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The Suits

July 15th, 2008 Posted in Daily Life, Society
723 people have read this post.

monk-suit-gunI have a bias that I struggle with from time to time. It is the fact that I don’t like Suits, even the ones I work with day to day. By “suits”, I’m dismissively referring to corporate types and the attitudes of the professional class that often goes with them. The funny thing is that I know a few people who would definitely be in this class of individuals and I like them just fine, at least up to a point.

If challenged, I suspect that my bias is similar to what a lot of people feel towards police. By that, I mean that I have known a lot of people that don’t like the police as a group but who, generally, have liked the individual cops that they have known, at least up to a certain point. They wouldn’t invite them to a party but don’t think that they are bad individuals. In fact, they often think the opposite. (I often feel this way as well but this really isn’t a post about cops.)

Over the last decade and a half, I’ve been around plenty of suits. I met them at Microsoft galore but also at the startups where I worked before Microsoft and where I’ve worked since then. They are the smooth talking professionals, often seeming power climbers of the corporate world. They may or may not be clean cut externally but they reek of privilege, at least for some of them, and this sense of belonging, ownership and entitlement in the corporate world. While I may be a visitor in their world (even after having made a career there), it is definitely their world, not mine. In other words, they are the establishment, the powers that be, at least to me. Maybe it is the feeling that they are comfortable with this society and its values that I dislike so much. They are comfortable enough to so fully engage in career and fitting in that they clearly have fully bought into it all (at least in any public persona).

In a sense, it is a sort of class divide. They’ve always reminded me of aristocrats. The ones I knew at Microsoft were Stanford or Ivy League graduates, often recruited out of school, never working shit jobs in their lives outside of a summer job as a teen. They were clearly gunning to be Vice Presidents, CEOs, etc. some day. For some reason, I’ve just never liked them as a class (just as I doubt I’d like the aristocrats). On one hand, even if I’ve never felt much of a bond of camaraderie with my working class side of my family, the carpenters and mechanics and the like, my sympathies are with them. I believe in labor and in unions, even if I see that they’ve completely disempowered themselves over the last 50 years (with a lot of governmental help). I’m a college educated, upper middle class guy but I grew up on food stamps and without much money in my early years. I was fortunate enough to have family pay for my Bachelor’s degree, which allowed me to get ahead, along with having educated professionals as examples (my grandfather the engineer is one). Even the suits that I knew that had similar circumstances reeked of privilege. Sadly, I’m afraid that the smell may also emanate from me at times.

The people that I’ve always felt affinity to were the freaks, the outcasts, the queers, and the unwanted members of society. Social malcontents and square pegs, all of them. This is hardly unique but doesn’t make it any less true. I have a friend that I met at Microsoft as a manager. He is ex-military, used to have a pink mohawk, and had successfully beat a drug addiction. I probably felt closer to him than any of the peers that I had at Microsoft with only a couple of exceptions. It’s the D&D kids made good and the hackers that I want to be around and build things with, not the fucking suits looking to make partner or president, buy another BMW, or pay for their kids’ prep school. It isn’t even politics as many of the suits are liberals but it is the culture and attitude that goes with their position, their consumer goods, and their money. Maybe it is the goals that drive them are different but I’m not sure that they are really any different than anyone else’s in our culture, just focused at a more monied level. As I said, they seem comfortable and happy to play the game that is set before us.

I recognize all of this as a limitation on my part, not necessarily that of others. They are going to be the people that they will be. Many of them are perfectly fine people that just make me uncomfortable. I’m not sure what to do except be aware of it. It is a point that gets driven home at any professional gathering where we are forced to socialize though. These aren’t my people. When I’m hanging out with the crazy pagans, anarchists, and hackers, there is always an ineffable sense of tribe, even when I still feel outside of things or that I don’t belong fully with people.

P.S. This is officially my 2,000 public post on my blog over the last six years. Wow.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 2:12 am and is filed under Daily Life, Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Viewing 7 Comments

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    Hey Al,

    One of the more difficult tasks in Buddhism is to generate compassion for people who think that _we're_ the ones who need it.

