My sinuses are still rattling from sneezing 22 times in rapid succession, a biological glitch that feels like a moving metaphor for the 32 tabs currently competing for my cognitive bandwidth. There is a specific kind of pressure behind the eyes that comes from looking at cell B-42 of a spreadsheet you weren’t supposed to own, but somehow inherited under the guise of ‘professional development.’ Sarah, my officially assigned mentor, called it a stretch goal. She stood over my desk, smelling faintly of expensive espresso and the kind of unearned confidence that only comes with a $212,000 salary, and told me that completing the quarterly impact report would be a ‘defining moment’ for my career trajectory. I’ve written 12 of these defining moments for her in the last 12 months. Each one is a brick in a wall she’s building around her own schedule, while I’m left outside in the rain, clutching a digital highlighter and wondering when the actual mentoring starts.

I suppose I should be honored. That’s what the HR handbook suggests on page 82, nestled between the policy on office footwear and the mandatory disclosure of external interests. But the honor is starting to feel a lot like being the primary engine in someone else’s vehicle. In the corporate world, we’ve developed this sophisticated linguistic gymnastics where ‘offloading administrative burdens’ is rebranded as ’empowering junior associates.’ It’s a clever trick. If you tell a 22-year-old they are being exploited, they might quit. If you tell them they are being groomed for leadership, they’ll stay until 10:02 PM on a Tuesday, meticulously checking the pivot tables for errors Sarah doesn’t have the patience to find. I find myself doing it anyway, obsessing over the font size in the footnotes as if my worth is tied to the kerning of a document that will be glanced at for 2 seconds by a Vice President who can’t remember my last name.

I’m currently staring at 112 emails from Sarah, each one adding a new layer of ‘educational’ complexity to the report. I hate how much I care about getting it right. There’s a contradiction in my chest-I despise the extraction, yet I crave the validation of the extractor. I want her to look at slide 62 and see a version of herself that is younger, faster, and more willing to sacrifice sleep for a slightly more symmetrical bar chart. It’s a sick cycle. We criticize the system but we participate in it with 122% effort because we’re terrified of the alternative. The alternative is being seen as someone who isn’t ‘hungry.’ In corporate speak, hunger is the willingness to eat whatever scraps of responsibility are thrown your way, even if they’re covered in the dust of someone else’s neglected to-do list.

There was a moment last week when I realized that Sarah has the same ‘learning experience’ conversation with 12 other mentees across the department. We are all essentially unpaid interns for her personal productivity, even though we have our own job descriptions and 42-page performance reviews to worry about. It’s a decentralized administrative assistant model that doesn’t show up on any balance sheet. If the company had to hire 12 people to do what we do for ‘mentorship credits,’ it would cost them approximately $822,000 a year in salaries and benefits. Instead, they give Sarah a badge for being a ‘People Leader’ and give us a sense of impending burnout.

I find myself searching for something that doesn’t feel like a performance. Everything in this office is a performance, from the way we hold our coffee mugs to the way we pretend to be fascinated by the 12-page memo on synergistic optimization. This is why I started looking for alternatives in my personal life-things that don’t come with a side of moral condescension or a hidden agenda. I’ve started using Calm Puffs because they represent one of the few honest substitutions I’ve encountered. There’s no ‘mentorship’ involved in a puff; it doesn’t try to tell me that my habit is a gateway to a better version of myself or a ‘growth opportunity.’ It just is what it is. In a world where my manager tries to convince me that her laundry list of chores is a masterclass in strategy, a product that just does its job without the paternalistic fluff is a relief. It’s a small, quiet rebellion against the ‘more, more, more’ culture that demands we turn every breath into a metric.

The Cadence of Care, The Coldness of a Ledger

Chen L.M. told me that the hardest part of his job isn’t the logistics or the security protocols. It’s the 22 minutes he spends each morning trying to convince himself that the system can actually be changed from the inside. He admitted that he’s made mistakes, once trusting a program director who promised that 82 percent of the graduates would find placement in high-paying jobs, only to find out the numbers were cooked to secure a $222,000 grant. That’s the authority we’re dealing with: people who have learned to speak in the cadence of care while acting with the coldness of a ledger.

I see it in the way the office lighting flickers 32 times a minute, a rhythmic annoyance that everyone notices but no one fixes because it’s not anyone’s ‘key performance indicator.’ I’m looking at the clock. It’s 6:02 PM. The office is emptying out, but Sarah just sent a message: ‘Hey, I just had a 12-minute brainstorm. Could we add a section on the 2022 fiscal trends to the report? It would be a great way for you to get exposure to the macro data.’

Exposure. That’s another one. People die of exposure in the wilderness, yet in the office, we’re told to seek it out like it’s a vital nutrient. Exposure is just work that you don’t get paid for, presented as a privilege. I want to say no. I want to tell her that I’ve already put in 12 hours today and that my brain feels like it’s been through a paper shredder. But instead, I type back ‘Sure thing, Sarah! Happy to dive into that.’ The exclamation point is a lie. It’s a tiny, digital mask.

The Shadow of Unfinished Business

I think about the 122 people I’ve met in this industry who all have the same hollow look in their eyes. We are all ‘mentoring’ someone else now, passing down the chores like a cursed family heirloom. I caught myself telling a new hire yesterday that filing the 42 project folders would give him a ‘great overview of our internal structure.’ The words tasted like ash. I’m already becoming the thing I’m complaining about, a 32-year-old middle manager in training, learning how to weaponize ‘growth’ for my own convenience. It’s an easy trap to fall into when you’re tired. It’s easier to delegate and call it development than it is to actually teach.

Chen L.M. says that the only way to stay sane is to find the gaps in the system-the 22 seconds of genuine human connection that happen when the cameras aren’t looking or the spreadsheets are closed. He finds it in the poetry workshops he runs on the weekends, where the numbers don’t matter and no one is being ‘groomed’ for anything. I find it in the quiet moments on the train ride home, 42 minutes of transit where I am not a mentee, a report-writer, or a ‘future leader.’ I’m just a person who sneezed 12 times and wants to sit in the dark. The corporate world assumes we want to be developed into something better, something more efficient. But maybe we just want to be left alone to do the work we were actually hired for, without the psychological tax of pretending it’s a spiritual journey.

The Fiction of Engagement

There is a specific data point on page 72 of the manual that I keep coming back to. It says that employee engagement is at an all-time high of 82 percent. I wonder who they asked. I wonder if they asked the 12 people in my department who are currently doing the work of 22 people while being told they are ‘lucky to be here.’ The numbers are characters in a fiction we all agree to believe so we don’t have to face the $1422 we spend on therapy and stress-related health issues every year. We are building a cathedral of productivity on a foundation of exhaustion.

I’ll finish this report. I’ll make the bar charts blue, the specific shade of blue (hex code #000042) that Sarah likes because it looks ‘authoritative.’ I’ll send it at 11:02 PM so it looks like I was working late, even though I’ll probably finish it by 8:12 PM. That’s part of the performance too-the optics of effort. But tomorrow, when Sarah tells me how much I’ve ‘grown’ through this process, I’ll look at the 122 empty rows in the next spreadsheet and realize that growth, in this building, is just another word for capacity. They don’t want me to be a better leader; they just want me to be a bigger bucket for their overflow. And maybe that’s the most important lesson I’ve learned: the only person truly invested in your development is the one who isn’t trying to profit from it. Everyone else is just looking for someone to do their quarterly report.