Every day, I look into the mirror as a voice in my head asks- screams– those words to the man staring back. Every day, that voice gets a little louder. Every day, it gets just a little harder to ignore.

There are certain cold realities that each of us faces when he joins the workforce. Among these realities is the fact that for the first six months to two years of your career, the cost of keeping you on the payroll will exceed the benefit that you provide to an employer. This is mainly because new employees simply don’t know what the hell they’re doing. I certainly didn’t when I started out; looking back at my younger self during and after my Master’s degree, I often cringe at how naive I was about the working world. I never took the silly theories I was taught in school entirely at face value, but I certainly didn’t realise just how poorly the realities of the working world would match the meritocratic ideals of hard work, enterprise, and initiative that I was taught at school.

If you work in almost any job within finance, banking, pharmaceuticals, or marketing, you probably have some idea of what I’m talking about when I say that you are Dilbert. How many of you work for people who have no idea what they’re talking about? How many of you work with useless and incompetent co-workers, who justify their existences by creating endless PowerPoint presentations and attending meetings and conference calls? How many of you are capable of doing not only your job but the jobs of your colleagues, often at the same time and usually much faster and more efficiently? How many of you have had to sit through meetings with “senior management” where the disconnect between their perspective and the reality on the ground is wider than the Grand Canyon? How many of you have expressed an honest opinion to someone and gotten slapped down for it? How many of you have to deal with regulators who couldn’t find their own arses with both hands, a flashlight, and Google Maps? How many of you have been denied promotions, bonuses, and raises just because you didn’t kiss the right person’s arse, because you weren’t obsequious enough to the obnoxious man-jawed feminist in HR, or because you happened to take off a couple of days at the wrong time?

The fact is that taking that slow, difficult climb up the corporate ladder simply blows.

If this sounds like your job, welcome to the club. And the funniest part is that in many respects, I have a fantastic job. I work for a large, prestigious company with a global brand. I lead my own team, made up of competent and skilled guys that I genuinely care deeply about. I personally trained a whip-smart, highly attractive, incredibly talented youngster whose only problem was a lack of knowledge to the point where she was outperforming people with twice her rank and five times her experience. I get to build tools and implement ideas that are truly cutting-edge; some of the stuff that I personally have built is so advanced relative to our existing infrastructure that I could potentially make entire IT departments obsolete. I get to work with smart guys who are looking to build their businesses and rely on me to help them do that. I get to solve complex, difficult problems every day which 98% of other people would be unable even to begin to understand. My manager is a great guy, for whom I have deep personal and professional respect; the same is true of his manager. I work with peers that I respect and admire, and who return that respect. My job allows me to live a very comfortable, highly independent lifestyle that lets me support both myself and others.

If you can’t be happy with that kind of job, then you’re not going to be happy anywhere.

And yet every day, I wonder what it’s all worth, whether I’m really making the slightest difference. Today, I had to deal with the truly surreal experience of filling out a form that took 30 minutes to understand- not fill out, mind you, just understand– in order to implement a code change that took me all of 10 seconds to complete and would have taken me under a minute to implement myself. Unfortunately, because of massive regulatory pressures in my industry, it is now necessary to jump through an endless change management process that means that even the most minor change requires you to fill out a form that is, I swear, more complicated than the logistics for the invasion of Normandy. It then takes a minimum of two hours to implement the change, in an environment where even a single minute can mean the difference between getting out at 6pm and staying in until 10. These procedures are invented by people who don’t have the first clue how a business works, and never will, and because they don’t understand these businesses, they make life incredibly difficult for those like me who just want to get things done.

You have to deal with people who are just there to pick up a pay cheque and go home. You have to deal with people who don’t want you to rock the boat. You have to deal with all of this because That’s Just The Way It Is, and if you want to advance, you have to toe the line even when you know in your bones that it’s morally wrong.

That is what I have to deal with all day, every single day. When a man has to deal with something like that, his soul dies a slow and agonising death, until his sense of pride is crushed and his sense of morality becomes so warped and twisted that he cannot tell which way is up. And slowly but surely, that voice in his head screaming at him to do better is drowned out by the soothing lies that surround him, making him comfortably numb until he is too fat and old and weak to fight back.

Don’t let this happen to you, the way it has to so many of our elders. Don’t let you job define you. Don’t let it trap you. That voice in your head is telling you something vitally important. Men were meant to aspire to more than just a 9-to-5 workday, four weeks’ paid vacation, and health insurance.

You have a choice- master your fate, or be enslaved by it. Almighty God intended for us to be free.

It’s easy to say this. It’s much harder to do something about it. It’s really difficult if you’re in a foreign country as a non-resident alien (like me); work visas and taxes go from being abstract irritations to the difference between freedom and imprisonment. However, that doesn’t mean that there is no way out. If you have a marketable, useful skill- and most of us do- then figure out a way to make money out of it. For instance, I happen to be a pretty handy VBA programmer. I happen to know my way quite well around open-source software, particularly the OSS statistical analysis package known as R- free software which makes expensive paid alternatives look stupid on a regular basis. I happen to be an exceptionally good problem solver. The question that I am trying to answer, probably along with millions of others, is: “how do I make money out of the things I’m good at?”.

There is only one answer to that question: start your own business. Become a freelancer, or a consultant, or a developer; hell, start your own gym, even. Yeah, it’s a scary thought. It might mean that you’ll have to move back in with your parents for a few months- well, so what, I happen to like my parents. It might mean you’ll have to move countries- big deal, I’ve done that 6 times in my life already and I’m still younger than my father was when he first left our country. It might mean that you’ll have to give up your American citizenship or permanent residency- not a bad thing if you’re American, because the land of liberty that you thought was yours is dead and gone, and America is one of the only nations on Earth that is stupid enough to tax its foreign-domiciled permanent residents and citizens. It might mean that you’ll have to really trim down your lifestyle for a little while until you find a way to monetise your skills- but then, most of us did this in college, and it really didn’t seem that bad back then.

No, this is not it. There is more. Maybe you can’t get it now. But for the love of God, start planning. Figure out a way to achieve your dream of total independence before you become too old, or tied down by the obligations of a family and a mortgage and children. Understand that the only one who can truly change your fate is you. Don’t wait around for your superiors to “reward” you, because they won’t. In this environment, they’ll screw you over with any excuse you give them. Don’t give them those excuses. Find a way to unchain yourself from the lies you’ve been taught.

The God-given gift of freedom is there for each and every one of us. Take it, and never look back.