If your 9 to 5 office life consists foremost of wishing it was over – for the day, the week, forever – it might resemble somewhat of a prison sentence: closed in by the narrow walls of a cubical cell, tied down to a chair and chained to a mouse, one-hour lunch breaks your lap in the yard. And nobody ever visits. Looking at it from the outside, I can’t help seeing bars in the symmetry that comes with the sterile and institutional blueprints of office buildings around the world.
______
a glimpse
glimpse: BUSY DIZZY | If your job isn’t the job for you, being busy might make you dizzy: fingers stapled to the keyboard, you hastily type your lifetime away, 8hrs a day; the next weekend ever too far, the next vacation further yet, retirement but a remote dream of a dream of a different life; a mirage really, once you reach it heaving 60+ years but having left behind the lightness of your youth. No backspace to slam now. Plagued by angst and inertia, your cellmates in the cubical penitentiary are guilty of the same crime – high stakes trades: contentment for happiness, security for moments, office life for life. And so the self-inflicted sentence will be just that: office life for life. But there is the hope of breaking out – and even this picture is trying to escape its rectangular fence, when you stare at it long enough.
______
gallery
_____
related
photos | people
Outside Job
when your office isn’t anywhere near an office
...nobody robbed us of our freedom; it was an inside job we signed up for. Outside jobs, by contrast, are not always a deliberate choice and oftentimes the harder labor, but they come with a certain spatial freedom... see more
photos | urban