Everyone who wants to hire you wants to do so because somewhere up the line in the hierarchical ladder, someone wants more freedom from the business they created. When they hire you, essentially what they are “buying” is a good deal of your freedom. This is a painful, yet clearly obvious fact.

Therefore, working for someone else, unless strictly agreed upon otherwise, is willfully entering a top-down power dynamic and, often, endless lists of unspoken “agreements”. This is easily perceived by anyone who ends up, somehow, doing more tasks at a job than they initially agreed to, aka “this wasn’t in my job description…” — a thought many of us have certainly thought while at work.

Indeed, the nature of “taking a job” (another phrase worth examining the dynamics of) seems to be something like: I will do pretty much whatever you tell me to as long as I get to keep this job and keep collecting money from you. This, ultimately, does us each a deep disservice, and is a gradual way of taking away from our power and autonomy in the world. We have to be able to set limits without a modification of the original agreement.

There are several other helpful and empowering ways to think about the “problem” of work. One, is that I personally discourage using the word “boss”. If we spend any amount of time at all thinking about it, we can easily recognize that the term itself — or, more importantly, our relationship dynamic hiearchically to said “boss”, is one of a definite power dynamic. They are the person who tells you what to do.

For those of us who do not like other people telling us what to do, this often creates a subtle (or not so subtle) resentment towards that individual by default, whether conscious or not.

Let’s examine the word “boss”. I did a little bit of etymological research into this, and I found the following:

Boss: Early 19th century (originally US): from Dutch baas ‘master’.

“Boss is Dutch in origin and is a bastardization of the Dutch “baas” (prounced:: “base.”) Its use was a uniquely American way of avoiding the word “master,” which had quickly become associated with slavery by the mid-19th century. Of course, bosses are far from slave drivers (though I know a few people who would love to argue that point), so the new Dutch word was a convenient moniker for the rising capitalistic equivalent of the corporate figurehead.

Urban workers were fond of using ‘boss’ primarily because they despised calling their superior ‘master.’ Ironically, all the effort was in vain. The meaning of the Dutch word, “base” is “master.” And it all comes back full circle…”

Seems pretty clear-cut as far as power dynamics go. Another helpful way to reframe our relationship to work, is to, instead of thinking of the person above you in the necessary evil of hierarchy as your “master”, you should think of them as someone you are agreeing, consciously, to work with. One recognizes the authority structure within the organization (as different roles have different decision making responsibilities), but you eventually change your relationship from, essentially, fearing this other person, to someone you have an equal dynamic with and therefore should not fear. You should look at them (and them at you) as an Equal.

I find the subtle background experience of fear in the workplace to be absolutely intolerable. If for not the reason that we should be establishing as much safety and good-feeling environments as we can (the prime function of civilization itself, in contrast with wild Nature) — then for the reason that: systems simply don’t work as well with a backdrop energy of fear and Domination as they do with the energy of Partnership.

All human interactions, if based in a Partnership model rather than the Dominator model (See: the work of Riane Eisler), should be based on agreements, not hierarchical power dynamics by default. The work of Don Miguel Ruiz in The Four Agreements is great book to read to integrate this kind of thinking.

Even if one decides to make the original agreement: “I agree to do whatever these people tell me to at this company, within some limits, in order to work here and receive payment.” — there is nothing fundamentally wrong in this perspective, as long as it is made conscious.

Isn’t it so strange how, to make money in this world, we enter into agreements with basically strangers (when first starting, anyways), and automatically begin to put ourselves in a subordinate role? All of a sudden because of the alleged authority within this company’s structure, we find ourselves doing what this other person tells us to do. And we call them “our boss”. The fact that more people do not voice this oddity more often has led me to look at it even closer.

I encourage you to think deeply on this and reflect upon your own relationship to “work” in the world. I have found this process to be quite long and arduous, and have had to experience much suffering at “work” in life to be able to be emboldened to question the very structures of our economy and systems that keep us all engaged in tasks, for money, for other people. Which can lead to an incredible amount of misalignment with our true selves.