I’m still burnt tf out and unemployed but I felt this big time when I was working in corporate at a large company.

I don’t have a degree, just was good enough in an environment where the average was pretty bad, and I got along with everyone so it wasn’t long before I had risen up a bit. The higher I got, the closer I got to business school types. My work became less structured, more stressful, more chaotic. It felt like there was a new disaster that I had to solve, every week, and every time it was totally avoidable and often was directly caused by these catty assholes starting shit on purpose.

I started to lose sight of what I was even doing. When I met someone and they asked me what my job was, I couldn’t give a straight answer because I was basically just doing whatever the fuck my superiors arbitrarily decided that week. They’d often assign me projects, then a couple days later pull me off the project and put me on something else that’s not even in my area of specialty, and then get mad that I wasn’t meeting the original project’s deadlines.

Our department had a lot of specific lingo that everyone knew and learned in training. On occasion they’d decide that a term wasn’t good enough, despite everyone knowing its meaning well, so they would arbitrarily change it. I was usually tasked with relaying these stupid fucking changes and trying to justify why everyone should follow suit. I would literally wring my hands cringing about how much of a fucking joker I looked when orating the senior management’s petty degree du jour.

I was a fairly fast, efficient worker, and my quality was consistent so I gained a reputation for being the go to guy for getting shit done quickly. That’s great, I’m respected by my peers, right? No because it just meant they would get more and more comfortable with shorter deadlines, faster project turnaround, quality expected to rise with each one.

They would constantly use that manipulative family rhetoric and to my utter shame I fell for it to a degree, and stayed there far longer than was healthy because I didn’t want to let the team and my mentor down. It was moot in the end. Eventually I hit a mental wall that I could not surpasse. It became physically impossible for me to do the work. I would try to type and my vision would blur. If I tried to work out a problem my head would start throbbing and I’d feel nauseous. I became unable to do anything. I’d often end up spending a lot of my work time anxiously pacing around my office trying to calm my mind rather than working. I started taking a lot of time off. I was closing myself off to the world, stopped hanging out with friends, stopped texting people, started to drink too much again.

One day there was a very stressful emergency in my family that I had to attend to and in a moment of overwhelming inability to deal with it, I found the clarity I had been lacking for a while. The next day I put in my two weeks. It hurt more than I expected. I really bought into that family shit, like a fool’s fool. I don’t know what the future holds for employment for me but I will never return to the corporate world. It’s like another plane of existence where everyone is aware of what a farce it all is, how performative and fake, how no one in charge knows or cares. But everyone pretends to care. And in a way, they do care because they’ll drive themselves mad for it.