Memories of Vaclav Havel and his obsession with the theatre of the absurd came flooding in
So many absurd managers are like a spectre that delights my memories from the legislative Grove to taxing Cranston …
Rhondas and Adams …
Acknowledging the strange nature of work, and injecting some humour, can make us feel better
We accept a lot of things in corporate life, which, on closer examination, are not normal at all.
Many professionals spend their days in client meetings, their time parcelled into billing-sized chunks. Nearly all of us move from one back-to-back meeting to another, all of it transactional, then carry on answering emails at night, in what Microsoft calls “the infinite workday”, where there are no time boundaries. And to top it all, someone else has total power over us, and our career path.
This cognitive dissonance is the inspiration for recent books such as The Expansion Project, or the TV show Severance, which present office life as dystopian. And the built-in lack of agency that we have in corporate life is also making a lot of people miserable. A Deloitte survey of Gen Z workers found 40 per cent were “stressed or anxious all or most of the time”; another, by Gallup, found the proportion of global workers who are “engaged” in their jobs fell from 23 to 21 per cent last year.
Workplace consultant Christine Armstrong has identified an epidemic of malaise among “lost leaders”: high-earning lawyers, consultants and senior staff who “look powerful [but] don’t feel any great power”. They may have been at a company for decades, with the attendant organisational knowledge, high status, and a job that looks interesting from the outside. But many spend their energy navigating endless internal politics. “You’re stuck in a film that you didn’t choose to be in,” Armstrong explained when I interviewed her earlier this month. It’s a situation that would grind anyone down.
All of this goes unspoken, most of the time. But what if we made explicit the contradictions inherent in corporate life? This was the premise for a recent event by the Law Society of Ireland. It runs an annual festival — cleverly titled Well Within the Law — to promote wellbeing and supportive workplace culture in the profession. The theme of its 2025 event, last month, was “This is Absurd”.
Here’s the sell: “In the legal profession, we are experts at smoothing contradictions. Between public duty and private wellbeing. Between professional authority and personal limits. We tidy the mess, manage the contradictions, and press on. But those contradictions don’t disappear. They accumulate.”
The festival aimed to bring these contradictions into the open. “Not to solve them, but to name them, and to ask what it means to live and lead inside them.” It asked attendees to try to embrace the absurdity that “happens when we stop rationalising and admit what doesn’t make sense.”
Sessions included stories “designed to unsettle rather than soothe” and discussions of why “waiting for the perfect system is futile”. Speakers included comedians and writers as well as lawyers. It was all framed with a Beckett quote: “We’re all born mad. Some remain so.”
Festival organiser Antoinette Moriarty said the festival sought to “address the inevitability of people feeling overwhelmed and overworked. We looked to literature, and the absurdists are a group of writers who invite us to accept what’s happening and try to make sense of it, and in the process of doing that, the relief comes.”
Even if you don’t have the bandwidth to mount an existential-style festival, you can still embrace — and challenge — the strange contradictions of corporate life. There are plenty of small ways to inject variety, creativity, even mischief, into the office.
At the Charter Workplace Summit in New York this week, Bree Groff, author of Today Was Fun, which makes the argument for enjoying ourselves at work, talked about creating “micro mischief, macro joy”.
Some of her examples of “mischief”: having everyone take turns at starting the team meeting with a blast of their favourite teenage music; or committing doing one thing at work each day in a very slow way: Groff suggested taking time over making coffee in a French press (cafetière). “These are all acts of agency,” she told an audience of US corporate leaders.
Plenty of my colleagues already spend ages on their coffee “workflow” each day. And I’d love to play Duran Duran’s Hungry Like the Wolf to a captive audience of competitive peers. But another of Groff’s ideas — “hosting a zipper-free day at work” — was too much for me, an uptight Brit. Even once I’d realised that “zipper-free” meant wearing sweatpants to the office — rather than something rather less safe for work.
Still, it made us laugh.
Isabel Berwick is FT Working It editor and author of ‘The Future-Proof Career’
