The Corporate Fairy Tale is Dead

"Where do you see yourself five years from now?"

True story. I was interviewing with one of the regional directors of this Fortune 200 company for a Vendor Management position that was generously offered. It was a phone interview, mind you, so my usual good looks and charm had no bearing whatsoever. Everything went remarkably well up to the point of him asking the above question, which rendered my mind catatonic.

Seriously, for what seemed like an hour all you could hear were fucking crickets. And that's where I managed to come up with the dumbest, most idiotic answer in my long history of job interviews: "I really don't know. Have my car fixed, I guess."

Picard Facepalm.

In my defense, it was an honest answer—and here's why. The dream of top-management and being a corporate hotshot is dead. The notion of walking down carpeted hallways armed with a blinking BlackBerry in one hand and an IBM ThinkPad with the extended battery on the other is just sickening. I've been there, and it drove me to the brink of madness.

Five years from now, you can have your elegant wallet full of your fancy business cards. You can have your hard-earned title outside your glass door and on top of your executive desk. You can have your fully-insured SUV with the leather interior, your two-bedroom condo with the marvelous view of the city, and all the meaningless little doodads your six-digit salary can buy. I don't want it.

I have shallow, often unrealistic dreams. Five years from now, I want to still be alive.
Five years from now, I want to be happy.