Letting Go! How One Man Escaped the Trap of Manufactured Normalcy

This essay was commissioned by Ernest Stabek, and is dedicated to his family, his friends, his connections and all of you seeking to broaden your vision whilst aligning life to your authentic self.

Departing

I am quiet and unassuming. Some might say self-effacing. A company man and an accountant by profession. So, you will no doubt understand my surprise when I heard the tiny voice in my head shriek, more insistently than ever before, Get me out of here!

The 'here' of my assumed discomfort was threefold. My flat in Kensington - a suburb in the West of London and the drawcard for hordes of Australian ex-patriates living there at the time. My office in a trendy glass and steel structure towering over the Thames. And, more emphatically, my role as Chief Financial Officer for Prism Technologies, a company where I had been thrown into the deep end, but for which I was paid a most handsome salary. As my mum proudly proclaimed to anyone who would listen to her: Stevehas come a long way, nudge, nudge. And in such a short time. Did you know he is only 27 years old?

The mysterious confidante who appeared to have taken up permanent residence in my head was not so easily convinced of my talent. But more of that later. I am running ahead of myself. For my story starts in a mining company in Perth, Australia.

It was here that I applied my newly-acquired accounting and management skills, quickly getting a slightly unfair reputation as a hard-nosed executive - nicknamed the "toe cutter" indeed for taking the axe and reducing staff numbers from 127 to just 17 following the 1987 market crash. It was a brutal label to give anyone. For I had no choice. That was my job and any discomfort I felt fulfilling the task I kept to myself. Unknown to others it troubled me enormously as people became highly distraught, after perhaps 20 years of service, and with no idea what they were going to do next. I, too, needed a change of air.

One day, purely on impulse, I bought a one-way ticket to the UK. After the stifling parochialism of Perth, I was seeking adventure in the old country - far away from Perth yet familiar enough not to be thought too much of a thrill-seeker. If I thought the muted voice in my head was going to be easily silenced by such a move, I was wrong. It nagged me continuously since arriving in the dank cold and fog of a British winter. In fact, it developed the uncanny habit of interrogating my every intention.

Steve, do you know what you're doing, the voice would casually inquire as I negotiated the people traffic jam on the way to work. Are you sure this is what you want? These were questions I was forced to ponder at the breakfast table most mornings. But it had never been this loud or intervened with such persistence. Get me out of here seemed to encapsulate an elision of conscience with more considered desires I had been harbouring for a long time. But how had it come to this?

From an early age I had romantically imagined the City of London to be the epicentre of the business world. It had always been my ambition to work at the heart of financial power. And here I was, after six years of part-time study, and full-time work, the CFO of an international enterprise.

New York had always been an alternative of course. But the US culture held little attraction for me compared to Europe with its variety and centuries of history. The few accountants and actuaries I met in the City, mostly ex-pats from Wall Street, seemed brash and impulsive - at least in contrast to their stoic British counterparts with their rich tradition of civility, old-fashioned orderliness and, well, regimented predictability.

Perhaps I did not allow for the fact that my warm colonial accent and neat demeanour concealed a streak of Australian larrikinism that did not suit the bowler hat brigade. Any disillusionment I had regarding my circumstances which, within months of my arrival was becoming distinctly worrying, arose from vague feelings of discomfort, rather than anything more explicit.

But the uneasy feelings simply refused to go away, creeping up on me little by little until my sleep was being disturbed. Like culture shock, which might in part have accounted for what I felt, it was visceral. It visited, as this slightly disembodied voice in my head, late at night when the hum of city traffic had subsided. Then I was treated to a stream of subliminal murmurings about things that were topsy-turvy, unfair, or definitely not right.

Get me out of here! Once more the voice intruded on my reverie. I had no doubt my conscience was speaking. I cannot claim the voice was that invasive. Nor was it a totally unwelcome guest, given my penchant for deep personal reflection. But what it was trying to tell me was baffling.

On dark rainy nights, arriving back at my Kensington flat jaded rather exhausted, it seemed to be more pronounced. You are wasting your time, it would caution, even getting to the point where it would insist that I had chosen the wrong career and that I should simply pack up and go home.

Steve, don't you want some Melbourne sun? Don't you miss the squawks of the white-crested cockatoos in the Botanic Gardens? How long do we have to put up with this miserable weather? And then there was work. You don't enjoy making all those investment decisions, do you? Surely there is more to life than this? Steve, are you listening to me? Steve! I was indeed listening.

The voice harped on for months, quietly and well-behaved at first, the inner monologue gnawing into the most precious assumptions I had held since my graduation. My ambition had always been to accrue wealth and to exercise leadership in a business setting. Status mattered. The corporate ladder had always been an inviting proposition, not some mythical impediment that would hold me back. Wealth, power, and status were to be the pinnacle of my career. That was always my dream. It meant everything to me. But now, as I approached the peak of that ambition, it failed to give me the gratification I desired. Worse still, I could not fathom out what I was doing wrong.

