How Work Became Our Religion
and brought about the rise of the Corporate Mystic
The new cathedral
On morning commute, thousands of quasi-penitent employees clutch coffee cups containing the morning sacrament, eyes downcast at glowing screens displaying the day's meme-prayers. They sit in subway cars communing with their priests via email.
In the office narthex, security guards check everyone's badges to confirm baptism. Elevators deliver the faithful to their designated chapels dedicated to patron saints: Sales, Marketing, Engineering.
Open floor plan congregational spaces allow surveillance of devotion. Who's at their desk earliest? Who stays latest? Who's most visibly engaged in the liturgy?
Slack notification church bells call the faithful to #general for group worship, #random for fellowship hour, #announcements for the corporate gospel. Notification sounds evoke a Pavlovian angst. How many of us feel the pangs of original sin when we are late to a call?
Puritan Work Ethics
Max Weber warned us about the Protestant work ethic, but he couldn't have imagined its digital apotheosis. The Puritans believed work was a calling from God and that material success indicated divine favor. Today's zero-sum corporate culture is fed by Calvinism with different branding.
The Puritans had their doctrine of predestination, that some were chosen for salvation. We have our myth of meritocracy. Some are destined for unicorn startups. The Puritans wore black and avoided pleasure; we wear Patagonia vests and avoid sleep or a personal life.
Work-Life Balance
True believers know better: work IS life. Life IS work. To suggest otherwise is to admit weak faith. A four-day work week is such blasphemy.
“If you don’t show up at the office in time on Saturday, don’t bother showing up on Sunday.”
Productivity apps and douchey “optimize everything" podcasts are inspirational reminders of our inadequacy. Time tracking, goal setting, habit forming: self-flagellation. Armor thy true self with efforts to become more.
The Lucifer Principle
Howard Bloom's Lucifer Principle describes how superorganisms, from beehives to nations, sacrifice (or "make use of") individuals for collective survival. The corporation is a pure expression of this principle: a superorganism that feeds on human creativity, time, and health and converts them into shareholder value.
The employee who fails to show enthusiasm becomes a threat to the whole system—if one person can operate on their own terms and in their own style and still succeed, what does that say about the credibility of everyone else's suffering? "Company culture" is the immune system for this superorganism.
The violence hidden in disruption rhetoric reveals the superorganism's motive. We kill the competition, crush our goals, dominate markets. It's the language of a predator organism modeled after the military. If the rhetoric were overtly violent, it would be less problematic, but these motives are glossed over with the veneer of virtuous growth.
The individual employee's unique talents get metabolized into standardized outputs and their creativity gets digested and excreted as branded content. The superorganism doesn't care about your dreams, your health, your relationships—it feeds on your function.
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
- from Howl by Allen Ginsberg
The factory never left, it just got air conditioning
Upton Sinclair exposed the meatpacking industry's brutal conditions in The Jungle. Today's tech campuses have sushi bars and nap pods, so it would be crazy in terms of physical evidence to measure them against those blood-soaked floors. But the factory logic persists and is largely unadulterated. We've replaced physical butchery and abject poverty with psychological processing and ownership of the most productive years of a person's life.
The assembly line worker repeated the same motion thousands of times daily. The knowledge worker repeats the same cognitive motions—check email, update spreadsheet, join meeting, repeat—developing their own deformities. Yeah, carpal tunnel syndrome isn't much compared with a factory injury, but what about decision fatigue? Chronic stress and lifelong inactivity? We medicate the symptoms without believing the system is at fault. We believe the system is normal and thus contribute to its being so.
Standing desks are a great idea, but also a tacit admission that our work is killing us, paired with a solution that keeps us working. The treadmill desk gets us to move without going anywhere while producing value for others.
Mental health has become the new industrial accident, but we treat it as individual failure rather than systemic outcome. The factory worker who lost a finger to machinery was obviously a victim of unsafe conditions. The knowledge worker who loses their sense of who they are amidst impossible deadlines and constant connectivity? That's for them to sort out.
The castigation of knowledge work as trivial since it's non-physical labor allows the problem to hide in plain sight. Because we're not lifting heavy objects, we pretend there's no toll. But the brain uses 20% of the body's energy. Cognitive labor is physical labor happening in a three-pound organ. The exhaustion is real, and it taxes most dramatically the person's creative and executive faculties, yet we've been trained to dismiss this.
Antilateral thinkin’
Edward de Bono coined "lateral thinking" to describe problem-solving through indirect and creative approaches. Corporations claim to want this but systematically eliminate it due to the effects of competition. It’s easier to copy what the other guy is doing.
Flow states, those moments of deep immersion where time disappears and creativity peaks, are antithetical to productivity metrics. Most people can't schedule flow from 2-3 PM. You can't measure it in sprint points. So we eliminate the conditions that allow flow and then generally just try to copy what the competition is doing.
Planned obsolescence of the self
Products are designed to fail so you'll buy new ones. Workers are the same. "Continuous improvement" sounds benign, even virtuous. But it's really continuous inadequacy—a state of permanent not-good-enough that keeps you buying courses, attending conferences, getting certifications. The self becomes a product requiring constant updates to remain market-viable.
