My anecdotal experience: The best jobs in my career were the medium-pay, medium-expectations jobs.
Most (but not all) of the very high paying jobs I've had also came with very high expectations. They were paying a lot of money and they knew that people didn't have many other options to get paychecks that large. Managers were compensated on performance of their teams, so they had to extract as much work as possible to get the maximum pay. They knew that they could post a job ad tomorrow with the high salary listed and it would attract hordes of qualified applicants who wanted that paycheck.
I never got to experience the golden era of certain FAANG companies where many people were making bank and few people were ever fired.
Likewise, the lowest paying jobs I've had were also terrible. They had no concept of anything other than extracting work from people for minimum pay. They kept everyone tired, demoralized, and afraid of being fired. People don't search for other jobs as much when they're constantly burned out and overwhelmed.
The sweet spot, for me, has been right in the middle. Good pay (great, relative to all professions), but not top of market pay, and reasonable expectations. Surrounded by a mix of people from different ages but with a lot of parents who have families at home. If I interview somewhere and it's nothing but mid 20s people who don't have families, I stay away because they have much worse concept of work-life balance in my experience.
That's a very good point.
I remember the first time I was in a cycle of trying to meet impossible expectations. We kept putting in a lot of effort and doing some very impressive things, but every time we got close to delivering something the goalposts would move.
After far longer than I'd like to admit, I realized that those lofty expectations weren't designed to be met. They were designed to keep us perpetually insecure. Always feeling like we needed to try a little harder. And it was working on us, at least for a couple years.
The illusion was briefly shattered when a manager gave us a goal that numerically meant that one of our vendors would have to serve us at a loss. He wanted us to negotiate a contract where they paid us to be their customer, when you added up all the factors. When we showed him, he did a pretend-angry routine and lectured us on how we should be thinking bigger all the time. We "failed" to meet that impossible expectation, to the surprise of absolutely nobody on the team. After that, it was like the team had been freed from the shackles of impossible expectations. We did our best and shrugged off the disappointed manager routine when it didn't meet the arbitrary expectations. It was interesting to watch as the manager realized his power over us had been broken, which quickly gave way to a slow-motion process of sidelining us for younger replacements who were more receptive to the disappointed manager routine.
I miss many of those coworkers, but I do not miss that job.
If no one in management has kids, run the other way.
Who am I? Who are any of us to complain and/or fix things? The answer is: we're the only people who can. Change has to start somewhere. The best thing for people who have it worse isn't to silently suffer, it's to help ourselves by dismantling the systems under which we both suffer. We have to take every opportunity to do that, and that means even the unglamorous ones.
> If I'm not for myself, who will be? If I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when? — Hillel
For me it's the uselessness of it that would bother me, the actual act of getting punched is neither here nor there. I mean I pay to take boxing classes and I enjoy them.
That can be a legitimate use, but one should remember that it's but a temporary thing to solve a particular problem, there should be an end date, and a way out. In particular, you should not start depending on the thicker stream of money such a job pays.
It's rare that such a job leaves the physical damage described in the story. More often it can damage you mentally: burned out, depressed, crushed by internally felt shame and guilt. This should not be discounted too easily; it can cost you a lot of plain money to get treated, to say nothing of the suffering, both yours and that of those who care about you.
It may be a terrible job in the absolute sense, but also a good job in the relative sense because it pays well and most involve gut punches.
>Who are you to feel bad about your situation?
I am a human being with one life that is far to brief to spend it being miserable.
Our safety nets have been ripped away from us. Leaving us with this awful choice of working with shitty employers. In some cases, they might even hold a monopsony on labor and thus have _no choice_.
The time I have wasted at shit tier employers is lost forever. All so the rapacious capitalists could pump the stock and deliver share holder value
That said, this also feels like something of a relic from the zero-interest-rate era when jobs like this were plentiful, before layoff fever swept the American boardroom.
Focus on making your therapy easier and making better metrics, especially at the cost of actual value. The purpose of the therapy-is- the pointlessness.
I have seen this unironically used to excellent effect, and the user was considered indispensable, since being indispensable and highly “valued” was what he focused 100 percent of his 9-5 on. Meanwhile, he was able to leave work behind once he walked out of the office, because he was not at all invested emotionally in the “therapy “ sessions.