Unlike the mythical hero who discovers the truth in a blinding revelation, there was to be no easy epiphany for me. Just a lingering weariness, together with a gradual apprehension that made me more and more uncomfortable in the very place I was destined to be. What was it about life in the capital of corporate life that disappointed me? I was hardly over-qualified for the work I was being tasked to do. Given my relative youth was it that I felt undeserving of the kudos and the financial rewards that came with the job? That seemed unlikely. Perhaps I just felt unchallenged? After all I could do the job with one hand tied behind my back. Perhaps, in the end, it was just pointless work? The endlessly numbing routine of it all...

By this time, I was moving around quite a bit - trying various companies in different industries in an effort to find that elusive satisfaction I was searching for. There were always so many incongruities between my day job and my nightly reflections that were impossible to reconcile, or so I thought. I knew I was becoming more bored with each new role. But I was immensely successful, at least by those tangible measures used by my friends, and my own aspirations as a graduate. I was young, enjoying a generous salary, a company car, a lush city office overlooking the Thames with all the trappings, a group of exceptionally wealthy friends - and kudos. I excelled at my job. What more could I possibly want? Most of my college friends back in Melbourne were envious of my rapid elevation.

Yet my inner voice seemed unconcerned with all of that. You don't appear to be happy Steve; it would try to convince me. I became more and more worried that I was missing something... You have achieved the goals you set yourself. So now what? Where to from here? Perhaps that tiny voice was referring to a factor I had difficulty seeing from inside the cage of my 'manufactured normalcy'.

To say that it bothered me would have been an understatement. Something was missing, though I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Clearly it was not apparent to others as my social life continued much as before. I wondered whether the comforts I enjoyed and the privileges that came with my job were the issue. Were the indulgences of my position preventing my disentanglement from the conformity in which I felt increasingly wedged, yet powerless to do anything about? Was this 'insanity of the norm' the cause of my boredom and restlessness?

As yet another winter drew to a close, and the daffodils bloomed in Kensington gardens, I started to plan where I would take my next summer vacation. On weekends I would spend many leisurely hours in Foyle's scanning Lonely Planet guides. The South of France and the Dordogne appealed to me. Greece, too, along with the sights and sounds of the Mediterranean, also beckoned.

Visiting the local travel agent proved to be a fruitless cul-de-sac. At the time they seemed only to be interested in promoting cruises for the elderly along with group tours, which I found not the least bit appealing. Adventure was still very much a priority on my list. Solitude too. That is what I really wanted. Time to revitalize my batteries - to reflect on where my career was taking me. How could I let go in a measured way that didn't require me to give up everything I valued and had worked so hard for? That was my profound challenge.

It was gradually dawning on me that I was on a quest for something 'better' - something outside of my peripheral vision. But what was that? Moreover, where was it? Since arriving in London all the systems, processes, and government bureaucracies seemed to hold me captive: instructing, inducting, and coercing me into an ill-fated role. They were there to confirm my place in the social order and to keep me there. Just another human cog in the wheel of industrial production.

At the behest of my inner voice, I joined another company, hoping to find new challenges. And then another. But it was all the same. Frustration built. Nothing I did seemed to matter or to make much sense. I turned my attention to how I might be able to generate more of an impact, some small incremental legacy on those around me, and those who chose to listen and learn from the conversations we had. I was 27 years old and desperate to find a way out of the success, which had become my prison.

As I began to critique this state of affairs, and to denounce its orthodoxies, hesitantly at first, but then with greater enthusiasm, I began to see more clearly what I was dealing with. Insurance, I was convinced, was nothing more than a parasitic leech, its suckers extracting the lifeblood out of the misfortunes of others. Can you see what I see Steve, my conscience nonchalantly asked? I could indeed. But clearly others could not. It was increasingly difficult to find anyone who thought the same way as me. Developing a talent for intuitive discomfort I felt more and more insulated from the world around me.

Steadily it began to dawn on me that we were all on a gigantic treadmill - a marketing Ferris wheel propelled by just the right blend of desire and consumption that renders almost everything else irrelevant. My friends were alarmed by my increasing disinterest with all things corporate. Most of them could not fathom out why I would contemplate discarding everything I had ever dreamed of. They were conformists to a tee - trying to drag me back into a world of business, rather than to admit there was more to life than compliance accounting.

That was the day the voice in my head could take no more and screamed with such impatience, Steve! Get me out of here. I remember the moment as though it were just yesterday. Shiny new elevators had been installed at the office. In each elevator a small television monitor (on a loop that played content repeatedly) invited me to buy the latest electric toothbrush, trade in my car for the latest model, or take a Caribbean cruise. Every 30 minutes it broadcast the local news. The last bastion of my privacy had been breached by sponsored advertising in a sanctuary of solitude. The elevator. It seems the inmates really have taken over the asylum this time Steve, my inner voice ventured to suggest. I did not argue.

