Modern work is kinda broken.
We’re living in this moment where, on paper, jobs are supposed to be easier than ever, yet everyone I know is mentally fried.
Burnout, bore-out, brown-out, we’re inventing new vocabulary just to describe how bad people feel.
What’s wild is that it’s not just office workers with vague job titles anymore. It hits everyone.
-> Nurses spend more time on forms than on patients. -> Teachers manage behavior more than they teach. -> Cops have quotas. -> Farmers are drowning in industrial constraints. -> Office workers survive meetings, forwards, calls, PowerPoints.. all for files no one will ever read…
Honestly, I’ve always felt like an outsider watching all this.
At family dinners or drinks with friends, I’d hear people talk about their jobs like they were describing some bizarre ritual they didn’t believe in but still had to perform. Everyone’s pushing the same giant boulder up a hill, and every Monday it rolls back down.
And I remember thinking: Why are we all pretending this makes sense? (I say “we,” but truthfully… I never understood it)
This whole structure, this whole choreography. It always felt alien to me. And that’s exactly why I became an entrepreneur. Not because I’m braver or anything dramatic like that. I just genuinely couldn’t make myself fit into that machine. I couldn’t sit there and act like the mechanisms, the protocols, the endless busywork were normal.
For me, the question was “simple”: If this is the game, why would I play it?
But most people don’t even have the luxury of asking that. They’re stuck in a system that’s slowly draining them, and the worst part is: everyone has quietly agreed that this is “just how work is.”
Material conditions get better (AC, remote work, free coffee) but inner suffering just keeps rising. And since nobody knows what to do with that, we’ve collectively started making jokes about it. Work misery is now a meme.
People love to say this mainly affects marketing guys, consultants, and the corporate crowd. And sure, I’ve known plenty of friends who couldn’t even explain their own job. But the truth is, the emptiness hits everywhere.
You can be in a field, in a hospital, in a school, on a factory line, the feeling spreads the same way. Real work gets replaced by the management of work. Everything becomes processes, metrics, reporting, dashboards. Everything becomes one level removed from reality.
That’s the part I never understood growing up: how people convinced themselves this was normal. Oh and also… if you listen to political speeches these days, they sound exactly like corporate management meetings.
All about efficiency, performance, sectors, “sustainable models,” “optimizing processes,” “rebuilding competitiveness.” It’s the same vocabulary used in status meetings, just with fancier suits.
Politics is shifting from “leading people” to “administering systems.” Humans are now spreadsheet entries, that’s a fact.
To me this isn’t just a work problem but more a worldview problem.
The whole culture drifted toward a kind of giant, abstract, bureaucratic corporation. And we’re all supposed to adjust our emotions accordingly.
In the book “The Castle” by Kafka (I recommend you to read it), the protagonist is destroyed by an opaque, absurd administration that blocks him at every turn.
To give some context, he worked in insurance. He hated it. It drained him. He wrote at night because the day belonged to bureaucracy. And even then, he wrote that his job was “innocent,” meaning: if he suffered, it was his fault. Work couldn’t be blamed. He could. That line sums up the modern psyche perfectly.
People collapse under impossible systems and still blame themselves: “I didn’t manage my stress.” ; “I should be tougher.” ; “I guess I’m not grateful enough.”
I’ve watched so many friends do this. It breaks something in you.
A ton of people have tried to escape by quietly checking out, doing the bare minimum, “preserving” their energy, refusing to care. And honestly? I get it.
But from the outside, it’s painfully obvious: quiet quitting doesn’t free you. It just numbs you.
You spend 35 hours a week pretending not to care, and pretending is exhausting. You come home drained. You look for easy distractions. You live for weekends. You survive, but you don’t grow.
You joke your way through the absurdity, but joke or not, Monday still comes.
When people ask me why I became an entrepreneur, they expect some ambitious speech about freedom or money or disruption.
The truth is a lot simpler: -> I couldn’t stomach the system. -> I couldn’t force myself into the rituals. -> Couldn’t pretend the incentives made sense. -> Couldn’t accept that this cycle of numbness and dread was “just adulthood.”
Being an entrepreneur isn’t always fun, it’s stressful (like really), unpredictable, and unforgiving. But at least it’s real. At least the work means something to me. At least I’m not spending half my life pretending.
I’d rather fight for something than quietly suffocate inside something that was never built for humans in the first place.
Work doesn’t kill us. Our reaction to it (or should I say our refusal to react) is what consumes us.
But eventually, you have ask: “Okay. If the system doesn’t make sense to me… what am I going to build instead?”