on the bus angry bout my boss

Sometimes my job sets me up to fail and does so in ways that mean failing people who need me to do my job well. The consequences aren’t huge, but they’re real, and that really sucks. This always feels like it’s my fault when it happens, and I have to remind myself that it’s not. I’m in an institution I don’t control. The people in charge arranged it so I can’t do my job well. That’s their fault. The thing is, I have some latitude on what I do, and so I get to make choices about how the failure will come about. It’s sort of like I’m told “choose who you will let down, part of your job is to let someone down.” Except if I was told that it would be clearer that it’s not my fault. The degree of decision-making power I have helps make it feel like it’s my fault. I also can choose to put in more work, to cut even more corners on getting sleep and exercise, or on my family responsibilities. I hate all this. This is not how things ought to be. I also think that the capacity to still feel guilty about this stuff is a good thing because over time people who spend their working lives in situations like this easily become callous. It gets tiring feeling this way and people get desensitized. The worst is when people start to channel their resentment downward and blame the people their failing for that failing, or worse, take the anger out on them. That too is the fault of the people in charge and it’s predictable that it occurs regularly.

Part of what I resent about all this is the pretending, pretending this doesn’t go on and pretending we’re all on the same side, and that we’re not in a situation where there are people in charge of others. The fiction that this is horizontal and consensual, a fiction those of us lower on the food chain are supposed to play along with whenever our superiors invoke it for their purposes but which we’re never supposed to invoke for our own purposes. We’re all equals on the same team and we all want to be here, whenever the people in charge are talking in that way. I think there’s a particular kind of psychological discomfort that goes along with this, pretending to believe and feel things you don’t, and not being able to talk about things you actually believe and feel. I also think that over time people higher up on the food chain start to believe all of this, I think it warps their social skills and moral judgment, to where they think things really work according to the fictions they insist on without realizing they insist on them. In a sense, people lower on the food chain facilitate this, and we’re asked to facilitate this, by insulating our higher ups from the consequences of their actions. Never having to hear about the failures, let alone experience them, they can pretend everything is fine.