That day I did what any self-respecting young Aussie living overseas was bound to do eventually. I resigned, packed up my few belongings, farewelled the world of business, and set out to explore the real world. There was nothing left for me in the metropolis. And certainly nothing but routine boredom and frustration in the prize I had always coveted - a corporate career. New horizons and fresh challenges beckoned now. At long last my inner voice fell silent.

Surrender

It took a while to find my bearings following those early experiences. After having succumbed to the relentless waves of conformity and marketing nonsense washing over most corporate life, my inner voice helped me to find an unlikely escape route. Letting go of my previous cravings for a life of luxury, inspired by an immature definition of success, being able to jaunt around Europe as a backpacker gave me time to reflect on the reality of the human condition - time to discover what had been missing from such a predictable, yet self-destructive, teleology.

Power, status, and money were no longer part of the equation for one very simply reason: I could no longer be constrained by any single individual or organisation telling me how to function or operate. I simply didn't want to be stuck in a giant corporate mechanism. I wanted authenticity and something approaching the truth. A better balance between the obligations I felt towards others and the freedom to be myself, to think differently, and to be more creative. That much I grasped, although at the time I had little understanding of what it might look like.

The great American comedian Danny Kaye once said: Life is a great big canvas. Throw all the paint on it you can. The only thing I knew with any certainty was that one day my entire life would flash before my eyes. I needed to make sure that when that day came it would be a life worth watching. And so that European trek was a mindful journey in which I deliberately began to piece together a portfolio of interests that would eventually become that life.

The first step was letting go of all my preconceived notions of what was important in life to search for more meaningful clues. I realised for the first time that possessions and status were ephemeral and almost totally unrelated to the kind of peace and contentment I was seeking. The realisation was accompanied by a sense of profound relief.

The second step was more radical: overcoming an innate reticence I began to engage people in conversations. Not just commentary about the weather or asking for directions, mind you. But real dialogues ranging from architecture to philosophy and life in general. Sometimes I would speak to complete strangers, just on impulse. A priest in Sacre Coeur talked to me for 20 minutes about the artists living in Montmartre. I made conversation with a fellow passenger on the Paris-Firenze express about the manicured state of the landscape as we sped through Lombardy. And I sat with a homeless youth in Rome for over an hour exchanging views about the welfare state and the line between penury and possibility. It was in these conversations that I was to discover my true self.

I began to recognise the potency of dialogue, a sense of liberty and the deep bonds between two human souls that it could provoke. I began to see my responsibilities shifting away from caring for myself and furthering my own career, to helping others grow and see the possibilities within their own lives and how they might expand on those. For the first time in my life, I felt accomplished as I aided others to make choices they had not seen - choices far beyond those being peddled by the mainstream marketing fraternity and the fakeness of everything on offer in the marketplace.

During my travels around Europe, I like to think I liberated the minds of many ordinary people as I helped them to identify their strengths and how to take heed of their own hearts, rather than the illegitimate information routinely fed to them by others. Lifting the burden of imposed values and beliefs, extending their thinking beyond the limitations of state-sanctioned normalcy, and moving towards their fears with optimism, felt joyful and justified. This became the mission I would pursue when back in Australia. It was time to go home.

Arriving

It was not at all difficult finding people who needed my help. I suspect my informal optimism and humility, honed by such a variety of experiences in the world of finance and big business, helped reassure those of my friends who thought this vocational shift a radical departure from the quietly resolute and ambitious accountant they had known in Perth. But if finding people who needed my help was not a problem, coaching them into a more liberated existence proved a formidable task.

Often their escape route from an inflicted reality they simply did not comprehend was unclear. I'm sure they probably felt trapped by 'the system' but could not easily convey why that was the case. Many of my new clients were wealthy, had a happy family life, and held down senior positions in industry and finance. They would often feign satisfaction when dodging more probing questions. But in some instances, they also expressed guilt for feeling hemmed in and controlled.

Their simple interpretation of reality, a mixture of staid routines and monotony, reified any action from them as normal. Examining their goals and motivations was tough. It was far easier for them to give up and revert to a relaxing evening in front of the television or staying late to sort out an issue at work. In conforming to their 'manufactured normalcy' they had no idea they were also surrendering to a parsimonic addiction that kept them from awaking to any alternative reality.

Only when we start to break the shackles of conformity, and to be frustrated by our discomforts, do we find the courage to stand alone. Curiously it is only then that we discover we are not alone. There are always alternatives to try if we have the courage to step into new ways of thinking and being.

