Chained to the Loom
Part 11 of a Multi-Part Series “Towards Religion and Meaning”
Note: This is a multi-part series, if you haven’t read the previous posts, I highly recommend checking them out to catch-up before proceeding, here.
- Part One: Why I Turned Away From G-d
- Part Two: Declaring My Atheism
- Part Three: The Repugnancy of Religion
- Part Four: The Superficiality And Thoughtlessness of Religion
- Part Five: The Silencing of Religion
- Part Six: It’s Cool To Be An Atheist
- Part Seven: “Culturally Jewish”
- Part Eight: I Am The Seeker
- Part Nine: Stealing Fire
- Part Ten: Phish — The Ultimate Spiritual Experience
My three-day Phish slugfest was juxtaposed by the sterile and unfeeling workplace which I would find myself returning to. You see, the fun little startup which I had been part of (Patient IO) had just been acquired by athenahealth a week before the concert. And while this is every startup’s dream and was 100% the right thing for the founders to do, I was very anxious about what things would change for our team / culture / work ethic.
That said, there were a lot of great perks of the new gig as well as golden handcuffs which promised a big payout if we were to stick with the business for two years after the acquisition date. It was truly an incredible opportunity that I had been afforded and if I were to stick it out for just a little bit of time, I would be handsomely rewarded.
So, I continued in stride and concluded that working for athenahealth was one of the most normal things I had ever done in my life. It was almost like witnessing a moratorium on authenticity. The people working there were 9–5, they came in at the last possible minute and left as soon as they could. We had company charity outings where everyone would give back to the community for their required 2hrs every six months. There were tampons in the men’s restroom.
Trying to connect with people was like trying to dig a well on a concrete foundation covered in a thin layer of topsoil. The company was completely fragmented and fraught with poor communication and A LOT or people doing the same work as others in different parts of the company.
I find myself in a bit of a crisis with myself. While I had been working outside of work with this cool thing called ‘Ethereum’, I was still being untrue to who I was by staying at the business and keeping myself miserable in that environment. The work I had on my plate wasn’t even that hard!
I would go through and complete everything I had most days and then try to help out other teams / groups within the company. This sort of effort would often be met with bureaucracy or incompetence, so, eventually, I started taking very very long breaks and spending roughly 3–4 hours actually working while at the office. Which, honestly, was still more than most people between all standup, coffee breaks, bathroom breaks, snack breaks, lunch break, and various meetings.
I felt alone and didn’t have a Phish show / community to help get me through it all. I had heard that meditation could help with things like this, so I began meditating with the app ‘Calm’.
Every morning, I would go downstairs and drop into a 15–30 minute guided meditation. And boy, was it hard. But I always left it knowing that I was growing and starting my day off on a mindful note. And, soon enough, I got up to a streak of 60 days.
But that was the only measure of progress that I had. There were no assessments, benchmarks, or quizzes to show me how / if my mind had changed after 2 straight months of daily practice. So, I started looking more and more into mindfulness, Buddhism, etc… and found that Calm was actually a bastardized of mindfulness for the layman, and, more or less, a VC-funded fad.
I won’t go too much into depth on that, but I stopped meditating and focused more on this ‘Ethereum’ thing. It was just the small, tight-knit idealistic community of outcasts that I dearly needed.
