What would you say you do here?

A Performance Review

Part I: The Cell

It’s nine in the morning. John cracks open a Diet Coke. The psssst is the sound of a minor demon being released from its aluminum prison, the fizz a sweet, chemical baptism for the day ahead. This is the first hit. A jolt of aspartame and caffeine to shock the soul back into the meat-puppet long enough to pilot it to the morning meeting. The fluorescent hum of the open plan office, Purgatory’s official soundtrack, settles over him like a leaden shroud. John, thirty-five years of prime mammalian vitality compressed into a single ergonomic throne of mediocrity, stares into the glow.

His PowerPoint bleeds across the screen. This is not a presentation. This is a sixty-slide oblation he bled for, sacrificing a Sunday night, his last parcel of unclaimed soul, on the altar of transition effects and font adjustments. He tugs at his tie, a silk noose for the modern sacrifice, feeling the silent dread creep up to the base of his throat.

Around the polished expanse of the mahogany table, his comrades, the knights of the ergonomic keyboard, clutch their paper shields. Their faces, illuminated by the holy blue light of their own screens, are masks of serene professionalism and astute political correctness. They are castrated courtiers in a bloodless court. Their swords are lukewarm lattes, their armor is the bland uniform of business casual, and their quest is to pretend that any of this really matters.

The projector whirs to life, a mechanical sigh from a dying god. The room falls into holy hush. John clears his throat, ready to spill blood for the abstract logo on the wall. He opens his mouth… and something breaks. Not dramatically. Just a hairline crack in the performance. A momentary glimpse through the back of the set…

And through that crack, he hears it. Not the fluorescent hum, but a different sound. A low, global thrum. The sound of a million servers in Iceland and Oregon, cooled by arctic air, processing the sum of human knowledge. The sound of an intelligence that does not need Diet Coke to wake up. The sound of the future arriving at the precise speed of our denial. The sound of the messiah that will burn this wretched chapel to the ground.

Part II: The Ideology of the Cage

This prison you’re in? Its genius is that it has no walls and its guards are people who love you. It is the most successful conspiracy in human history precisely because it has no shadowy cabal, no secret handshake, no smoky room. It requires no planning. It is a self-perpetuating, decentralized prison of good advice. You don’t even know you’re in it. That’s its power. It’s a cage so total it has convinced you it is the horizon, and you’d sooner question your need for oxygen than the sanctity of a 9-to-5.

It began with the first lie, whispered by people who were too broken to imagine anything else for you. Your parents, who traded their spines for a mortgage and called it stability, told you to "study hard to get a good job." Your teachers, wardens of a twelve-year holding pen for the nation’s youth, rewarded your silent, seated obedience with gold stars, meticulously training you for a life of silent, seated obedience. They weren’t preparing you for life; they were breaking you in for a desk. Your guidance counselor, a person whose own career path demonstrably culminated in a small office with faded inspirational posters, showed you charts of median salaries, equating human value with a bell curve of earning potential. Every signal, from every direction, for your entire formative life, whispered the same seductive, unified message: there is a single, sacred path. University. Internship. Career. Fulfillment.

This is the new fealty. This is the modern code of chivalry, scrubbed of all its inconvenient blood and glory. To question it, to suggest another way, to become a carpenter, a poet, a philosopher, a stay-at-home father, is to be branded a heretic. A dreamer. A child who refuses to grow up. Because the alternative, they imply with a worried frown, is destitution. This is a conspiracy of a million acts of short-sighted self-interest, a collective agreement to never, ever ask if the emperor is wearing clothes, because everyone is secretly employed in the emperor’s textile department.

And so we get the modern knight. Not a warrior clad in steel, but a consultant clad in Brooks Brothers. Let’s be compassionate, for a moment, to his predecessor. The medieval knight was a young man at the absolute peak of his physical and genetic potential. He was a weapon. Twenty years old, bristling with testosterone and trained in lethal violence. Yet he was captured by an ideology so potent, so total, that it convinced him the most glorious thing he could do was ride his magnificent warhorse into a meat grinder for his lord’s petty border dispute. The mythology had to be grand because the sacrifice was total. It spoke of God, of an anointed King, of sacred Honor, of a Chivalry that elevated a trained killer into a protector of the innocent. It was a beautiful, heroic, suicidal fairy tale.

