Wake Up, Human

Ep.15: On Wasting Time in the Corporate World

• Shannon M. Wills

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Have you ever looked back at years spent in a soul-sucking corporate job (or other seemingly dead-end pursuit) and thought, "I wasted so much time"?

We often convince ourselves we've wasted time in corporate careers or chasing someone else's definition of success, but every choice we make teaches us what we need to know to find our authentic path. Exploring the idea of "wasted time" through the story of a Beijing woman who left her prestigious career

  • Learning that action brings clarity—we can only know what doesn't work by experiencing it
  • Comparing two paths: the corporate "success" track versus the soul-aligned but financially unstable path
  • Using the metaphor of filling your gas tank (stability) versus hitting the open road (following your passion)
  • Recognizing how capitalism and hustle culture have distorted our relationship with time
  • Finding balance between practical needs and living a meaningful, authentic life
  • Understanding that past choices weren't mistakes but necessary steps to your current wisdom

I'll be back soon with more episodes including an interview with Lorin Peters on the power of nonviolence, coming up next. Connect with me at shannonwills.com to share your thoughts on this off-the-cuff episode format.

Shannon W.:

Hello everyone and welcome to episode 15 of the Wake Up Human podcast. I'm your host, Shannon Wills, and in this episode I'm going to be trying something new. It's going to be a shorter episode, it's going to be just me talking and I'm going to go off the cuff and see what it feels like to just chat about something that's on my mind. And the thing that's on my mind is this idea of wasting time in the corporate world. Are you wasting time in the corporate world? Do you feel you've wasted time in the corporate world? I'm going to play around with this idea and if you do feel like you've wasted time in the corporate world or anywhere else, I think we might be too hard on ourselves when we tell ourselves that we've wasted time. So I'm going to riff on that for a bit and I hope you'll join me. See you on the inside. Welcome to the Wake Up Human podcast. I'm Shannon Wills, a curious wanderer with a passion for digging into life's mysteries and mining them for wisdom to apply to our modern lives. This podcast explores the ways we humans have become disconnected from our native ways of knowing what we have lost and what we can gain by coming back into wholeness. Each episode will explore this theme of reconnecting with our innate human power in order to heal ourselves, our relationships and our planet. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let's jump into the latest installment of Wake Up Human. Hello everyone, and thank you for joining me on the Wake Up Human podcast.

Shannon W.:

It has been a while since I have put out a podcast episode, and there is a reason for that, which I'll talk about in a moment, but I just want to say it feels great to be back and I never meant to be gone for so long. What I was doing over the past six months or so since I published episode 14, is I was doing a major overhaul of my website at shannonwillscom and I was also putting together the beginnings of a massive resources section for the website, which is now available also at shannonwillscom. And those were projects very dear to my heart and important for building the foundation for what I want to offer in the future. But they did mean that I took a step away from the podcast in a way that I did not expect to do. So I've got a couple of new episodes in the works. One of those is an interview with an incredible man named Lauren Peters, which I think will be the next episode to come out, and I also have an episode that I'm creating myself called what Is your Wildness, and I'm very excited about that episode. It's a little bit more in depth.

Shannon W.:

So, before moving forward, I just want to share a little confession with you, which is that one of the struggles I've had with putting out this podcast is just a tendency to want it to be really, really good. It's a perfectionist tendency, and while I think there is nothing wrong with wanting the content I create to be really good and really helpful, I also think that the perfectionist tendency has gotten me into a bit of a struggle with creating the content, because I'm just taking a long time to record, a long time to edit, a long time to put everything together, and it makes the podcast itself feel more laborious than I think it needs to be. So I had an idea that what I'd like to do is some off-the-cuff episodes, meaning rather than preparing too much. I want to just sit down and talk for a bit about something that's on my mind and trust that what's on my mind is good enough to share and that what I mean to say will come through and that it's not something that I need to predetermine and that I can hope that it will be of value to someone listening. So that's what I'm going to do today. These off-the-cuff episodes are going to be an opportunity for me to let go of that perfectionist tendency and to put out a little bit more content and just to be a little bit more free-flowing with my voice and with my ideas. So you know, I would just say, please bear with me, please have some grace for me. I don't know how this is going to go and, depending on how it does turn out, please let me know what you think after listening.

