From Leona Lewis to The Pogues without a pause for station identification

That's how the music on the radio has gone today. Thankfully one of my colleagues is out of the office so I've been able to turn her radio off - two of them listen to the same station via their PCs and the sound comes through with a half-second delay on one of them so not only do you hear the same song but it's not even in sync. This really doesn't help when the song itself is dire enough to be inducive to suicide by itself.

Add to that the usual lovely work issues that we're still getting it in the neck from various angles due to problems which we didn't create in the first place and I for one have had enough. I used to think that by applying myself with a high level of dedication and efficiency I could be instrumental in getting everything running properly in here. Experience has now told me that I don't stand a chance where I am and even if the unthinkable did happen and I got a higher-level job it'd just be the same old story but with longer hours and more meetings. I really do think that so much administrative work is completely unnecessary and is done just to keep people in a job. It may not be that it was designed that way, I don't think the work anyone in here does was created just for the sake of giving them something to do (although that is true in some minor cases) it's more that someone higher up, usually in a different department/organisation decided they wanted something done a particular way and that caused enough of a ripple effect that people had to be employed to process additional information just to keep that one person/group happy.

I remember reading some of Jung's travel writing, specifically the part where he visits bits of Africa and is amazed at the difference in the way people live there. According to his observations, most Europeans spend so much of their lives living in their heads (being fussy about detail, doing tedious work that's nevertheless mind-centred rather than physical, over-thinking everything due to being trained that way by the prevailing culture, etc.) that we've lost a lot of our vitality. It's this vitality which he found very evident in the Africans he came into contact with during his travels and here we are nearly 100 years later and the same is as true today as it was then. We can grin smugly about how far we've come with our technological improvements, social welfare and the overall improvement in the material quality of life but we've lost something too. We've lost that part of ourselves that links us to the natural world. Science killed superstition, which sounds all well and good, but superstition was actually created by our own psyche trying to make sense of the suprasensible world through the physical world. You cut off that link and we're floating around in our own heads feeling detached and displaced, looking for meaning. Well, some are looking for meaning, the rest are happy to fill the gap with noise in the form of drugs, alcohol, increasingly elaborate and ever more shallow forms of entertainment (see any reality TV show for an example) and an unnatural attachment to lifestyle (as though the way your house is decorated and/or the food you cook/eat defines you as a person). A lot of those who are searching for meaning shun the traditional organised religions due to their generally dogmatic approach, exclusivity issues and their overall bad press, so there are countless faceless masses defining themselves as 'spiritual' because they bought an over-priced dreamcatcher from the local hippy tat shop and like reading books by Paulo Coelho.

Ugh, here I am wasting more time complaining when all I need to do is muster up the energy to get off my over-analytical arse and do something completely different. That, of course, will have to wait until the silly season is over and I can (possibly) afford to do a job that pays less but is more fulfilling. I've already moved out of London and now it seems my 'downshift' will have to include a double de-clutch in order for something to really start happening. Until then, it's back to the day job.

Keep your eye on the door, a tsunami of tedious paperwork is about to wash our intelligence down the drain.