The age of the vapid quote
Workplaces are plastered with ‘inspirational’ slogans aimed at motivating employees … and casting blame on them for feelings of dissatisfaction
By Yvonne C. Claes
When arriving at work shortly after 7 a.m., groggy and gripping my large coffee, I meander through a gauntlet of brightly colored inspirational quotes.
If the 45-minute commute already didn’t put me in a bad mood, the vapid words greeting me from almost every surface surely will.
Be the best you! After all, there’s only one you!
*Sigh*
The last part of that simplistic saying implies you should be yourself, be unique. But employers don’t want individuals. Most want compliant drones who don’t think for themselves and do as they are told.
Corporate American culture is rife with these catchphrases that tell us how highly we are valued, how work is a virtue, and how success can only be achieved through constant toil, to the exclusion of a personal life.
And if you aren’t feeling gratitude when laboring for hours after your scheduled workday, then you just need to change your way of thinking. A new perspective fixes everything.
After all, you should be grateful you have a job at all.
Don’t blame the extra duties that have been piled on your desk with alarming regularity each year — minus extra pay or time during the workday to complete them — for your bad attitude. It’s not your boss’s fault he can’t hire more employees to share the load.
Conventional wisdom says that no one wants to work. The reality is no one wants to work for bad bosses, and there are plenty out there.
Gaslighting and the American worker go hand-in-hand, and the vapid quotes found in most workplaces nowadays reinforces the mental abuse. Ironically, most of the people offering these pithy quotes are billionaires or multi-millionaires who inherited their wealth and haven’t known a day’s work in decades.
Or they were given at minimum solid financial and educational foundations that most Americans can’t afford to give their children.
Employees also are criticized for thinking small and being too timid when it comes to taking chances. Americans for generations have internalized these criticisms, not understanding that an unfair system is why they can’t reach their aspirations.
Take risks and do something bold. You won’t regret it, says Elon Musk, the man who could afford to take risks after inheriting millions from his father. Musk had a large financial cushion to pursue his dreams; most people don’t.
“Musk is far from self-made,” states an Oct. 18 article. “He was born in South Africa to an extremely wealthy white family that profited off the exploitation of workers in sub-Saharan Africa and apartheid-era South Africa. Much of his family’s wealth came from an emerald mine in Zambia owned by Errol Musk, Elon’s father. The African mining industry is known to be incredibly exploitative, with child labor, horrible working conditions, disease, abuse of workers, and fatalities all commonplace.”
So much for that being bold and taking risks nonsense.
But Musk isn’t the only one who has benefited from parental riches and has the compulsion to share words of wisdom.
Such was the case with Malcolm Forbes, an American entrepreneur whose father founded Forbes magazine. And what would a billionaire or multi-millionaire be without a pithy quote to accompany all his cash:
Diamonds are nothing more than chunks of coal that stuck to their jobs, Forbes was quoted as saying.
Nothing like dehumanizing workers, eh?
Then there are those who didn’t directly inherit wealth but led privileged childhoods, which of course, led to privileged adulthoods.
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning — Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft. Gates came from parents who owned multiple homes and a mother who came from wealth. In other words, I doubt Gates ever worked in a fast-food joint in which customers hurled obscenities and threatened him with physical violence.
Gates had more opportunities to achieve due to his parents’ financial background and ability to send him to the best schools.
Then we have intellectuals telling us it’s solely our fault for not having the life we want.
Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from, says American author Seth Godin, whose job allows him to work in solitude, minus micro-managing bosses and difficult co-workers.
Godin must not know that approximately 80 percent of U.S. workers dislike their jobs.
Godin’s Canadian counterpart, author Robin Sharma, doesn’t understand the plight of workers either: Don’t live the same year 75 times and call it a life.
Well damn! If only I had received these laconic language lessons sooner!
Besides businessmen and authors, entertainment types love to share personal pearls of wisdom with the masses.
Aim high, work hard, and love your family, says American broadcaster Deborah Roberts. Notice how family comes last in her mini-catalog.
Then there are famous people who didn’t even try to hide their true feelings toward workers. Take the late Paul Rand, a designer who created logos for UPS, IBM, and Enron among other corporations: Don’t try to be original, just try to be good.
Quite a paternalistic sentiment, if you ask me.
Then there’s politicians, the kings and queens of feeble quotes. Perhaps one of the best orators — and bullshitters — in history is former President Barack Obama.
Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time, Obama has said. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.
His comments would be laughable if they weren’t so sad. People voted for Obama because he promised “hope and change.” Unfortunately for us, we got change, and none of it good.
We got a historical upward transfer of wealth, more wars in countries of color, a broken promise to make Roe v. Wade the law of the land (and this was when he had a super-majority in Congress for two years), a record number of pipelines cutting through Native American lands, no universal healthcare but instead a financial giveaway to private insurance companies via Obamacare, and increased militarization of police.
I could go on, but you get the picture. Obama was a human quote machine, and his utterings rarely matched reality, just like inspirational corporate quotes.
I prefer nonsensical “inspirational quotes” to those that seek to blame or make the reader feel inadequacy and shame.
British hairstylist and businessman Vidal Sassoon once said, The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.
Terse, for sure. But it really doesn’t say anything of substance. Come to think of it, inspirational quotes rarely do, but at least Sassoon didn’t cover his miniature missive in gold.
I appreciate his whimsy.
My favorite quote has nothing to do with working harder or being grateful for the crumbs people receive for their labor:
It is just as difficult and dangerous to try to free a people that wants to remain servile as it is to enslave a people that wants to remain free — Niccolo Machiavelli, Italian diplomat, author, philosopher, and historian who lived during the Renaissance.
Machiavelli’s quote pretty much sums up where we are today, doesn’t it?
©Yvonne C. Claes, 2022. I own this content. You can share my column, but make sure my name is left on it. If you don’t, be prepared to deal with my copyright attorney. Thanks!
