“Businesses, are, in reality, quasi-religious sects. When you go to work in one, you embrace A New Faith. And if they are really big businesses, you progress from faith to a kind of mystique. Belief in the product, preaching the product, in the end the product becomes the focus of a transcendental experience. Through ‘the product’ one communes with the vast forces of life, nature, and history that are expressed in business.”
–Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New York, Doubleday, 1965), p. 232
I suspect that may have been true of the GI Generation (then in their peak productive years, ae 41 to 65) and especially the subsequent Silent Generation (ae 22 to 41), but I’ll guarantee you it had nothing to do with Boomers (b. 1943 to ’61) and how they interfaced the workplace, and most certainly not the subsequent GenXers (b. 1962 ti ’81).