, Wallace has already covered how Joyce admitted that he barely did anything academically in high school (and in a footnote explains that going to college would just have been for tennis as well), that “tennis is what Michael Joyce loves and lives for and is”, and yet Joyce didn’t choose tennis as a vocation at all because he started playing at age 2 and his career directed forcefully and enthusiastically” by his father, but even given that, he has this look of “the sort of love you see in the eyes of really old people who’ve been happily married for an incredibly long time” when tennis is brought up. Beyond Joyce himself, though, Wallace reminds us that the sacrifices professional athletes make to practice and train for absurd hours every day from the time they’re children manifest themselves in the shocking shallowness of their inner lives, best demonstrated by the moronic platitudes captured in court-side interviews and press conferences.

Wallace can relate to Joyce because of his (Wallace’s) experience as an amateur tennis player growing up in Illinois. He writes about how, as a teenager, he and his friends simply could not imagine that there were players of their age that were on a different level, basically not even playing the same game as them. But that difference was rendered in humiliating detail to Wallace just by watching Joyce hit around; here was someone in front of him who surpassed Wallace’s lifetime best tennis ability at age 10 (my speculation, not Wallace’s).

Wallace, embarrassed at his pretensions to even propose volleying a ball around with Joyce, is our erudite correspondent. Again and again, throughout the essay, Joyce’s Tennis Nirvana is cast against Wallace’s more conventional life path where amateur sports were little more than a line item on a college application. While Joyce and Wallace may be able to see the same things on the tennis court, Joyce is able to do things that Wallace could never imagine doing, while Wallace is able to articulate things that Joyce could never imagine saying. This is the fundamental split between the two life paths: Joyce is destined to be a doer, the man in the arena type, while Wallace is a critic.

What makes Joyce’s life enviable is its bounded simplicity. And throughout my twenties - especially after I entered the working world - I had adopted a strain of workaholism that presented itself as a yearning for the kind of excellence and simplicity that Joyce had. And I think Wallace had this same yearning too - he wanted to experience the type of transcendence that annihilated the self and made him forget about the demons of his own life.

II. Corporate Samurai

The workaholism that I adopted is best captured by the phrase corporate samurai. There is a whole TVTropes article on the term, and there appears to be a business book unironically preaching the gospel - I mean, bushido - of the corporate samurai, but I don’t really mean it in either way. I like the term because of the image that it conjures in my mind.

The ethos of the corporate samurai - for the purposes of this blog post - is:

Do everything that is assigned to you in your area of responsibility with a high level of quality.

To be able to do everything in your area of responsibility with high quality means you have to understand every process related to your area. To achieve understanding, you have to synthesize the opinions of subject matter experts and internal documentation. To do this well, you need to be able to ask good questions. This is just the definition of competence.

What’s appealing about the corporate samurai as an ideal is that that it is obviously Good due to the competence factor. Look at those first two words again: do everything. The corporate samurai, by definition, does not let anyone down. There is no risk of disappointing Management, or other coworkers, when you are a corporate samurai; what The Company needs is always placed above the self. There is no choice involved when there is work to be done. They can carry a clean conscience, knowing The Job is done. Just like with Michael Joyce, it is bounded simplicity.

It turns out that I am extremely motivated by the prospect of guilt or shame for not doing my duty; the appeal of a clean conscience is immense because it is what I need to give myself permission to forget about work, which of course means that I am not a corporate samurai at all, not really. The true corporate samurai would do the work because it is the most important thing in his life. For me, work has always come second place to ensuring I have enough time and energy to build and maintain a home life worth living.

I first came across the corporate samurai term in a substack’s comment section. From what I recall, the commenter was saying that the average corporate samurai working 60-hour weeks wouldn’t have the time or energy to be a decent caregiver for a child. To which I thought, “It sounds badass to be a corporate samurai - and I want to be one now - but is it really true that people with high-powered careers can’t have children?”

Now that I have a child of my own, it seems obvious to me that it is difficult for someone doing much more than 50 hours per week to even see their children, especially when they’re small; they’re only awake for a 12-hour stretch. And there are enough cautionary tales of powerful, absent fathers in pop culture to turn me away from that path. The additional marginal hours at the end of the day - for me it’s between 6 and 7pm - are incredibly valuable because that’s my window to be with my daughter. If I were still at the office or in the car on the way home, I would miss her every weekday.

III. Bottomless Pits of Suffering

(Inspired by this Slate Star Codex post)

The problem with the corporate samurai is that there is no limiting principle on someone getting assigned more work. As a cousin to the “Peter principle” of people ascending the hierarchy to the level of their incompetence, the reward for a job well done is more work. Many people adhere to the airport business book platitude of, “If you want to get something done, ask the busiest person you know.” The reason that’s a cliché is that the busiest people you know are wannabe corporate samurais with no personal boundaries, so they’re busy fulfilling requests from everyone they couldn’t say no to.

From the point of view of an earnest corporate samurai, the firm becomes a utility monster that is never satisfied. If you subscribe to a form of utilitarianism that can be abused by a utility monster, there is no hope: you will be destroyed. Utility monsters and their associates hide in the blindspots of altruistic behavior, consuming the fruits of their earnest labor unrepentantly. It is very easy for those of us who have a drive to succeed to be manipulated and exploited by those who will ask us to give more and more without limit by telling us that it is good for us (the opportunities!) and good for the company (creating shareholder value is capital-G good, after all).

It really can be seductive to think of yourself as better than other people by letting your identity be erased in service of dissolving yourself in a singular pursuit. Whether that be pro tennis or some other career, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the way you get ahead is by making sacrifices that others won’t. You become a monk, renouncing your earthly desires to further the interests of the Company. Even the leisure you do take is done in service of the Company and optimizing your personal performance. This is what is so grotesque about McMindfulness, the idea that the Company can suggest what is essentially a spiritual training because it correlates with better work performance.

Like with Michael Joyce, though, there is a profound emptiness that accompanies monomaniacal careerism. Everything that you do becomes refracted through the lens of the organization. There is no space for contemplating why you are doing it, or how much work is enough. When you have tethered your self-worth to one concept of the Good, and it is determined by stock prices and executives and meetings, you forget about the rest of life. Do it long enough, and you won’t even realize you’re missing it.