Bad Faith in the Org Chart
Sartre tells a story about a waiter. The guy is a little too much of a waiter. Movements too precise, too eager, too perfectly waiter-ish, like he’s performing the role from outside. Sartre’s point: the waiter is pretending he is a waiter, the way an inkwell is an inkwell, fixed and finished. But a person is never that. He’s a human being currently choosing, freely, every minute, to wait tables. He’s hiding from that freedom inside the costume. Sartre calls it bad faith.
Open any org chart and you’re looking at a building full of waiters.
Bad faith is the most natural thing in the world at work, because the institution hands it to you for free. I’m a Senior Engineer. As if that were a fact about you like your height, instead of a description of what you currently choose to do with your hours. The title shows up and quietly does a magic trick. It converts a daily decision into a fixed identity. And a fixed identity can’t be questioned, which is exactly why it’s so comfortable. If I am a backend engineer the way a rock is a rock, I never have to face the morning where I could, in principle, do anything else.
Sartre’s word for that morning is anguish, and he thinks we burn enormous energy dodging it. The org chart is an anguish-avoidance machine. It tells you what you are so you don’t have to keep deciding. The ladder gives you a direction so you don’t have to pick one. The process gives you next steps so you never face the blank page of what should I actually do. Genuinely useful. Also where ambition quietly goes to die, because a person protected from the blank page never builds anything that wasn’t already on the roadmap.
I felt this hardest at a large company. The work was real, the title was real, and underneath both there was a low hum of is this me, or is this the chair I’m sitting in. Bad faith would’ve been answering the question by promotion. Climb until the title got impressive enough to drown the hum out. The honest answer was worse and freer. The chair is not me. I’m choosing it today. I could choose otherwise. Existence precedes essence. I’m not first a thing and then my actions. I’m only ever the sum of what I actually do, and tomorrow’s sum is still open.
This is why I keep starting things even when the job is good. Not restlessness for its own sake. It’s a refusal to let the org chart finish the sentence of who I am. Every venture I start is, partly, me insisting the essence isn’t fixed yet. That I’m the author, not the role. The verb, not the noun on the business card.
The waiter could put the tray down. He probably won’t, and that’s allowed. Freedom doesn’t oblige you to quit your job. It only obliges you to admit you have one because you keep choosing it, every single morning, and could choose the blank page instead.
The terror of that is the whole point. A title tells you who you are. Only you get to decide who you’re becoming. Anyway, back to the tray.
One of a series of essays. I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.