The Great Pretending

Modern work has become an elaborate performance.

I managed to escape for a couple of hours last week to meet an old friend for a beer. He works for a massive tech company - the kind with free lunches, sleeping pods, and stock options.

We were barely halfway through our first pint when he let out a long, heavy sigh. He spent the next ten minutes trying to explain his current sprint goals, using all the right words. Eventually, he landed on something about “orchestrating the migration of our monolith to micro-services for better vertical scalability.”

Then he just stopped. He looked at me and laughed - a dry, tired laugh. “I honestly don’t know what that means anymore,” he admitted. “I don’t think I’ve pushed a line of meaningful code in six months.”

The Human Middleware

He isn’t alone. A lot of us are feeling this. We are living through a strange era of “corporate theatre.”

You see it everywhere. People rush around looking incredibly purposeful, but if you get them alone in a quiet pub, the truth spills out. Their days are filled with meetings about meetings and endless emails that nobody really reads. We have become human middleware between systems that could probably just talk to each other.

It makes you wonder what we’re trading our time for.

Going Through the Motions

The pandemic was a weird time, but it pulled back the curtain on all this. When we were all remote, it became obvious who was actually building things and who was just managing the noise.

Now that the offices are filling up again, the faith hasn’t really returned. The corporate role is fading. It isn’t crashing down, but people just don’t believe in it anymore. We are all just showing up, sitting at our desks, and playing the part. We know the script, but the meaning is gone.

The Job as a Platform

But here is the hopeful part. I’m seeing a massive shift in how people view their “9-to-5.”

People are starting to treat the corporate job differently. It’s no longer their whole identity or their “career” - it’s a funding mechanism. It is the Venture Capital for their actual lives.

I know developers who do their official stand-ups in the morning, then spend their mental energy building their own products in the evening. I know designers who use the stability of a salary to fund their own creative projects on the weekends. They aren’t checking out; they are zooming out. They see the job for what it is: a resource, not a calling.

Permission to Stop Pretending

If you are sitting at a desk right now feeling like you’re going slightly mad in a hollow role, please know you aren’t alone. The madness isn’t in you; it’s in a system that asks you to pretend that sending another email is the most importunate task of that day.

You have permission to stop pretending. You can show up and do the work. But you don’t have to let it define you.

Life is too short to spend it acting. Once you stop believing the corporate fiction, you can finally start using that energy to build something that actually matters to you.