    W.B.
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    As you might imagine, I've given some thought to this same question.

    In my own case, I don't think that it's privilege that alienates me from those folks. (Though unreflective privilege does squick me.) Rather, it's something that occured to me about folks who got undergraduate degrees in business; these are folks who went to college for social class reasons, but couldn't find a single subject at the university that they were interested in.

    These folks are apparently only interested in one thing: it's not money, though it often manifests through money. They are interested in primate status games.

    While we freak citizens are interested in stuff, whether it's comic books or ballet the quest for enlightenment.
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    spot-on. it's pretty rare to find this sentiment. i also feel like a space alien, what with having a college education and now earning more a year than most families but my dad not having finished 9th grade. it kind of makes you wonder what the fuck you're supposed to do with all the crap you learned when you grew up, since it's entirely irrelevant. that, and being sensitized to class basically evicts you from public discourse in america

    that said, I don't like calling them "the suits" because I think most people dress like slobs.

    and ivy league grads... went in illiterate brats, came out illiterate brats.

    not really sure how to tie any of this into a spiritual practice, save to say that they're all suffering on the inside too
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    We're all suffering inside. That's why I feel ill at ease with my own sentiments even though they are definitely there. At the end of the day, they are people just like us and not necessarily even *bad* in any particular way. They're dealing with the same alienation as the rest of us (except for maybe embracing the game). I dunno.

    As to them dressing like slobs, well, since I remember to shave once or twice a week and work in Silicon Valley, I can't throw too many stones there. I embrace my slacker dress code.

    Jonathan, the thing is that when I've gotten to know a few of them, some of them (not all) that I've sat down with have more going on inside than one would superficially expect. You want to ask them "Why are you into all this shit?" at times. I mean, I know people who, at the same age I'm getting my MA or contemplating a PhD, are getting an MBA. That's a LOT of work and I can't really poo-poo it but I also can't understand why I'd bother. I can only think of class and goal differences. They are trying to achieve goals that I just don't really grok. The one exception to that is the getting of an MBA in order to start and own one's own business. I can understand wanting to run a business instead of working for someone else, though I don't want to organize my life around it.

    I have no problems with people having money. Heck, by most standards, I have money (at least until I go back to school) but I don't use it to acquire status symbols except for my geek stuff (yes, I own an iphone, etc.).

    I dunno. In a way, it is hypocritical for me to be critical but I still feel this weird class-like divide with these people when I'm sitting in a meeting with them at work or interacting with them at events and this feeling has lasted more than a decade now. It's a feeling that they are "other" than whatever it is that I am and that their goals are some sort of space alien thing that I don't get.
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    Suits strike me as people who are either unimaginative or have not really thought about the direction they are taking things.

    But then again, suits are like every other group or denomination of people: the majority of them don't really know what they're doing or why they do it, and the top-tier are really in control of the direction of their lives.

    I think the people who have mid-life crises are often suits with no genuine interests outside of finance or business goals. I say suits because they're often the only ones wealthy enough to afford a mid-life crisis.
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    I don't think that they are necessarily unimaginative. They are often very creative business people. I think it is more than their goals are focused around the corporate game, amassing "success" in that game and, potentially, wealth and influence. They have bought into it all.

    I work in the same system but I've never been completely comfortable doing so. It used to be that or flip burgers though. Now I'm far enough along to be able to make some choices and old enough to realize that they can be made.
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    "I dunno. In a way, it is hypocritical for me to be critical but I still feel this weird class-like divide with these people when I’m sitting in a meeting with them at work or interacting with them at events and this feeling has lasted more than a decade now."

    That's not hypocritical. You've just recognized that class exists and that it's real. A friend of mine was sitting in the cafeteria as an undergrad and overheard a conversation. "What's the average income? $150,000 a year?" That's a real divide, and to think that it's hypocritical to acknowledge it is being hard on yourself. It's not hypocritical to acknowledge that you can't really relate to a wife-beating alcoholic redneck, so it's not to have trouble understanding a banker, either. It's just that we're not supposed to alienate up, just down... that's a primate-game too. But if you are actively developing compassion for everyone then it doesn't matter.

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