Or, how to land yourself in prison without ever committing a crime
Approximately one year ago, I volunteered to work on one of two night shifts at my workplace. This shift was between 4:00 PM and 12:00 AM so it was OK - I'm usually up those hours anyways. But six months in, my supervisor ordered me to temporarily fill a critical position working two days a week between 12:00 AM and 8:00 AM - not OK. So, since January, I've been toiling away, doing two graveyard shifts a week being told that it would just be another two months before my replacement was hired. Now, I haven't taken this in stride, I've been a consistent thorn in management's side about it since the beginning. Finally, when I was just about ready to give it up and resign myself to working graveyards, my supervisor came to me and told me that my replacement had been offered the job and accepted and that she would begin in about one month. I was overjoyed to return to a normal shift - or so I thought.
Now I have to face some important decisions about what to do next. While I was on nights, I had full flexibility and authority to do most anything that I deemed appropriate. Now, going back to days, I'm going to be just an administrative services clerk who has to run everything past his supervisors before acting. Also, with my transfer to nights, came my transfer under a new (and much better) supervisor, now I have to report to my old boss - not something I'm looking forward to. So, in a way, I'm afraid to leave nights. This really got me thinking because it's what I've been trying to get ever since I was assigned to graveyard shifts, but now I almost don't want to go. After thinking about the reasons for this seemingly irrational fear, I came to a curious revelation: I've been institutionalized.
Now, some people may say that this is an over dramatization and that working an odd-hour shift could not possibly compare to a life in prison. I would argue that it does, just on a smaller scale. It proves one thing: when forced into a constraining situation, we humans readily adapt to it in most cases. When a person is sentenced to serve a jail term, they have no choice but to do so and so they adapt. Now, one might argue that everyone has a choice in every situation, and I believe this is true. But somehow our minds manage to exclude some options. For instance, the person sentenced to serve a jail term has an option to attempt escape, which will result in punishment if failed. Given that this activity has a high risk of failure, the mind may exclude that option. Another option for that person might be suicide, but since most minds - even criminal - act in self-preservation, this option will probably also be excluded.
Taking all of that into account consider this: when I began working at my workplace, I was to be paid a specific hourly rate that corresponded to my skills and abilities. As I have spent the years there, that hourly rate has increased due to workplace specific skills that I have demonstrated. Now, when I consider leaving my employer and seeking another job, my first criteria is whether or not my pay will be matched or increased. Unfortunately, due to the highly particular nature of the industry that I am in, there are not many employers who want the skills that I have acquired and even fewer who are willing to compensate me at an equal or better rate. So in this way, my mind has excluded those jobs that I could have, but where I would be earning less money.
My argument is that exclusion of options - whether from external control factors or from internal constraints - is at the core of imprisonment. Hence why so many people feel that they are trapped in their jobs. That imprisonment, a cage, as it were is what we adapt to when we feel we have no other options - or at least no good ones. So when we adapt, we become institutionalized. When we become institutionalized we fear change and, like the convict who breaks the law to return to prison after release, often opt to stay in the situation we have adapted to, whether or not a new situation presents a better or worse alternative.
Maybe this is all just navel-gazing, but I think that individuals should be cautious what they let themselves adapt to. Just something to think about.
--Andy