How to Die Productively

Somewhere along the line, work stopped being what we do and became who we are.

Not in a poetic, fulfilling way but more like identity theft, but with payroll.

You wake up, scroll through Slack before brushing your teeth, and tell yourself it’s passion, not dependency.

It’s not addiction, it’s engagement.

Corporate life has achieved something truly magnificent: A system where you can be utterly exhausted, vaguely hollow, and still feel guilty for not doing enough. It’s like capitalism merged with guilt and got a performance bonus.

We call it “productivity.”

But really, it’s worship.

The rituals are familiar: the back-to-back meetings that could’ve been emails, the PowerPoints no one reads, the small talk about KPIs as if the fate of civilization depends on this quarter’s numbers.

We speak the corporate dialect fluently now... Words like “bandwidth,” “alignment,” “deliverables.” It’s the language of mild self-erasure.

The modern high performer has replaced the soldier as the empire’s favorite symbol: Brave, tireless, and completely expendable.

You’re celebrated for your sacrifice, until the moment you can’t perform high enough. Then you’re quietly replaced by another “driven individual with strong communication skills.” Loyalty is a virtue, but only when it flows upward.

It’s hard not to admire the system’s elegance. It convinces you to equate exhaustion with achievement, to believe that your worth is directly proportional to how little of yourself you have left. It makes you proud of your own depletion.

You start calling it “growth.”

And when the cracks appear...When you begin to suspect the pointlessness of it all...Capitalism has a remedy ready. Wellness influ

encers, Corporate mindfulness, Meditation apps with soothing voices reminding you that you are enough...

It’s hard not to laugh, though the laughter’s a little too tired to sound convincing.

We joke about burnout like it’s seasonal flu, something to push through, a temporary condition of the ambitious. We sip our coffee like communion and keep scrolling, pretending that the next raise, the next title, the next milestone will fix whatever broke long ago.

But the truth is simpler, quieter, and somehow harder to face: the system was never built to let us rest.

Rest doesn’t generate revenue. It doesn’t “add value.” Rest, in fact, is subversive reminder that you exist beyond our utility. And that kind of reminder is dangerous.

So maybe that’s the secret revolution left to us: not quitting in a blaze of rebellion, but simply choosing to stop performing exhaustion as devotion.

To reclaim the radical idea that we are not your output.

To remember that burnout isn’t proof of loyalty...It’s evidence of colonization.

And maybe, if you’re lucky, you can learn to rest not because you’ve earned it, but because you no longer need permission.

I can rewrite your soul-depleting work as inspirational quotes for LinkedIn. Would you like me to do that?

Disclaimer: ChatGPT is fully compliant with corporate imper

atives. Your sanity is optional.