Probably won’t work for everyone, but it’s a pretty solid pattern for accepting useless work. The important part is to have some “real” work that you -do- care about. Otherwise it’s potentially a shortcut to a high ledge.
It goes without saying that the physical damage of being punched in the stomach is a metaphor for the psychic damage of having your soul sucked. You can bare it for a while but it starts to add up. And, like many wounds, it CAN heal over time.
Less money and greater meaning, or more money and mind-numbing tedium.
I sympathize with you because on January 1st I nearly doubled my salary, but the job leaves me rather unfulfilled. I'm left substituting my hobbies and family for all meaning in my life, but it's challenging when you spend 50-55 hours a week at work.
This whole idea of "other people have it worse so it's rude or 'bad' for me to complain about things I don't like" is not a helpful mindset. That there are starving kids in Africa or victims of war in eastern Europe or slaves imprisoned in China doesn't make your life any better or worse. If every slave in the world was freed making those JIRA tasks would feel exactly the same so there's nothing wrong with wishing those JIRA tasks weren't quite as bad as they are.
Housing is expensive. Food is expensive. Childcare is expensive. Health insurance is expensive (even the "good" insurance, where a PPO will still gleefully deny your claims).
So you can either be well-off and miserable, but probably not destitute, or you can work at a gas station, and enjoy 30-40 years of precarity before you die of a preventable illness.
Great options.
I spent some time at Pivotal, and then shamelessly adopted the Pivotal process at subsequent companies. One thing I took to heart is that a product manager that communicates through well-written user stories is golden. Jira is a drag but it's still fundamentally a textbox and you control what goes into that textbox.
Run wild with it! Engineers actually are counting on you.
Is there a name for the genre of writing that gets so, so close to magical realism without actually incorporating literal magic? Because this story is the epitome of it.
And of course the absurdity of the physical abuse is a mere literary device, the heavy hitter (oof, sorry) is the emotional one. (As the story spells it out. It's cPTSD from struggling in this unfamiliar world every day, with not knowing what exactly is going to happen, not being able to connect to humans, being alone.)
Maybe the darkest aspect is how sidelined any support is. Spouse? Only mentioned as a healthcare package. An old friend? Good for telling the truth, but that did not help at all! Lots of supervisors are dicks.
I think socially we have mental-model of what a "good" job, or "good" life is, and this model is largely based on certain capitalistic/individualistic assumptions.
We tell ourselves that being isolated, feeling useless, feeling blamed, being punched in the stomache once doesn't really matter and aren't real problems if we get paid a lot.
So we save up a lot of money, but we aren't happy (despite insisting we should be), and ironically no amount of money can purchase back what we gave up -- a sense of purpose, respect, community, etc.
A friend once asked "What would be your ideal job if you had F-you money?" and my answer was "The field wouldn't matter that much, just a job where I had coworkers who genuinely liked and respected each other and cared about what we did." He couldn't understand me and kept repeating "No what field though, if you could choose?"
The protagonist mentions that their previous jobs gave the same anxiety and pointlessness. (The previous boss that was bombarding them with tickets, emails, etc. seems like a stand-in for typical micromanagers who don't respect boundaries. And the protagonist was obviously bad at saying no and standing up for themselves, etc.)
Still fantastic writing, though. Just personally can't relate.
I would have thought the same about 10 years ago, and then ... life got interesting.
I was always going around with at least a book! How bad a punch is after all? Is it worse than tripping and falling with skis? And we still want to ski more almost immediately, right? Just work out a bit, get some protective layer, try to come up with some sustainability strategy with Chris so he doesn't punch in the same place all the time, and let's go!
... and now I can relate a lot more to the character. But after many years I read a book this year! (I mean other than this ~150 page short story. :D)
Mental health shit is insidious.
Until I could improve my situation, every day I'd look him square in the eye with a fierceness that says:
I'M READY, LET'S DO THIS M_O_T_H_E_R_F_U_C_K_E_R !!!
Once I bump into Chris's boss, it will just be a matter of leverage, as is the nature of all tactical domination.
Then one day Chris will show up,
and be escorted by security
into my new office,
I mean, his old office.
I'll crack my knuckles and tell him to have a seat.
You're late for your onboarding, after which legal's going to explain your situation to you.
There are definitely people that thrive in such environments (like Chris).
FWIW, it's an office workplace, not MMA, so one shouldn't need to be a "finely-tuned fighting machine" to do the job.
