Escape the Corporate Cage

a strategy for exiting the soul-crushing capitalism machine

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

Millions of us detest our jobs. We know deep down why we hate them, and what’s more, we dread the thought of being stuck in them until we’re 65, or even older.*

The uncomfortable truth is this: we willingly walked into the trap, and we chose to stay there. If this idea makes you angry, good. Use that energy to transform your mindset - that’s where it all begins.

The economy is just something we made up. We, in Western society, have all agreed to play a game called capitalism. There are a myriad of arbitrary rules, and everything is interconnected with complex intricacy.

It’s possible to play a game well, despite disagreeing with the basic premise. In fact, by playing efficiently and effectively, one can even exit the game entirely, and without negative consequence. 

If you’re not a fan of capitalism or if you just aren’t keen on slaving in a cubicle for decades, then it’s time to learn how to escape by shifting your mindset. In our culture, capitalism is the water we swim in, but that doesn’t mean we can’t become aware. We need to wake up and ask what we really want out of life, and then reverse engineer our way there. 

There is a way to observe the economy and benefit from its forces, without actively participating in it. We can stand aside and watch the wheels grind away - without turning any of them. Instead, we can go and live our lives exactly as we choose, not beholden to the next paycheque.

Like all avenues toward self-actualization, this is not an overnight process. It requires that we exercise discipline and patience, but armed with those capacities, we can achieve life-changing results. 

Let’s start with a stripped down story of how the economy functions:

• People work for corporations (i.e. wage slaves).

• The work produced by their efforts is sold to consumers.

• Corporations profit from the combined transactions of the wage slaves and the consumers.

The basic gist is that we don’t want to be either the wage slave, or the insatiable consumer. This can’t be avoided entirely, but there are creative ways around it.

Upon examination, we see that the sole winner in this system is the mighty corporation. However, corporations compete fiercely against each other, and only the most profitable win. Eventually, if a corporation is not profitable, it gets gobbled up by its competitors or goes out of business.

We are awash in conditioning from these powerful, gigantic corporations. It’s not just advertising. It comes from our peers, who unwittingly promote these products by displaying logos and creating FOMO. It comes from influencers, who are often paid to push the products. It comes from our deep sense of emptiness and loneliness - we want to fill the void and belong, and don’t know how else to do that but by purchasing things. 

Social media itself is the platform deployed by corporations to push their wares on us - it is free for us to use, because we are the product up for grabs. Our attention - our eyeballs on the app - is the highly sought after commodity that corporations are vying for. Until we understand how this economic paradigm works, we will continue to play into their hands. Our free use of these products is generating billions of dollars for these companies.

How do corporations “grow” - make ever higher revenue and profits? By paying their workers as small a pittance as they can get away with and/or cutting the work force when it is dragging down the bottom line. As giant corporations invest in AI and robots or machines, they will need to employ fewer humans, thereby cutting their costs over the long run. They also balloon profits by increasing the price of their products and services. Inflation and shrinkflation are part of this equation. 

When we work, we make money for corporations. And when we buy the things we want and need, we make money for corporations. Clearly, the only way we can escape the cage we’re trapped in is to own corporations. 

We can make this paradigm work for us. Assuming we are done with being chained to a corporate overlord, and allowing these behemoths to make tons of cash off our backs, both as workers and consumers, we need an exit strategy.

Photo by dylan nolte on Unsplash

Building Your Escape Hatch

You will need to work, at least for a while. Aim to get the highest paying job you can. Aim to spend as little as you can and save as much as you can. Forget the 10% savings guideline - that will never get you where you need to go. Cut costs to the bone and save 50-80% of what you make.  

What you save needs to be invested in the stock market. Stocks are simply chunks of those profitable mega-corporations, which we’ve determined are the only winners in this society. You need a piece of that. Unless you spend a great deal of time researching and learning about the stock market in general, and specific stocks in particular, then do not buy individual stocks. You may hear hot tips at the office or from your buddies at the bar. Unless your buddies have been students of the stock market their whole life, do not gamble alongside them. Instead, invest in an index.*

Corporations reward investors in a couple of ways. They pay back part of their profits every quarter or so with dividends, which can be automatically reinvested in more shares. And as they grow profits over time, the price of the share increases. Assuming you hold for the long term, then the value of your investment continues to rise. Plus, with the benefit of the eighth wonder of the world (compounding), your portfolio becomes an income generating machine of infinite growth potential. 

As Warren Buffett said, if you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die. 

Building your own money machine is a three part process:

1. Sell your time to the highest bidder.

2. Give as few of your dollars to corporations as possible by cutting your costs.

3. Profit from those corporations by investing in stocks.

Depending on how effectively you apply this system, you could be free to step outside of your economic cage within a decade.  

If it’s really so simple, then why don’t more people do this? Because it requires achieving both a higher level of financial literacy, and a higher level of consciousness in order to overcome conditioning on multiple fronts. Many people experience barriers in achieving one or both of these essential keys.

Once you’ve gained the capability to remove yourself from the system and just observe, you can live your life exactly as you choose. Focus your time and energy on doing what you want. You’ve already developed all kinds of free or low cost hobbies and interests because of the lifestyle you’ve designed. You know you don’t need to fill your life full of stuff to be fulfilled. 

You may have empathy for all the people trapped as cogs in the machine, and may try to share your knowledge in one way or another. Sometimes you will be met with derision, sometimes you will be met with insouciance. Once in a very long while, you will find some weary soul who wants to embark on the journey (and I do hope I’m addressing you). 

You are not a human doing, or a human consuming, but simply a human being. Can you find a way to be in the world without participating in the economy in a way that causes you to violate your own values, or perform pointless work you don’t want to do, or buy useless stuff you don’t actually need? There are ways to escape the cycle of work and spend until you die. As humans, we all need to work. But if we can choose the nature of the work, how much of our time and effort we spend on it, and even whether we need to receive payment, then that enables us to self-actualize in a way that we never could as a 9-5 wage slave. 

We all reap what we sow. We are the manifestation of our past choices, compounded. And making different choices now gives us hope for an alternative future.

Is this a ridiculous, impossible pipedream? Or is this something you’re striving toward or have already accomplished?

Please share your thoughts below.

*Assorted disclaimers: This is an over-simplified plan for achieving financial freedom. As such, it comes from a privileged standpoint. Clearly, not everyone has the basic income to meet life’s needs, not everyone works in a corporate environment, and not everyone hates their job. This strategy works best if you have the benefit of sufficient time for compounding to take effect. It does not constitute investment advice. It also does not address the moral question of whether it’s ethical to invest in the very entities that profit off the wage slave/consumer equation.