Creativity, Emotion, and the Corporate World

There is a tradition amongst the humanities that the corporate world is a bland and dreary landscape of robots sitting on their computers with hunched backs. In our perception as students of literature, we imagined these employees as cyborgs and non-human entities and used to comment on corporate slavery as a no-go-zone for the idealism of freedom, creative expression, and the incessant probing of the soul that we embodied or tried to embody. Meaning - in work, in life, in death - was something we searched repeatedly in everything we did. From the smallest decisions to the largest - we are slaves of grand narratives that seep into our lives and try to recreate the greatness we have gone through in books. When you come from a background such as this, the corporate world can be daunting with its gray walls and fake heavens made by money-making machines. It was in this milieu that we termed it - “places of lost souls” or “places without a soul”. In all of these dreary visions of humanity’s demise at the hand of late-stage capitalism, I decided to leave teaching behind and join this world. The decision was made easier because of the cushion provided by people I knew. Friends who worked in the company or knew people who worked there convinced me that it was a place that would not exhaust me and kill the softness inside me that I cherish so much. The world drives us to cruelty, and I do not want to be cruel.

When I joined this company, I was worried about not being able to work efficiently. I am a free-spirited soul whose creative potential goes in all directions like chaos. There is no driving force, no discipline, no direction to it. I have been working on that, and this place provides it in gentle ways. I have been burnt out by academia, and as ironic as it may sound, I come here to rest. Usually, we think of rest as a stasis, but in my experience, I have found that rest can be work, too, provided that it is humane. We have a long way to go in making workplaces comfortable spaces for those who put their energy, time, and skill into it. I do not discount the transactional nature of work in terms of monetary and other benefits, yet growth requires more than equating work with money. We humans are communal beings whose various intricacies put us at odds with efficiency. Just as a bacterial culture needs proper habitat and conditions to grow, so do we. The modern office is a honeycomb lab where everyone works to create an atmosphere of production and consumption towards a certain goal. The important question to be asked here is - what is a healthy habitat?

In a journal entry last week, I wrote: When you build walls around the waters of your body, you are bound to create a dam. Dams are places of sedimentation. Undissolved soil accumulates. It builds and builds and does not stop building. Sometimes the sediments come up and the water spills over. Tears are spillways, but you can also bleed internally. You have to take care of the wound. There is only one and it keeps getting bigger. You have to start from the edges. You will build slowly towards the center. God is at the center… I do not remember why I wrote what I wrote, but it gives me a pertinent reference to what I want to convey. All creation is a work of art. All humans have porous surfaces where they spill their emotions. How much of our modern workplace provides that? How much creative and emotional comfort is provided to us so that we may work to the best of our abilities? The idea that repetition is natural is incorrect. All repetition carries variation and it is variation - the insatiable human need to be always curious and always restless - that may be the answer to that. Formulas do not always work. Deciding that a certain methodology of ‘event’ may work is not the answer. Work events also become work in certain ways. It’s something outside of us thrown at us that we have to receive. The answer is more than another toy thrown at teams.

A birthday party, a dinner, a lunch, or a national celebration are monotonous blueprints. Creative engagements through events based on somatic workshops, playing with color, mental health tools, and how to make monotonous work more creative can be transformative. Introducing visual engagement is perhaps the easiest and one with which there are a lot of creative possibilities involved. Bullet journaling skills for the workforce can be life-changing for personal and professional productivity. It can also be a creative and emotional outlet. Openness to individual creative potentials is also a way where the methodology is made into an open conversation and provides space for individual needs, making them provide more enriching work. These are ideas that come from a personal space. In my short time here, I have talked to various colleagues and friends about their personal passions, which has always made me wear an expression of surprise and awe. Corporate offices need not be places where one hears of broken dreams. They can also be work sanctuaries that drive the potential creative possibilities of human existence. From hearing about documentary makers and writers who dream of one day getting themselves published to creative doodlers and artists - we have a medley of talent whose energies can be directed to the company goals. It all comes down to the fact that we want meaningful work that does not numb us - intellectually, emotionally, and physically. Soul work and meaningful work require recognition and a work design that is flexible, like clay. We shape and mold into versions that are powerhouses of creative production - driving work toward growth and success in organic and humane ways.

Work is something that shapes us. Shifts 8 to 10 hours long become life-giving or soul-taking. It is always the outsiders that bring innovation to repetitive ways of being. The ‘other’ becomes the mirror for me to judge myself - something we usually discussed in our literature class on psychoanalysis. In such ways of being at work, creative re-evaluation is an important step towards bringing the much-needed change we desire and need. This is not a piece that frivolously complains about how the corporate world is bad for health. I think that would be a misconception and missing the point altogether. Our existence is tied to work, and working in the corporate world is one of the ways we work. However, if work is tied so closely to our own existence and our days are spent sitting in the office working on our laptops and talking to our colleagues - it must bring in a more fluid and creative engagement with it. Art has always been directly related to work. In the modern world, it has transformed itself into ‘skill’. A carpenter would make things from wood, and that was his art. Now, carpentry has become a skill. A carpenter remained a carpenter all his life. Now, it is so tied to the notion of capital/economic work ethic that it can be easily compartmentalized into a box separate from the existence of the one who channels that skill. The split between work and life is a late invention that shapes our modern world and one of its most clear manifestations appears in the corporate world. What we need is a bridge that binds these splits together - not in a way to make a mess out of everything, but an anchor to hold onto when things start losing their meaning and motivation jumps out the window.

Image: Flame by Jackson Pollock (MoMA)