Corner of Thought: The Human Experience

“We’re all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.” Charles Bukowski said that, and I have not been able to shake it since I read it. Not because it’s clever. Because it’s accurate.
I have spent eighteen years in industrial supply. I know what it looks like to build a territory, learn a customer’s operation better than some of their own people know it, put in the early mornings and the late calls, and then watch a title change or a reorg happen and realize the machine does not actually need you. It needs a you. Someone with a badge and a login and a working phone number. The seat gets filled by the next warm body before your last paycheck clears, and the business runs exactly the same the following Monday. That used to bother me. Now I think it’s the most honest thing about corporate life, and most people spend their whole career refusing to look at it directly.

The circus we signed up for

Here is what nobody tells you when you take the job, any job: the deadline that feels like a crisis today will not exist in anyone’s memory in six months. The account you lost sleep over gets reassigned. The quarterly number you hit or missed becomes a line in an old spreadsheet nobody opens again. We treat these things as though they are the whole of what we are, when really they are just weather. Loud, immediate, and gone. Bukowski’s word for it is trivialities, and I think that word is doing a lot of work. He is not saying work is meaningless or that showing up doesn’t matter. He is saying that the specific things we let terrorize us, the inbox, the deadline, the performance review, the fear of being replaced, are small compared to the fact sitting underneath all of it: we are all going to die. Every one of us. That should be the thing that organizes our priorities. Instead we let the trivial stuff organize them, and the big true thing gets pushed so far down we forget it’s there.

The night I actually understood it

I remember a stretch a few years back where I was running numbers in my head at eleven at night, replaying a conversation with a customer who was unhappy about a lead time, building a case in my mind for why it wasn’t my fault, rehearsing what I’d say the next morning. My kid walked past my office door on the way to bed and said goodnight and I barely looked up. I said it back on autopilot.
That is the moment this Bukowski line describes. Not some grand tragedy. Just a father so flattened by a triviality, a lead time complaint that would be forgotten by both parties in a month, that he missed an actual moment of his actual life happening four feet away from him. Nobody died. Nothing dramatic occurred. That is exactly the danger. The erosion doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly eats the years.
I have thought about that night more than I’ve thought about almost any deal I ever closed.

What I do with this now

I am six years into rebuilding how I relate to urgency, and here is where I have landed. The job still matters. Providing still matters. But I no longer confuse the job with my worth, and I no longer let a Tuesday’s fire drill borrow against a Tuesday night with my family. When I catch myself spiraling over something that will not matter in a year, I try to ask the blunt question directly: is this actually about mortality, or is it about my ego needing to feel indispensable somewhere? Almost always it’s the second one. And once you see that clearly, the grip it has on you loosens. Not because the deadline stops existing. Because you stop pretending the deadline is the terror, when the real terror, the fact that we’re all going to die, all of us, is the thing Bukowski is actually pointing at. That fact should make us gentler with each other and more present with the time we have. Instead we let ourselves get flattened by everything downstream of it, and skip the one thing that should have mattered most.

The seat gets filled either way. Make sure something besides the seat got your attention while you had it.