Shannon W.:

So, all that said, so I've had the idea of doing an off-the-cuff episode for a while and I just haven't been, I think, quite courageous enough to do it. But yesterday, something happened that made me think well, here's an opportunity to do this. My partner came to me and he showed me his phone and he had an article pulled up on the phone. Hey, look, you know all the people you're talking to at Wake Up Human, who are wanting to wake up from the drudgery and the narratives around success and money and the working world. It's not just us. This is happening in China too. And he showed me this article on his phone and it was about a young woman in China living in Beijing, and she had recently quit her job and moved into a small provincial town many, many kilometers from Beijing. And she did this in response to, basically to COVID time, where the exhaustion and the drudgery of the lockdowns and the insecurities in China, just as they have here, have caused a lot of people to second guess the choices we made about what we believe is going to bring us happiness and prosperity and success.

Shannon W.:

And one of the comments that this woman made about her life was she said she had done all the things right according to her society. Right, meaning she had gotten a college degree from one of the top universities in Beijing. She had then moved on to get a master's degree from Stanford University in the US and she had returned to work in Beijing at a lucrative position in a Chinese company, making good money and doing well for herself. And in spite of that, she found herself feeling like she had made the wrong choices, that she wasn't feeling happy. She found herself feeling like she had made the wrong choices, that she wasn't feeling happy, she wasn't feeling fulfilled, she wasn't feeling like she was doing the right thing for herself. Now, one of the quotes that she said in the article was I wasted so much time.

Shannon W.:

This woman is 30 years old and she says I wasted so much time, meaning the time, presumably the time that she spent in her studies, the time she spent getting her undergraduate degree, her master's degree and working in this corporate environment before she quit her job and moved to the country, so to speak. That really caught my attention. I've wasted so much time. Immediately, when I heard that, I felt so much compassion for this woman, and how many of us can relate to this feeling that I've wasted time. I've wasted time because I've been living a life that someone else chose for me and that I didn't choose for my own self. I've wasted time because I've been following what the social norms of my day have told me that I should do and be, and I haven't listened to my heart and I don't even know what my heart even has to say, because it's been so long since I've asked and what I thought to her was you know, okay, so you've made some choices that you thought were going to bring you the kind of life that you wanted, and now you're looking at your life and you're saying, well, that's not actually true.

Shannon W.:

So a couple things come to my mind. One thing that comes to my mind is that if you hadn't made that choice, you wouldn't know what you know now, right? So a phrase I heard recently that really caught my attention was something like action brings clarity. You know, it's really easy for us to look back on choices that we've made and second guess ourselves for those things, but the truth is that if we hadn't made those choices, we wouldn't be in the position now to look back on them and to receive the learning that we have received from them. And it also reminds me of a couple of years ago.

Shannon W.:

A dear friend of mine died and I was pretty distraught and I was talking to another friend about it, upset, crying, and I was talking about choices that I had made that I wish I had made differently during the time of my relationship with this person, and I was feeling regret, I was feeling guilt, I was feeling, you know, a lot of emotions that we could totally understand in the time of loss or a death of a loved one, and just really wishing that I had done things differently. And my friend was so wise in that moment. She said how long ago was this that you made these choices in this relationship? And I said, well, it's been about 15 years. And she said, okay, 15 years ago, how can you expect the you 15 years ago to have made the choice that you today would make? Don't beat yourself up for a choice that 15 years ago you made. You have so much more life experience, wisdom, insight, perspective than you of 15 years ago could have possibly had. So have some love for that. You have some love for that former you that made those decisions that got you to this point today where you have more wisdom and perspective because of the mistakes you may have made in the past. We don't get to the insight unless we pass through the struggle. So that's the first thing that came to my mind when I saw that headline of I've wasted so much time. The second thing that came to my mind was you know, I know a lot of people, a handful of people at least in my life who have experienced the same thing as this woman in Beijing that they have started off by getting a degree and another degree and a job.

Shannon W.:

Maybe it's a job in the corporate world, but a lucrative job, they're making good money and they think they've made it big and they're happy for a minute. And then they go oh wait, now what? I did all the things I was supposed to do to be happy and I'm not happy. And maybe they've bought all the things that they wanted to buy, maybe they've bought a house or started a business, and they just realize at some point, like this isn't actually making me happy the way that I thought that it would. So they end up leaving the lucrative job that they have and they take time to step back and ask what do I really want? What does bring me fulfillment? What other definition of success might I live by?

