The Illusion of Work
Discover why your daily grind might just be a well-rehearsed performance in the grand theater of modern work.
Most jobs don't matter. Yours probably doesn't either.
If you disappeared tomorrow, your company would send a Slack message, redistribute your tickets, and forget your name inside a quarter. The work you're defending in your head right now is theater.
Entire departments produce nothing. Decks nobody reads. Reports filed and forgotten. Meetings about meetings. Consultants billing six figures to document "best practices" that die in a SharePoint folder before lunch.
I've sat in planning sessions where we planned the planning session.
This isn't a bug. It's the org chart.
Real value is rare. Someone grows food. Builds shelter. Heals the sick. Writes software that solves a problem.
Everything else is overhead dressed up as work.
We invented SAFe so simple tasks could require armies of coordinators. We mandate tickets so the absence of output looks like process. We hold retrospectives not to improve but to feel like we are.
The appearance of work has replaced work.
The uncomfortable part isn't that most work is pointless. It's that everyone knows.
Your coworkers know. Your manager knows. The VP running the all-hands knows. We've built an economy on a collective agreement not to say it out loud, because saying it threatens every paycheck in the room — including yours.
So we say "alignment." "Stakeholder management." "Strategic initiative."
We're lying. We know we're lying. We keep doing it.
Strip away the process, the politics, the methodologies. What remains?
Building things people need. Solving real problems.
That's the list.
Find work that fits on it, or admit you chose the theater. Both are valid. Pretending there's a third option isn't.