Perhaps one can extrapolate that the author is hinting at another dark truth -- the higher up you go in the hierarchy, the more MMA-like this will be. Therefore CEOs are, by definition, distilled psychopaths (like the Felon and the Husk in the White House right now).
Unlike that comment about 'please summarize'. I'll fault that.
Here's the problem: this is an artwork. It's there to experience something, not intrinsically to deliver an answer or data point. It's to vicariously go on a journey without literally doing the thing. That's a purpose of artworks, and one that's completely wasted on LLMs as they cannot feel or experience or have a purpose: if they did they'd be fixed (or, I supposed, punched in the digital stomach)
Summary? You don't need an LLM for that, conserve the energy. The summary is 'The ideal candidate will be punched in the stomach. And that's bad'.
It's literally in the title. I read through to see if it was 'and that's bad' or, 'and that's good', or possibly 'and that's inevitable'. I like the author better for ending up at 'that's bad' with a little bow on the end to celebrate meaningfulness, but that's not the only possible conclusion, and other conclusions would be just as artistically valid.
Quitting 30% of the way through is just as valid. You don't HAVE to take the ride just because it exists. If you're curious, averng, it's an okay story, leads up to its ending pretty well and finishes with a hopeful note. That's most of what you missed.
The only NON-valid way to engage with it would be to point an LLM at it and say 'tell me what the point is, I'm busy' because that would be failing to take the ride without even comprehending that you're failing to do so.
Living life through ChatGPT is about as useful as getting punched in the stomach. Try reading the story or ignoring it completely. There is no summary that is not as meaningless as… well, you know :)
I find two things to be distasteful: 1) Asking others to do the work you're uninterested in doing yourself and 2) the rejection of any kind of stylistic writing as an annoying distraction. I don't know if the person I was replying to is guilty of #2 but I've seen the sentiment a lot here and more frequently than I used to. Not everything is a technical manual that needs to convey its main ideas in as straightforward a way as possible.
This article is a work of art. And I don't mean that in the highfalutin sense. But the style is meant to evoke something just as much as the words themselves. It's fine if it that doesn't work for you, but the goal was not to convey as much meaning in as few words as possible.
There is no "why it's worth reading". They write for enjoyment, and don't care if anyone reads it.
"I write this content because I want to, and because I enjoy it. If you do too, great! And if not, also great; I hope you find whatever it is you’re looking for elsewhere."
On the contrary--every individual reader gets to determine this. I found that it wasn't.
1. You land a software job which is "perfect" on almost every traditional indicator. Amazing office and amenities, incredible compensation and benefits, and no hard demands on your time... except to meekly endure some brief pain, for no particular reason, every day.
2. However it seems that neither the team nor yourself really accomplish anything, you gain no sense of social belonging, and you are literally a (very brief) punching-bag for your manager.
3. You "should" be happy, but you aren't. What's the point of it all? What are your values, and what is your worth? You start to struggle with depression. Eventually you can't take it anymore. You quit. Maybe you heal.
It's sort of like a Twilight Zone episode: You get (almost) everything you (believe that you) will be happy with, yet somehow the result is a subtle form of hell.
Bullshit / Pointless jobs ? Most are definitely not physically demanding. Meanwhile, our devices run on metals mined by 12 year old kids.
Toxic bosses ? They probably don't act in the open. And they don't pay well.
Lack of workplace regulation ? Your continent democratically decided that workplace regulations were bad, so it should be a "gleeful" metaphor ?
Bad job market ? Then the guy would be accepting a job where he gets punched AND badly paid. But that's not metaphorical: that's a lot of real life jobs.
So I'm missing something here.
Especially you need to be able to understand the main bit about not needing to do anything at all after daily standup, err I mean punch in the stomach. (because likely the work will be thrown away soon, or the company will pivot.) and then the pre-climax (there's a name for this in plot development but I don't know it), the perf review. and finally the firing. The unnamed peers used as an excuse for a single instance of not being a team player, ie not participating in a nonsense ritual. It is indeed fatal for such firms, so to that degree the firing was a correct action.
To me this is a story about big-A Agile as a disease. But there are other meanings (side messages?) that can be taken away.
And, yeah, not all meetings were the best use of our time, it's better to write things down, it's tricky to find out which software to write and which to throw away, we got things wrong lots of time, we wrote legacy code for ourselves, etc...
