I hate it here. But I have to be here. Or maybe I don’t. Maybe in some ways, I am part of the machinery that makes the gears in this place grind harder. I have the fertile profile of a despondently unemployed Nigerian youth, angered and pissed at the corporate world for its lack of fair and evenly distributed opportunities. I probably am the stereotypical hater who everyone else sees as just being too lazy to succeed, instead opting to gawk at other people’s success stories with disdain and blaming the system. Maybe in being here and hating, the algorithmic witches can sense my ire and choose to crank up the gears; revealing one pseudo-positive and quasi-successful feat after another so I can drown in my hatred. Perhaps, by showing me that young freelance writer who just made his first million on Upwork, or that self-starter lady who just completed her Google certification in Project Management, it hopes not to inspire but to torture. Maybe my sadness—and by extension, all sadness created by the gnawing sense of unworthiness pervading the corporate world—helps fuel the depth of despair that makes here a thriving hell.  

It is noteworthy to mention that I have never once liked it here. Not even when I was not unemployed, once upon a time in my life. Not even when I had every reason to act like everyone else here and tell my story of personal and professional triumphs. My unwillingness not to act wasn’t for a lack of optimal temptation. As an unemployed youth in Nigeria, temptation is a siren that constantly flirts with me. In seeing the picturesque stories of my peers here, I too am often tempted to portray my struggles as conquerable. I don’t think I even hate coming here to declare with aplomb, ‘I got the job because I was hardworking and patient.’ However, I would rather not lie or proffer half-truths if I can avoid it. Because what most people won’t tell you about here is that hard work and patience have little to do with the outcome of becoming a walking, talking grass-to-grace merchant.    

On the contrary, hard work is a virtue reserved here for the poor and uninformed. This salient truth is encoded in the fine print of each post you come across. As you scroll, you are bombarded with information you should know that is almost guaranteed to help you become a better project manager or content writer or copywriter or software engineer. You are hit with tip after tip laced with anecdotal stories that are all but certain to help you swallow the baited hook that tells you why your career might be in a slump. You are constantly reminded of how the world wide web is the ultimate sorcerer supreme on par with Doctor Strange, and all you have to do to wield its magical powers is to understand x and y strategies from A and B experts with C and D years of corporate experience. It is no surprise why you are likely to find more answers than questions here because the spectacle of magic requires the suspense of any critiquing of the act itself. Here, hard work is for the sad job seeker like me. True success comes to those who do not wait but to those who can tweak their story to make it more magical than ordinary.  

Here, ‘patience’ is a mere word made famous by that saying about bones and dogs. Here, what matters isn’t how long you wait your turn at the table of CEOs and corporate giants. It is how many half-truths you are willing to peddle about yourself while waiting and positioning yourself to be noticed by those CEOs and corporate giants. Patience is not a state of waiting for the stars to align but building your constellation and touting it as the real deal. In some way, I must admit there is a sense of strength to such narratives. Nothing can be as self-hindering as the ploy to wait for fate to make things happen. Yet, something sinister lurks in how these seeming virtues are used in this place. Here, patience isn’t even a virtue —it is a vice, purposefully used for the greater good of reimagining your personal or professional narrative to feel a part of something bigger. In the end, nothing good comes easily here, because nothing about this place is inherently good—only necessary to project a mirage of order for the corporate world. 

I hate it here. But I’ll remain. As long as the corporate powers deem this dungeon of self-fellating hell the necessary evil that an unemployed youth like me has to endure in my search for the illusive freedom of a pay check, I will have to remain here. I will have to hold my nose and take a dive in this cesspool and hope I only emerge with a few leeches on my skin. I will still hate it here tomorrow. But in the quietude of my heart, when no one is listening to its frightful thumps plagued by the insecurity of unemployment, I sometimes secretly wish I had the talent to repurpose my misfortunes into paeans, like those that love it here do. I would wish my paeans could then be sung as lullabies for the next sad soul who is forced to be here, albeit unsure why they, like me, desperately hate it here⎈