Shannon W.:

And this is a really common thing to have happen, because our culture is pushing a lot of us from the very beginning into this mindset that success equals money, that security equals money, that happiness equals money, a successful and secure job. So it makes sense that we make these decisions and we get into the workforce, because we need to make money regardless, and we want to grow up and we want to get out into the world and we want to blaze our trail and all these things, and so we do that. So there's really no reason to beat ourselves up for having chosen this if that's what we chose. Now there's a flip side to this, and this flip side is the side that I personally resonate more, and this is the mindset that I see the corporate world, I see the social norms that are working to convince me that the only way to be happy is to get the degree and the job and the house, the career, the money, the success. And I'm not going to buy into that. I'm not going to buy into that success story because I sense from the very beginning that there's a seed of capitalist manipulation in that right. So for a great deal of my life I was making choices that run counter to that. I don't care if I'm going to make a bunch of money. I'm not going to take a job for the purpose of making money. I'm going to follow my heart. I want to listen to where my soul guides me. If I have to sleep on couches or live in my car or live out of a backpack, I will do that if it means that I'm living a life that's true to myself. So part of this was a mindset of Carpe Diem seize the day.

Shannon W.:

I'm giving a nod to Dead Poets Society here, one of my very favorite movies, and I was highly affected by that movie If you've ever seen the movie. There's a young man in the movie named Neil, and Neil is the son of a successful doctor and his father, the doctor, is doing everything in his power to make sure that Neil becomes a doctor like him. He wants his son to be successful, he wants his son to toe the family line, he wants his son to make him proud. The problem is, neil wants to be an actor. In his heart, in his soul, his dream, his joy, his happiness, his creative spark is wrapped up in this dream of becoming an actor. And he's good at it, he's a good actor. And his father is furious with him for wanting to become an actor and he pulls him out of the play. And I won't ruin the climax of the movie, but it's a devastating outcome when Neil realizes that he is going to be forced to live someone else's dream for him and not his own.

Shannon W.:

And watching that movie when I was a teenager, I was like, ah, no, no, this is the worst possible thing that could happen to anyone in their life. You know, I mean this is a very American dream. You know we want to do, we want to live our lives, we want to live our dreams, you know, and and it was like the one of the worst possible things that I could imagine is somebody to have to give up who they are for someone else's opinions, someone else's pride, someone else's desires for them. And so to me, from that vantage point, I'm looking at going to school, getting a master's degree. Going and working in the corporate world is like another version of Neil's dad saying another version of Neil's dad saying here's what I want you to do with your life in order for you to be happy. It's really for me to be happy, but I'm going to tell you that it's for you to be happy so that you'll do it Right.

Shannon W.:

And often our society tells us that too, like this is for your own good. You just don't know it yet, but this is what's going to make you happy. You think you want to be an artist. You think you want to travel around the world. You think that you want to be a circus clown or a deep sea diver, but those things aren't realistic. So what you really need is X, y, z. And then you think well, they might know more than I do, and after all, I do need to make money, and so I'm going to go ahead and try what they said right.

Shannon W.:

So on the one hand, we have people who have made choices to become stable, to become successful according to some type of social norm, and then they get to a point where they stop and realize that that hasn't gotten them where they wanted to be. On the other side, we have people who didn't want to get caught in that kind of potential web, and so they made some choices along the way to keep themselves out of that web. And then what I didn't say is that sometimes they suffered for that. I certainly suffered for that. Because of those choices and my unwillingness to ever make money the reason for my choices I did end up sleeping on couches, living out of my car, living out of a backpack, not having enough food to eat, sometimes not being able to go to the grocery store, counting pennies, not being able to get my car repaired, etc. Etc. And end up living in a maybe a fulfilled life, doing work that we love, or work that feels like it's related to our soul's calling, so to speak, and yet we don't have money for toilet paper.

Shannon W.:

So from that vantage point, we can look back and say, ok, well, here I am and I've made all these choices and I've lived according to my values, and now I can't take care of myself and I kind of can't take care of anybody else. And I don't know if anyone listening can relate to that side of the story, but in my experience, then, what I ended up doing, and what I ended up absolutely having to do in order to get myself straight, is I needed to get a secure job, and I spent years getting my feet back on the ground, getting my health back in order, getting my health back in order, getting my diet back in order, getting my credit back in order, building a foundation under me and getting myself rooted in one place Just different things that I hadn't done. All the while that I was following my dreams and following my heart and following my soul. At the same time, I was neglecting a lot of the sort of the basic needs that I had in life and the gift that I got from the stable job.