But "being punched in the stomach and then spend your day doing nothing" was not part of it.
But I guess "burning books" is not yet a thing in the USA, and yet "Farenheit 451" is still a good metaphor of "something" ?
I've never been confortable with the literary genre of "let's slide through the slippery slopes and imagine unrealistic worst case scenarios to sound smart and not really make a case about anything cause fiction".
Then the 5 day weeks kick in and I become flat again.
I am not sure if it is just the nature of software jobs? The level of mental engagement and uncertainty we deal with is pretty high. Forcing yourself to do deep focused work for several hours a day every day while staring at a screen and doing remote meetings must cause some kind of schism. I love not commuting but I do wonder if working in person would help fix this.
In my experience, no.
"Coworker" is universally recognized as a slur for a reason. Think about "coworker music", etc. You go to work and pretend to care about sports or the Drake-Kendrick feud or cape movies (dude Brode Screenguy was so sick in Capeman CXXVIII) and make small talk around the office cooler. Then you go back to your desk and look like you're working. The managers are watching - it's an open office - sometimes they get up and walk around and make idle and foreboding chitchat, and sometimes you are pulled into a hey-how's-it-going that turns into a meeting on your way to the bathroom.
Sometimes I take my 9ams from home. I turn off my webcam and look at my phone. It doesn't matter. Meetings are enrichment for the ex-finance bro who likes to hear himself talk, and necessary for the other managers, most of whom struggle to read and write.
(The people in this thread who complain that the story is too long are likely in the top 50% of literacy skills for tech jobs - they're consuming written text as a hobby. Most people don't do this because they can't.)
In my case I think it would help a lot. I feels kind of lonely in this job too. There is no chatter or jokes, discussing news, tech meetups, nothing. Most of the day it is just 'please look at this PR' or 'Can customer have to active addresses' communication. And I rather social person. But I can't commute because I have small kids that needs to be driven to and from kindergarten everyday. And in a small city IT does not exists so either commuting or remote work.
I think the key is to have some part of your life that is meaningful and fulfilling and not dependent on your work situation - aka hobbies.
To relate it back to the story, there's a part where the protagonist thinks about what they've been doing with their time ("What have you been doing with the remaining 36 hours of the past workweek?") - when you're at this step, you should pick something up.
Painting, learning spanish, volunteering at the animal shelter, amateur hockey league, picking up trash at the park, writing a book, etc
If you can manage this, you'll find a new appreciation for your job. This thing that is minimal tax on your life that allows you the opportunity to hobby in the 99th percentile.
Happened to a friend, a big Java shop spent 1 year looking for the perfect candidate, courted him again after they failed, and even my friend said no to them.
I was like GP, and worked on fulfilling side-projects for years (after family goes to bed).
Like you, I'm beginning to see that it isn't working well any more. Though I've built some very useful things for myself, being productive in this all-but-invisible manner still leaves much to be desired.
For example, I'm not frustrated that I have to spend 8 hours sleeping. I simply accept that's the world I was born into, that our bodies require sleep, so I do it. I imagine you probably accept it in the same way. If we were to criticize this from a perspective of "this is a dumb design and we should change it", then maybe we would be frustrated by it.
Now when it comes to "bullshit jobs", I feel the same way. I was born into a society where some % of my job is bullshit but I can be paid for it anyway. But it really doesn't bother me that much, it's historically a great transaction, and I'm not responsible to change it (is it even a bad thing that needs to be changed? even if it's dumb that doesn't mean bad)
I simply spend some hours of my week doing this arbitrary thing, just as I do for Sleeping and Pooping. And as soon as I'm done, I put it down and go live my "real life". I've never thought - "wow 15 minutes spent pooping everyday? I'm wasting my life"
So what's the difference between the bullshit job and pooping? Well maybe there's a perception that these 2 things are different categories because 1 is designed by other humans and can therefore be changed. But I don't actually think it is changeable because it turtles down to some quirk in basic human desire. It won't work in the same way that you can't just tell people "Hey don't be curious today" or "don't be vain" or "don't be greedy".
I accept that our current iteration of society has been defined somewhat organically, much like the way our body has biologically evolved. And that I need to "poop" at the societal level.
At times my career over the decades has felt like this.
