4 ideas
Othman Bayyumi, a poor boy from a Cairo alley, enters a ministry as a junior archives clerk and is awed on glimpsing the director-general's office. He spends decades studying, flattering superiors, and renouncing his first love because marriage would slow his rise. He finally reaches the chair only as an aging, ill man near retirement, having traded away the relationships that could have given the achievement meaning.
Othman treats the grades of the civil service as a sacred order. Promotion functions as grace, the director-general's chair as a holy object, and diligence as worship. Once an institution's ladder is invested with sacred meaning, a person will accept any renunciation as devotion rather than loss.
Othman judges each human bond — love, marriage, friendship — only by whether it helps or hinders promotion. Relationships managed as career inputs wither.
Watch how each promotion Othman gains immediately resets his attention to the grade above, so the ladder never produces rest or satisfaction. Seen this way, a hierarchical career is an endless deferral of life to a future moment. The clock of a human lifespan eventually outruns that moment.