The person who enjoys photography without trying to monetize it seems to lack ambition. We've made self-obsolescence a virtue and self-acceptance a vice. The corporate superorganism no longer needs to enforce constant upgrading because we do it to ourselves.
Travel as apostasy
The corporate worldview, like all worldviews, depends on immersion. Step outside the daily rhythm, and suddenly the whole edifice looks arbitrary. Why do we sit in specific buildings at specific times? Why do we dress in this strange way? Why do we speak one way at work and a different way around our friends?
Digital nomadism threatens corporate orthodoxy not because remote work is inherently radical or better, but because it does help to reveal the arbitrariness of corporate culture. When you're working from a beach, it's harder to take the urgency of the quarterly business review seriously. Steeped in another culture, the sanctity of the 9-to-5 becomes obviously fictional.
In another country, you see different approaches to work, time, relationships, meaning. The American hustle culture suddenly appears as one option among many, not an inevitable truth. The Japanese have karoshi (death from overwork), but they also have ikigai (reason for being). The Europeans have their long vacations. The Australians have tall poppy syndrome. Each culture's work pathology reveals something about the others.
Unconscious adoption
Job dogma operates like accent acquisition. It's gradual, unconscious, and eventually total. You start a new job speaking your natural language and eager to fit in. Six months later, you're casually dropping terms like "synergy" and "bandwidth" and "circle back" without irony. Five years later, you can't imagine speaking any other way, God bless your heart.
The frog-boiling happens through a thousand micro-normalizations. What once seemed obviously dystopian becomes quotidian.
"That's just how things are done here" might be the most powerful phrase in any culture. It forecloses questioning, implies inevitability, and recruits you as an enforcer. You'll move from victim to vector.
The corporate mystic's toolkit
Plenty of people find themselves trapped in work they never chose—not because they lack dreams, but because the chasm between their current reality and those dreams feels insurmountable. They possess talents and aspirations, but wage slavery (or at least lifestyle creep) creates a vicious cycle where there’s no time or energy to cultivate new skills, no financial cushion to take risks, no mental space to imagine alternatives.
The workplace family becomes another form of bondage. When you spend most of your waking hours with colleagues, your social circle naturally narrows to people in the same boat. This echo chamber reinforces the status quo—everyone's too exhausted to encourage each other's escape plans. The very community that could support transformation instead perpetuates stagnation.
Not everyone dreams of turning passion into profession. Some simply want to minimize the damage—to find work that doesn't devour their soul, that leaves enough of them intact to live after 5 PM. They seek not fulfillment through work but despite it. Their goal isn't to love what they do but to survive it with dignity, to extract what value they can—skills, connections, savings—and get out before it hollows them out completely.
The real tragedy isn't that people work jobs they hate. It's that the system is designed to make alternatives feel impossible, to colonize not just their time but their imagination, their social world, their sense of what's possible. Breaking free requires recognizing these systemic barriers for the collective chains they are.
Here are some things that can help.
Meditate
A morning meditation—actual meditation, not an app. Sitting quietly without consuming or producing for twenty minutes declares independence.
The corporate system can't monetize genuine stillness and emergence of being, so it tries to eliminate it.
Decouple
Feel the parts that don't fit in. Don't do anything differently, necessarily. It can be hard to be in touch with how different you feel and not try to rebel. The suggestion is to feel it, and not manifest the feeling into some action. No, you're there, you're deciding to be there for the moment. But allow yourself inner sovereignty.
Obvious questions
The "stupid question" practice involves regularly asking yourself the questions that seem too obvious to ask. Why do we have this meeting? What would happen if we didn't do this report? Who decided this was important? Questions that point to the emperor's nakedness.
Strategic incompetence
Strategic incompetence at corporate rituals preserves your soul. Forget the corporate values. Mispronounce the jargon with the benign incompetence of someone whose identity exists elsewhere. Be very good at what you choose to be good at. And let the rest erode a bit.
The corporate mystic needs to live from a sense of self that exists beyond professional brand, a core that can't be laid off or competed with.
Unbinding
What happens when you stop buying into the job that pays you? First, vertigo. The corporate worldview is totalizing—it explains everything from your daily schedule to your life's purpose. Urgency is an effective substitution for meaning.
Seeing the strings changes everything and nothing. If you're in the system, you probably still need to eat, pay rent, and survive in the system. But now you see it as a system, not as reality.
The real win: using corporate resources to fund your apostasy. The paycheck that chains you can also free you. The corporate mystic learns to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and keep their soul off the books. This means living below your means so you can optimize your extraction from the system.
Going indie
Going indie means going off-grid from the system in some way. That might mean a solo endeavor or being part of a collective. Alternative ways of working, living, creating value that exist alongside the dominant system. Cooperatives, mutual aid networks, gift economies, or just good old fashioned friendships and partnerships. Other ways of being together are possible.
The Great Resignation was just the beginning. As more people question the corporate religion, we'll see increasing polarization between those who double down on faith and those who abandon it.
A prayer for the corporate mystic:
"Grant me the serenity to accept the paychecks I cannot refuse, the courage to refuse the beliefs I need not accept, and the wisdom to know the difference. May I render unto the algorithm what belongs to the algorithm while keeping my soul sovereign. May I find fellow apostates in the wilderness. And may we together build something better than yet another cathedral of extraction. Amen."