Your boss hates you.

You are not special. Nothing you do is special.

Don’t let corporate high priests fool into believing that your daily grind is part of some grand, noble enterprise. The mission does not exist. Capitalism, meritocracy, ambition, and reward are stories they want you to believe, but none of it exists.

Capitalism never existed. Rather, a new grotesque, predatory, oligopolistic corporate welfare state replaced the robber barons and feudal estates. You exist to prop up those that control the narrative.

If our economy was truly composed of independent craftspeople and local small businesses our world would not be spiraling into moral and material collapse. But you are not a merchant, and you are not an owner. You are a cog in a machine engineered to extract everything from your labor and the biosphere. The real mission is to funnel wealth to the parasitic elite.

Even your contributions to this funnel aren’t valued. The system despises you. This includes the scaffolding that supports the system, including your boss. Yes, your boss hates you. How else would you describe someone who is willing to put you at risk of homelessness so they get a bigger bonus?

The system hates that it needs to pay you a living wage to help pillage the planet. It tolerates you only until it can replace you with something cheaper that complains less: an offshore team, machinery, an artificial intelligence agent. The moment a cheaper alternative is found, the system will throw you to the curb.

This is why so much of corporate life is spent justifying your existence, rather than doing the actual job. You must constantly remind your masters that you deserve to eat. The burden is on you to prove it. And if your masters don’t see your value and fire you, it simply becomes someone else’s problem.

What do you call it when you love something that doesn’t love you back? People worship celebrities, sports teams and their employers. None of these things give a shit about your existence. Or that of your family.

Of those shit-eating grins you see from 9-5 (or more like 8-6), how many will be at your death bed to wish you well as you dissolve into fertilizer? It’s 2026 and I think most masters know it’s cringeworthy to tell your staff “we are a family”. Yet, many employees have indeed replaced their family with the cubicle farm at which they spend most of their waking hours. Sacrificing sleep and sanity for the sake of the team.

These people are not your family. Those “smiles” turn the second you’re expendable or lose your authority. Most would toss you out the window if it meant saving their own skin. You’d be surprised at how many people I’ve seen get stabbed in the back by their work “friends”.

Over a 30 year career, you might actually collect a handful of real friends. The rest are temporary avatars filling secondary roles in your life. You’ll never know the difference until you’re out, unfortunately. So watch what you say and do. Trust nobody.

You must recognize that when you die, only a handful of people will grieve for more than a week. The rest will give pause and maybe question their own existence, but once the next episode of whatever comes on they’re over it. If that alone doesn’t force you to rethink how you direct your energy, I don’t know what will.

The work you do, the stuff you accumulate, the people around you. Nothing really outlives you. Yes, there are some who leave a legacy. But out of the billions and billions of humans that have ever existed, there’s only one Michelangelo.

When you die, nobody wants your stuff. Your collection of porcelain cats, Pokémon cards, and vintage records will either get chucked into a landfill or sold for pennies on the dollar. I’m sorry, but these things that brought you joy, which I don’t think they truly did, become someone else’s burden. THe world is choking on crap nobody needs. Stop worshiping it.

I didn’t write this post to make you feel bad.

Rather, I wrote it so you can give birth to happiness. Break free from the narrative they sell you and you can start to invest in what really matters to you. Even if whatever that is doesn’t carry on to other generations, at least you won’t waste as much emotional labor on things that only exist to suck the life out of you.

Stop playing the exhausting game of corporate musical chairs, trading performative labor for a paycheck to service the debts you incurred just to qualify for the job, and to rent a roof over your head. It’s a circle jerk. The fact is you were born into indentured servitude, like the rest of us. You might never be able to fully escape, but knowing it’s a game lifts some of the emotional burden and avoids psychological waste.

Better still, if you have children do everything in your power so they don’t fall into the same trap. Be the safety net they need to explore more meaningful avenues. Save them from the path forged by indebtedness. Instill values to be useful, rather than pawns to enrichen the 1%.

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Thanks

Sarah