Date: May 3rd, 2025 10:39 AM
Author: Seedy Trump Supporter Friendly Grandma
New York Times – Opinion | The Working Life
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)