A suited man flops down on the couch, his tie coming away from his neck, his shirt tail loosened from the waist of his trousers, his hair clung to his forehead by a layer of sweat. A child of nine or ten runs up to him and begs him to come outside and look at his den in the woods at the bottom of the garden, but the man tells him no but maybe tomorrow.

The screen goes dark and relights with a similarly suited man sat down on the couch, displaying similar symptoms. A woman (presumably his wife) enters the room and asks him if he'd maybe like to take her to the new restaurant in town, it is, after all, she explains, their anniversary. The man mumbles something about being tired and the screen fades to black, followed by a voice over. The words spoken by the voice appear in bold, white text on the screen.

Is this you or someone you know? Are you or someone you know always tired, apathetic, moody and withdrawn? Has your loved one undergone a personality transplant? Are you confused as to a solution? It may well be that your loved one is suffering from the new disease plaguing our society, Careeritus. Every year thousands of men and women suffer needlessly from this disease caused by job abuse. Call 1-800 I-HATE-JOBS and say NO to jobs TODAY!

We'll never see that ad, but maybe we should. We've been conned into trading our souls for the endless pursuit of money, often under the guilt-ridden guise of 'making a better life for our children.' But what good is it when our careers rob of us the time we'd have otherwise spent with our families. The career-man isn't a hero who 'takes care of his family'. He is the epitome of all that is cowardly and wrong with society; we ignore problems, jump in a suit, gather some money and run away, hoping they won't follow us as we don't really have a back up strategy.

Jobs were once means of supporting ourselves and our communities. People undertook a business (or worked for one) that provided a valuable service to the local community. Something valuable and necessary has been replaced by something for its own sake. People punch in and out of places where they shuffle papers that don't need shuffling and they sell things that people don't need. You'll see some people running around claiming the government channel drugs into cities as to keep the population unfocused and dumb. I disagree; maybe the government do want to do that, but they don't give us drugs, instead they make us get jobs under pain of being homeless and a social leper.

Many of us have probably travelled to work and, in a still moment (a traffic jam perhaps), have paused to think and realised that this is the sum of our lives: to come to work for 40 odd years and, no matter how much we earn or high we climb, pay for somebody else's dream and do their work. Normal people might exchange the terms 'boss' and 'leader'. Look at the bosses you've ever had, I'd say only a small percentage could have been called leaders. Mostly The Boss says "Hey, Jim, make sure you get those done before 5 o clock, you can do that." It's odd because you're sure it is impossible to do and, on top of that, you've never seen The Boss do that job or… anything at all.

Having said all this, jobs are necessary to an extent. That is to say, to an extent that they are useless. If shops can't find a real reason to open 12 hours a day the answer is: don't. If jobs at the office only really take four hours when done in an efficient form: have them done that way and let people go home to their families or their gardens or whatever it is that gives their life meaning, whatever it is it surely isn't efficiency reports.

Unfortunately, we can't tell our bosses "hey look, I squeezed a nine hour day into four hours, can I go home? Me and some friends are wanting to sample some homebrew that's finished fermenting." You can interchange that with anything: anniversary/kids birthday/date etc. and the answer will probably be no. We have to take action ourselves. It means seeking out less offensive work, taking a look at your lifestyle and getting rid of the crap so that you can afford to have a job that doesn't require 40+ hours a week. In the face of the career, societies that once treasured generosity and socialising have turned into selfish and introverted deserts, coloured only by green paper with pictures of dead guys on them. Environmental agencies are always advertising, so are libraries. If you don't have the qualifications for these jobs, consider getting them, even if it means redoing things you left behind years ago or re-entering full time education. People are always starting their own businesses that operate less harshly that corporate businesses; start a venture with a friend. Even if we fail at everything, it must be better than to etch out the miserable existence of The Career Man.

by David Brooks