The Clocking Out Ritual

Life is a series of rituals. You wake up and do your morning rituals of making your bed, brushing your teeth and showering. These are signals in your mind that you need to transition into a new mindset. You are no longer in sleeping mode and need to be in awake mode. The ritual of Coffee or Tea in the morning is more a symbolic waking up than it is a necessity for caffeine.

Rituals for success

I have been thinking about these rituals a lot recently just in that I am trying to develop new rituals to develop better habits. I want to relearn to code, I want to get another IT Certificate, I want to write more. These are all habits I want to form and for which I need to develop my rituals before hand so that I can manifest the change I want to see in myself. It’s a simple principle of Magick that simply doing the spell does not make you more money or successful, it just enhances the chances that you will reach whatever specific goal you had in mind.

The rituals are a focus. A trick you play on your mind to switch into a mindset you need to maintain for your benefit. And I have lost the most consistent ritual I’ve ever had. I don’t “Clock in” anymore.

The loss of a ritual

It’s shocking how profound a change that made on day one switching from Wage to Salary. I have clocked in 5-7 days a week for 12 years. And the first day I didn’t absolutely threw me off. I can no longer hard switch to this “working” mindset when I make it to work. This distressed me because it felt like I was doing something wrong.

Similarly, clocking out doesn’t happen anymore. I can no longer switch off the work mindset once I slowly lull into it. My first day on salary, I went home and worked some more for a little bit (just some bookkeeping stuff).

This second part I believe is the trap they were laying for me by switching me to salary.

Corporate abuse of a lack of ritual

It’s not surprising that the corporate zeitgeist is playing psychological games to try and manipulate the working masses into free labor. Even if my specific company doesn’t have the cruelest and cleverest minds in corporate America necessary for this plan, I’m certain my HR department meets with and talks to other HR departments that are “doing better” who did devise it (and certainly didn’t pitch it as the “how to guilt employees into working more” plan). I think a lot of massive institutions pull these sort of malicious manipulation tactics, but they are so far removed from the first cruel implementation of it that they just see the results and don’t ask too much why it works.

Conclusion

Any ways, I am developing a new ritual for starting and leaving work. I’m not really sure what it is yet. Maybe I will just clean my desk at the end of every day or simply power down my laptop instead of putting it to sleep. I need an immediate symbol that the day is over.