Shannon W.:

It has helped to support my psychological and emotional and spiritual health, because if we don't have a foundation under us, there's only so long that we can run on an empty tank. We can run on empty for a while, but at some point we have to stop and fill up. So if I just take a step back, using this metaphor, and I look at someone like this woman in China, she filled her tank and filled her tank Just talking about financially right now, but you know, she got a really full tank. And then she went look, my tank is full, but maybe I'm not really going anywhere. Maybe I need to use some of this gas in my tank now and maybe I need to actually head out on the open road and find out where life wants to take me. And then there's the flip side of that, where someone might be like well, forget about stopping at the gas station, I'm going to hit the road because my soul's calling and I would have head out toward that horizon and see what life has in store for me. And then, you know, maybe years down the road, on that highway, you're like whoa, actually my tank is pretty dry and I'm going to have to stop and pull over that gas station and fill up my tank for a while. I know I said I didn't want anything to do with gas stations, but guess what If I don't fill up, I am never going to make it to the beach.

Shannon W.:

So here we have these two different sets of choices, these two different MOs regarding what we think will bring us happiness, and what I'm seeing is that the way that the world is structured requires a bit of both of both. It requires us taking steps to make sure that we have what we need to take care of ourselves physically and financially, and life also begs us not to have that be the only thing. As multidimensional beings, we have multidimensional needs, and we're fooling ourselves if we think that just making a lot of money and getting a good degree and following the modern Western economic world's prescription for happiness, we're fooling ourselves if we think that's all we need to be happy and I know it's not about happiness per se, you know, but I'm using happy as sort of a touchstone but it's not all that we need to be fulfilled. Right, she might look at someone who made different choices than she did and say, well, that person didn't waste any time. That person hit the highway and went straight for the horizon. That person didn't waste all that time at the gas station.

Shannon W.:

And then someone who really hit the ground and then ran out of gas and now they're working at a gas station and they never wanted to work at that gas station. And they're beating themselves up because they're like if I would have just filled up my tank at the beginning now, I wouldn't be out here in the middle of, like Elko Nevada, working at a gas station and selling Slurpees to fill up my tank so I can get back on the road. And side note, no offense to Elko Nevada if you just happened to cross my mind, but you all are my neighbors and I love you, so you know it doesn't help to say like which way is better, like that way would have been better, that way would have been better. Even that is part of the problem. It's part of the mindset that there was a better way to do it.

Shannon W.:

And so and I will I will admit that that has come to my mind before, where I say, oh, I wish I would have done it the other way, because I have a couple of friends and acquaintances who did actually go and get the degree and get the corporate job and made a boatload of money. And after making a boatload of money, they stopped and went oh wait, this isn't actually making me happy and then they left their corporate jobs and they had a boatload of money. So here they are, a couple of years in and they left their job and they've got so much money and now they can invest it and now they can travel the world, and now they can become philanthropists, and now they can support causes they believe in and they can use that money that they made to live an aligned life from as the foundation. Oh, it'd be really easy for me to look at those people and go, wow, I wish I would have done that. So that's the thing there's no right way.

Shannon W.:

And another thing our culture often wants us to believe is that there is a right way. So I think part of waking up means waking up to belief systems that we have about the way that the world works, and a belief system about wasted time is a belief system that we can wake up from. The whole idea of wasting time comes from an industrialized culture that has us all living our lives according to the clock. So we can question that Is there such a thing as wasting time? Or does wasting time only come from a corporate culture that wants to make sure that it squeezes every bit of work out of us before we clock out for the day.

Shannon W.:

It's worth thinking about that, Because it's a balance. It's a balance we do have to live in the world that we're all living in together, which requires taking care of the practicalities Living by a clock, working to bring in resources to support ourselves cleaning our house, washing our dishes, putting gas in the car, taking the kids to school, whatever it is, you know, life does require that of us. It also requires of us that we live fully, that we ask of ourselves this one life that I have, this fragile, beautiful temporary life that I have. What do I want to do with this one life? What do I want to give with this one life? Who do I want to be in this one life?

Shannon W.:

It reminds me again of Dead Poets Society and a quote that Robin Williams has in that movie. He says something like medicine, law, engineering. Those are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life, but beauty and love, those are what we stay alive for. This is what he's talking about in that movie. Life is asking us to be whole. We can find a balance, and I think balance may not be exactly the right word, because I don't want to fall into the life-work balance idea word, because I don't want to fall into the life-work balance idea. I think that what I want to suggest more is that we can build a foundation that then we can live upon. So we build the flower bed and we can plant the seeds so that the seeds can grow. And it's not either, or it's both, and it's not better or worse. It's not.