I am reminded of many friends who run a range of professional businesses. She needed to be calmer in order to let go of her anxieties and make better decisions. Another had a bucket list of activities as long as your arm, on a meticulously planned Gantt sheet that could only ever be realised in a perfectly ordered world. He needed a spell of uncertainty to intervene in order for him to let go of his cravings for control. And yet many others who are being held back by a family so fearful of the slightest variation to routine. Frustrations leading to excessive drinking to numb the reality of expectations.  As his exasperation reached fever pitch, he had nowhere to turn. He still needs to find the source for his own letting go. I am still working on that with him.

Then there are the many others, some wealthy and famous, who simply refuse to find enjoyment in the life they have fabricated with such precision - are too fragile to fully engage or to be honest and open with others who might question their motives. They are cut off and unable to let go. For that would deny everything they stand for and have worked towards.

In all these instances my overwhelming instinct is to care, to trust, to be helpful, and to create an escape route - a revitalized sense of hope, a sense of choices.

Nowadays we are becoming used to what the media likes to call the 'new' normal. This phrase has been adopted internationally as the linguistic instrument for anchoring our world-system in a form of quasi-mandated optimism. Regrettably there can be no 'normal' of any kind in a material era of such volatile and asynchronous social, economic, political, and technological shifts. We are adrift in a unique form of manufactured normalcy where chaotic capriciousness and instant ambiguities prevail.

Exponential technologies are escalating at a pace we cannot even begin to grasp. Yet individual and collective comprehension regarding the realities of the human condition, urgently needed if we are to make sense of the plethora of information in which we are immersed, is flat lining. The gap between truths hidden within the noise, and our competence to sort and make sense of it, is getting wider. This is the most alarming crisis facing the human family. Inherent ignorance of this kind encourages us to stumble on in the belief that the future can take care of itself. It preserves dangerous delusions that are the cause of so many problems facing humanity.

Applied wisdom is critical if we are to rectify the flaws in human behaviour that have given rise to recklessly competitive materialism, wealth as an end in itself, insane warmongering, a climate at the point of collapse, the very real threat of self annihilation, and the splitting of civilizational worldviews. Yet we act as if none of this matters, that we should just put our minds to a return to business-as-usual as quickly as possible.

In all that crazy technocratically-addictive milieu, the gift I can bring is better sense-making of the unfolding drama - instilling calm where there is distress and wisdom where there is none.

Early in my career I was expected to exercise the authority vested in my position by letting people go - a woefully inadequate euphemism for making them redundant or giving them the sack.

Today I encourage my friends and clients to 'let go' by adapting with open eyes, an open heart, and an open mind. With purpose and conviction too. We must learn to let go of our appetite for the contrived definitions of success, however that might be defined, especially if it drives competition and material desire, but invariably leads only to anxiety and distress. We must learn to be givers rather than takers. We must learn to apply growth as the means for becoming better people, rather than the channel for acquiring more and more goods that we don't need. And we must learn to care again - for each other and for the planet.

After 15 years of complying with society's expectations, ignoring the false red flags that cautioned me to remain in my little box or suffer the consequences of my enlightenment, redefining my path took many years of introspection, travel, courage, and opening my mind to possibilities outside of the norm. I knew I was unhappy. I knew that something was not right.

My conscience reminded me at the most inopportune moments which was a challenge in itself. I had reached the pinnacle of corporate success in a multinational enterprise. It was little wonder that my colleagues persisted in trying to pull me back into my box. I had moved around to find a better fit for my talent, but to no avail. Instead, I became an expert at making myself redundant.

At first, I was reluctant to stand out from the crowd. To let go of the discomforts I had rationalized as virtues was even more painful. But only by letting go of everything I once thought so beneficial was I able to discover that which had previously been missing. To grow in confidence and in love with life, along with being helpful to others.

Each person requires different events and experiences in order to wake up to what is all around them, to what they feel is left out or missing, and what they choose to leave behind. My path, the shift from personal materialism to helping others find their own escape route out of the cage of normalcy was unlikely. Friends and colleagues tried to hold me back for my own good, feeling that what I was doing amounted to self-harm.

Fortunately, in terms of my sanity, I recognized soon enough that the manufactured normalcy in which I was trapped - its routines, rules, reports and, of course, its rewards - was an addiction. A drug, a pacifier, a defence mechanism, and a condition that kept me in a quasi-comatose state and was making me nauseous.

I had set out to get a title, power and money - every young person's dream when they come out of university. And I achieved just that. But when I got to the point of having the title of a CFO of a multinational, having the power, and having the money was not enough. At that point I sat back and asked my inner voice, what’s next, there must be more?

And I still believe that to be the case. As David Bowie once said: I don't know where I am going from here. But I promise it won't be boring.

Copyright 2021 Ernest Stabek

 For the full book with ten short stories see https://www.linkedin.com/posts/erneststabek_contagion-living-realitycheck-activity-6867625212654043136-tg90