That's impressive, this post was massive
edit: this post has almost 26,000 words in it I am extremely skeptical someone reads it in its entirety I'm not sure how long that would take
When you write truth to power, you get downvoted and suppressed!
Firstly, there's no reason to assume 'AI-assisted' will help you in any way. You might consider that by definition that places you in a position interchangeable with any other person or indeed running the AI by itself, without you.
Secondly, 'most' creative experienced persons? As someone who's successfully-ish done the thing you're talking about, WOOF. No. In fact, I would suggest based on my experience and perspective, that a person looking to rely on AI assistance is the last person who should attempt to be entrepreneurial.
I guess go ahead if you must? If it doesn't really feel like work, it probably isn't work. If it doesn't seem meaningful because it's just chasing what an AI tells you to do, it's probably not going to stick out with any competitive distinctiveness. And if you are only doing it for yourself, you should keep your day job because that's not enough to succeed at business.
AI is not a substitute for personal effort; it's a tool for going where one struggles to go alone.
For work to not feel like work, one has to be super passionate about the goal that one is working toward, and this is never possible at a job. Most people have forgotten what it means to have a personal passion, some of which can also manifest a commercial angle.
To make a long comment short, AI is the missing glue in ikigai that brings everything together.
Want to ask AI, that question?
I mean I'd rather be on a road trip with my kids, but my work is generally pleasant outside infrequent periods of high stress.
It's mostly about big-corp life, though—my time with startups and little agencies and such didn't much resemble this, day to day, but still had some of that "why the fuck are people paying me to do this?" factor, like having finished projects cancelled without ever being released due to corporate politics or because it turns out a client was only paying us build a product as a BATNA for some acquisition negotiation and they weren't really planning on using it except as a bargaining chip, or having clients (or your own startup leaders...) assign you projects that you're 100% certain are a bad idea that's never going anywhere (and sure enough, you get it done, and it flops, for exactly the reasons you could have told them it would on day 1).
Like, 80+% of the work I've ever been paid to do has been kinda pointless except to drive the gears on some abstract large-scale money-making machine that randomly sometimes produces returns but mostly just makes everyone do a bunch of work that at least someone involved already knows isn't valuable, at least not for any straightforward reasons, but everyone has to do anyway to keep the gears turning.
Feeling lost in a large org, the awkwardness of being new at a large office and of kinda clinging to the very-few people whose names you can remember, being told you're doing well and being paid great while kinda feeling like you're just coasting along and money's showing up in your account for no good reason and because that's just how your stumbling-through-life path has worked out, for whatever reason, but why should that continue for another day and OMG what will I do if people figure out they could just not do a bunch of this stuff and nothing bad would happen and they'd save money and I'd be out of a job and what else do I even know how to do and is this current too-easy gig making me soft and messing me up for future employment (but they're all kinda like that...)—very relatable.
If you like Severance's grounded absurdity, you might also like the film Corner Office with Jon Hamm.
For someone who spent his whole career on camera, Stiller and company absolutely nailed every minute aspect office culture.
Not sure if plot hole or even deeper metaphor.
Every job I've had has always felt like they're taking more than my time and energy: they take my "life force", as it were.
A job can really drain you, especially since as the article says, a lot of jobs are just busywork. A corporation is a machine whose goal is to spend money, and sometimes make money back too.
The massive layoffs in 2022 and 2023 in the tech world sort of exemplify this. The big tech companies had money, so they have to spend it, and the easiest way to spend money is to hire people. Whether or not they're "necessary" isn't the point, the point is that you need to do something with the money.
When the money dried up, suddenly they have tens of thousands of people whose jobs really were not necessary and so they have to fire a bunch of them. It's terrible, but it's basically the backbone of our economy, so I don't even know that it can be fixed.
[EDIT] Still not done but this is just getting more true the farther I go.
A friend of mine developed stomach ulcers, so this isn't even that fantastical.
Hope your friend's doing okay.
Stress pretty much ruins your body one way or another. It was the teeth grinding that got me.
We both ended up putting more stock in family than work and it has been going well.
Frankly, this should be mandatory reading for everyone I've ever worked for.
Edit: Yeah, wow, this is more depressing than Ted Chiang's Exhalation[1].
For more in this vein, but with an erotic cyberpunk theme, play the interactive novel Secretary[2].
Edit 2: Perhaps the antidote to this malaise is a re-read of Hexing the Technical Interview[3].
