The Theatre of Work and the Illusion of Separation
How the illusion of separation maintains corporate absurdity and blocks consciousness
This week, my new article at Fast Company Magazine BR, brings my take on the corporate game. Original here.
Observe a typical corporate meeting. Artificial personalities sit around a table, each defending imaginary territories, protecting constructed egos, performing importance for other performers. Everyone knows that the meeting could be an email, that the decisions are irrelevant, that the project will eventually be sidelined by the hype of the moment. But the ritual continues because each separate "I" needs to justify its individual existence.
Corporate architecture - glass towers, marble lobbies, closed offices - physically materialises our belief in separation. Each cubicle is a cell in the prison we have built by believing that we are isolated fragments fighting for survival. Reports, meetings, positions, organisational charts, all this keeps alive the fiction that we are these fragments, when in reality we express the same Consciousness.
Today's tiredness doesn't come from physical effort, but from sustaining artificial identities. It's exhausting to live ten or twelve hours a day as if your "professional self" were real, as if tasks had intrinsic meaning, as if you had to defend a territory that never existed.
Companies are going through a process similar to the secularisation of religions: we've abandoned faith in rituals, but we're still attached to the beliefs that sustained them. We no longer believe that meetings and reports matter, but we still insist that we are isolated individuals competing for survival.
As David Graeber observed in his book "Bullshit Jobs", we have evolved into entire ecosystems of mutual absurdity. But the root of this pathology doesn't lie in economic structures - it lies in the fundamental belief that we are beings separate from each other and from reality.
Some are beginning to see this. They are the corporate heretics, those who fulfil their roles without being confused with them, who use the system's resources to create something genuine and who recognise colleagues not as rivals, but as expressions of the same Consciousness. Few, very few still, but they are starting to appear.
These pioneers have discovered that when you stop defending a separate "I", the stage work becomes less exhausting. No more energy is wasted maintaining imaginary borders or protecting territories that were never real.When this realisation sets in, the theatre loses momentum, because no more energy is spent protecting imaginary borders.
All attempts to reform the system while maintaining the premise of separation are doomed. Benefits, home office, purpose speeches - everything is still based on the same illusion: that we are isolated individuals who need to be motivated and managed.
NO STAGING IN THE THEATRE OF WORK
The only real transformation begins when we see that we are not people competing, but a single Consciousness experiencing itself in different forms.
At that moment, competition loses its meaning, hierarchy becomes absurd and collaboration happens effortlessly. Companies made up of people who experience this clarity wouldn't need sophisticated protocols, because the very basis of the dysfunction has disappeared.
Corporate theatre only exists as long as we believe in the characters. When we recognise that we are the Consciousness that plays all the roles, the staging dissolves and the work can finally stop being a meaningless burden.
ALL ATTEMPTS TO REFORM THE SYSTEM WHILE MAINTAINING THE PREMISE OF SEPARATION ARE DOOMED TO FAILURE.
Deep down, it's fear that keeps the theatre going - fear of losing power, of no longer being influential, of no longer being recognised, of being seen as irrelevant. Fear acts as the invisible cement of separation, imprisoning leaders and professionals in fragile roles that need to be defended at every turn.
While fear occupies spaces, vital energy is wasted on maintaining characters that never really existed. Seeing this mechanism clearly doesn't mean denying work or leadership, but rather freeing them from the need for masks, allowing them to be lived from another place, without the constant defence of an illusion.
The real challenge is not to lead others, but to have the courage to unmask your own fear.
Leadership is an idea, not an individual.