I hate the corporate culture

Most tasks are mindless

Nothing seems to matter

I am conscious that it is a giant waste of a life to be spending it this way, tapping out messages to retards in a corporate environment

Yet it is one of the only things I think about

I only care about corporate politics, always positioning myself against threats or figuring out how to position myself to get the next gold star I am looking for

I don’t even like it but just do it out of an addiction

I feel like this won’t end wel

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5719692&forum_id=2#48899693)

May 4, 2025

Essay | “I Hate Work, But I Can’t Quit It”

By Evan J. Garrish, J.D.

There is a moment every weekday morning—sometime between unlocking my phone and the first Slack ping—when I whisper to myself: I don’t want to do this anymore.

I’ve thought this for years.

The decks I prepare are pointless. The metrics I obsess over are gamified. My “gold star” is a mild nod from someone who hasn’t looked me in the eye since 2021. Yet I chase that nod like it’s salvation. I wake up at 3:12 a.m. to pre-read meeting prep for a call that lasts 11 minutes. I cross-reference two SharePoint drives because one of them might house the real version of a document called “Draft_Final_FINAL_USE_THIS(1).pptx.”

I know it’s hollow. But I am hooked.

I hate my job, and I crave it. It’s not the work—I couldn’t tell you what I even “do” anymore. It’s the theater of it. The maneuvering. The optics of seeming busy. It's knowing where to stand during the war of attrition we call QBR season.

Sometimes I think about quitting. But quitting means confronting the void. No Outlook calendar. No unread Teams chats to signal relevance. Just... silence.

That might be worse.

http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5719692&forum_id=2#48899693

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5719692&forum_id=2#48901090)

180 feeling when some hot little slut in another department looks up to you as a corporate juggernaut. She sees the emails you're chained-on, the approvals that come to you, the policy implications that drip from your email signature. My penis filling with blood as she nervously tries to make small-talk with me at the coffee machine.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5719692&forum_id=2#48901092)