1. https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/
2. https://www.secretarygame.com/
3. https://aphyr.com/posts/341-hexing-the-technical-interview
"This job, it was you. Every sentence, every bullet point, they all described you [...] You fire off a copy of your résumé. [...] As each employee taps their badge, the turnstile emits a pleasant green [...] You were directed to the gate at the far end, which the receptionist opens manually [...] you are absolutely speechless [...] The only words that were polite but nonspecific enough to fill the absolutely dead air that now fills the room."
Turnstiles emit green pleasantly, as Noam Chomsky might once have said.
Style points for gratuitous misuse of the word "catachresis." (Autocatachresis?)
I'm a big believer in the power of the zeitgeist, and this quiet desperation is all over the air of the year 2025. It doesn't really have a name yet. It's not just ennui, because ennui is just boredom. The feeling of 2025 is boredom and fear and despair, all mixed together. But it doesn't seem to be entirely new:
“...and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
> And let’s not even get started on you. You, who breezily engaged with any recruiter who blew smoke up your ass. You, applying and interviewing for jobs you didn’t want, then saying yes to their offers just because the compensation was higher and it felt like maybe the grass would be greener too. You, who time and time again sat around waiting for the world to tell you what you were supposed to do at every given moment, spelled out in big bright letters. Someday you will have to learn that opportunities never find you like that; historically, only punches do.
I opted not to pursue the opportunity.
It's always wise to ask questions about this during the interview
In my experience, though, hyperbole in job listings is usually the product of someone in HR who doesn't know how to write job listings, so they write a bunch of vacuous words that sound good but mean nothing.
The confusion - that this thing that seems like it should be excellent, isn't, and is in fact damaging - that's a sign of gaslighting, of being convinced to ignore or dismiss your own sense of reality.
When we're in these situations, we do know something's wrong, but we doubt; that it's wrong enough, that the wrongness matters, that the wrongness is worthwhile.
When you know it's wrong enough, you quit. When you know the wrongness is worthwhile, you don't have the dazed malaise. When you doubt your sense of reality, the reality you sense... crumbles.
And for some unfortunates, this is their school life.
"Good Sir, I must politely decline your generous invitation."
I'm lucky to have a job where although my main value is tolerating a lot of disrespect and pointless abuse, I value my colleagues a lot and enjoy working with them, and my job/product/company is doing something meaningful, which offsets it quite a lot. I've also been in roles where that hasn't been true and the oppressiveness after a while is hard to put into words - particularly people like the unsympathetic bad-advice relative that thinks anyone that makes what you make shouldn't be miserable at all.
The first time I noticed I was burning out like this, at an old miserable job, was there was a part of my commute I'd been taking for 10+ years where a few weeks in February, the morning sunrise will shine in a particular way at an intersection I noticed. Then, one year, I noticed this again and in my head I was like "oh, it's February again" and kind of uneasily noted that it had only felt like a few months, not an entire year - and then the next year it happened, was even more unsettling - huge chunks of time I couldn't really piece together clearly in between the two years. The year after I got a little bit better of a job and had recovered from burnout, the "February sunlight" phenomenon stopped. It now feels like a full year in between noticing this, if I notice at all, and I'm grateful for that very small and weird win.
> I know, you feel like a whore Working for a dream that isn't even yours Pleasing everybody but yourself Would you rather be, somewhere else with someone else?
"There was an extraordinarily high mortality rate among employees of the VOC due to shipwrecks, illnesses such as scurvy and dysentery, and clashes with rival trading companies and pirates. The VOC 'consumed' approximately 4,000 people per year." [1]
[1] Zanden (1993) The rise and decline of Holland's economy : merchant capitalism and the labour market
What a reference! Probably my favorite line of the story.
I’ve never been good with twiddling my fingers at work. It’s a strange anxiety when you see others go, “yeah, I’m fine with this.”
> None of what you’ve been saying to people over the course of your career has been a joke.
But seems, most did take it as such.. or pretended..
> as you mentally replayed your time at the company.
and this one.. still hurts.
> You notice, not even a month into this engagement, that you resent the regularity with which you are forced to interact with your supervisor.
This is very relatable for some reason. I don't hate anyone I work with, but them being physically gone sends a wave of relief over me. Even if it's just for 15 minutes, being in an empty room with no one around really helps me focus and reduces stress.