I read an article about doing business and work in Japan which describes broader aspects of everyday life including working for mega corporations, non-existence of personal life and how foreigners experience living there. It made me thought about workload and non-existing work-life balance and people who are many times devoting all their time serving the company with all personal resources.

The employee hereby promises the company: Your first obligation, in all things, will be to your company. You will work incredibly hard (90+ hour weeks barely even occasion comment) on their behalf. The company can ask you to head to a foreign office for three years without your wife and child beginning tomorrow, and you will be expected to say “Sure thing, when does my flight leave?” or accept that your career advancement is functionally over.

And people often naively jump on this train by trying to achieve some status symbols and running a rat race that nobody really cares about. We are quite easy prey for corporations, no matter if we work in “high intelligent management” position or are on a basic worker level. Just the price tag on our back is different.

“Most people want to become wealthy so they can consume social status. Japanese employers believe this is inefficient, and simply award social status directly.” The best employees aren’t compensated with large option grants or eye popping bonuses — they’re simply anointed as “princes”, given their pick of projects to work on, receive plum assignments, and get their status acknowledged (in ways great and small) by the other employees.

The scariest facts of all is the following, that although people spend their lives for companies and they are paid with invaluable resources and bounties. People on average don’t do work that makes sense and brings results. They spend all days in the office, where a big proportion of it is wasting time, they could spend privately for themselves and family.

Young engineers are not, in traditionally managed Japanese organizations, given authority or responsibility, with the notion that from the time they’re hired to their early thirties they’re mostly just supposed to be learning the Proper Way Of Doing Things At Our Company, so expectations for productivity are very low. (I know some folks might find it difficult to reconcile “90 hour weeks” and “very low productivity.” Suffice it to say “Six hour planning meeting by five people to discuss whether the copy on a button should be ’Sign Up’ or ‘Sign Up For Newsletter.’”)

I hope you don’t have to be convinced that there is something wrong with that system. To get such a low quality of life In a world of abundance is absurd. Think about your life and what you do. You don’t want to be a modern slave, do you?