Shannon W.:

I wasted time. If you wasted time, if you think you wasted time and you didn't get that garden bed seeded, seed it now. If you think that you spent all your time growing flowers and now you actually have no vegetables to eat, go find some vegetable seeds. Self-blame isn't going to get you there, but planting seeds will. Again, action brings clarity. So, going back to this article and this woman who said I wasted so much time, the main thing I would wish to say to her, to myself, to all of us is to myself, to all of us, is to say don't be so hard on yourself.

Shannon W.:

We all grew up in a world that is teaching us to be a certain way and teaching us to follow a certain path in order to be fulfilled. You're human. We're made to look to generations ahead of us, to our parents, to our teachers, to our society, to guide us, to tell us what will bring us fulfillment, what will bring us contribution. And our society is pretty broken right now. Our society is not always giving us the messages that are really going to lead us to fulfillment and contribution. Especially, it's just a very individualistic society. Especially, it's just a very individualistic society. It's a very capitalistic society that thrives off of feeding us messages to convince us that we need to buy things to be happy again, that financial security equals happiness.

Shannon W.:

So if we buy into these narratives that are all around us from birth, it is not our fault. So let's not be hard on ourselves. Let's just recognize that we're human beings making human choices within human structures. And then let's look at where we are right now and say, okay, great right now. And say, okay, great, based on what I have learned about myself and about life. Let me take a step back and say what if I don't look at that as wasted time? What if I look at that as the time I needed to spend to get to where I am now, to have the wisdom and the experience to now contribute to the world in the way that I really mean to, because it's not just people in the US or Europe or the Western world who are struggling with meaninglessness, who are struggling with feeling lost or disconnected or dejected in a world that often treats us and everything else as commodities and objects. It's also happening in China and I would venture to guess it is happening everywhere in the world. That toxic hustle culture we all live in has permeated the planet.

Shannon W.:

None of us are alone. So I'm tired of the grind. You're probably tired of the grind. You're probably tired of the grind. Let's not let that grind grind up our hearts and souls. Let's not let that grind convince us that we have done something wrong when all we have wanted to do was to live a full and meaningful life. And let's ask ourselves what would it mean to live a full and meaningful life? No judgment, throw the judgment of the past decisions out the door.

Shannon W.:

And I won't even say start again. We're not starting again. We're starting from today, because we already know this. But today is really all we have, and regrets from the past can keep us stuck in the past. But if we're in the present moment, right now, that's the best place for us to be able to sit in silence and to listen to our wisdom, to our own perspective, to feel our own heartbeat, to get in touch with our senses, to feel what it feels like to be human. So I'm going to turn this thing off. I'm going to go to the park. I'm going to walk out to the little goose pond it's frozen with all the little geese, and I am going to probably squeal with glee when I see some geese coming in for a landing. Or I see some cute dog wiggling his tail so hard that he's about ready to fall over. And these kind of sensory experiences and momentary joys are always available to us and we have these opportunities regardless of the choices that we've made in the past.

Shannon W.:

So on wasting time in the corporate world you know the corporate world and the capitalist world, the industrial world. It's already taken a lot from us. It's already taken from a lot of us our land, our original livelihoods, our original connections to place, our original perspectives of time and space and what's important and what matters. It's taken a lot from us already. Let's not let it take away our sense of wholeness and well-being. Let's not let the corporate world make us feel bad, thinking that we've wasted time because the corporate world doesn't deserve it. Let's take back our sense of time. Let's reorient our sense of value, to our own center of gravity and what we know is important. Let's give ourselves some grace for the choices that we've made.

Shannon W.:

The American dream has a lot of holes poked in it. If you're seeing those holes and if maybe you've fallen into one or two of them, or 10, it's not you, those aren't your holes. That's probably not your dream, and this might sound a little bit like a cliche as well, but I really think you can't do this wrong If you're questioning now or later or 10 years ago, if you're questioning and you're saying what does it really mean to be human? What does it really mean to be happy? What does it really mean to contribute to life? What does it really mean to get to the end of my life and be able to say that I've lived a life fully lived? There's no one right path, but I'd say you're on the right path.

Shannon W.:

Friends, thanks for listening. As I mentioned before, this is a new thing for me to just talk off the cuff about a topic. I hope there was some value in this for some of you listening and I would love to know how it landed for you If you have a comment for me. If you have feedback for me, please, please, let me know. You can get in touch with me on the contact page at ShannonWillscom, and I want to thank you again for being with me on this journey. Stay tuned for more episodes to come, and I promise it will not be six months before you hear from me again. Be well, take care, much love and let's keep waking up together. Bye for now.