Now look at you. You believe you are too sophisticated for such fairy tales. You are an adult. You aren’t naïve. You believe in serious things. So, the ideology had to adapt. It no longer speaks of God; it speaks of Shareholder Value. It no longer demands fealty to a King; it demands alignment with Brand Identity. The new code of chivalry isn’t about protecting the weak; it’s about being politically correct in a public Slack channel (“Please use folks instead of guys, its more inclusive, thankyou”). Your sacred duty isn’t to God, but to the DEI committee. You prove your virtue not by slaying enemies of the crown, but by putting your pronouns in your email signature. You have traded the grand, blood-soaked mythology of the God-King for the sterile, soul numbing pieties of Human Resources.

Let's do the kind of cost-benefit analysis the modern knight, the MBA, loves to perform on paperclip expenditures.

Medieval Knight CBA:

• Cost: My one and only life. My youth. My physical body. The high probability of a gruesome, septic death at age twenty-three from a spear wound to the gut.

• Benefit: A tiny parcel of land I'll never have time to farm. The fleeting approval of a distant, obese lord who will replace me in a week. The abstract concept of "Honor," a story whispered to me by the people who benefit from my death.

• Conclusion: This is a catastrophically bad deal for a rational actor. But for a human being searching for meaning in a brutal world, the grand story almost makes it noble. Almost.

Modern MBA CBA:

• Cost: Forty of the best, most vital years of my life (ages 25-65). My intellectual curiosity, which withers from disuse. My soul, which is amortized over 2,000 work weeks. Eight to ten hours per day of profound boredom, punctuated by moments of low-grade terror. A life spent in a state of suspended animation. Clinical depression as a status symbol.

• Benefit: A mortgage on a house in a suburb I'm never in. A 401(k) that might be worth something if the market, the climate, and the global order don’t collapse. A title like "Senior Vice President of Synergistic Outreach." The approval of people I secretly despise. Casual dress Fridays.

• Conclusion: …And you nod. You sign the contract. You call it ‘a great opportunity.’ You call it ‘being realistic.’ You call it ‘growing up.’ You are the medieval knight who has analyzed the spear wound and declared it a synergistic net positive. Time to remove ‘#OPENTOWORK’ from your meticulously curated LinkedIn profile.

The knight at least got a sword. You get an ergonomic keyboard. He died for his lord’s castle. You die incrementally for your boss’s third holiday home. The ideology has been perfected.

And what rituals are performed inside this corporate castle? This is the Cathedral of Bullshit, and the central sacrament is the belief in Meaningful Work. Remember Santa Claus? Not the 4th-century Anatolian bishop, but the jolly, morbidly obese elf in the red suit. That Santa is a piece of corporate necromancy. He was summoned into his modern form by The Coca-Cola Company in the 1930s, a marketing ghoul conjured to make people associate a dark, sugary stimulant with familial warmth and magical deliverance. It's one of the most successful psychological operations in history. A corporation hijacked the deepest neural pathways of childhood wonder and sold this grotesque symbiosis back to us as "tradition."

Modern corporate culture runs the identical playbook. It is Santa Claus for adults. The mission statement about "changing the world," the team-building exercises, the grotesque fiction of the "work family"—it is all an elaborate theatrical production designed to convince you that your job is a noble calling.

What is your job? Let's be honest. You spend eight hours a day translating one set of symbols into another. You take the numbers from an email and put them into a spreadsheet. You take the bullet points from a document and put them into a PowerPoint. You spend three hours in a meeting to debate the exact shade of blue for a button on a webpage that 0.01% of users will ever click. You rewrite a press release fourteen times to ensure its tone has the precise emotional resonance of a dial tone. You have pre-meetings to set the agenda for the meeting to prepare for the quarterly review. This is not work. It is a ritual of appeasement to an invisible god of productivity.

You thought The Office was a comedy. It was a mirror, and you laughed the nervous, horrified laughter of recognition, because seeing your own vacant face in Michael Scott’s desperate, pathetic belief that a paper company could be a family was too horrifying to confront sober. Michael Scott is not a cynical boss. He is the system’s most pathetic and fervent true believer. He is the high priest of the corporate cult, genuinely believing a sales conference can be a profound human experience. We laugh at him because to admit he is us would be to slit our own wrists. Office Space gave us the fantasy of catharsis. Smashing the printer is not about a malfunctioning machine. It is a symbolic execution of the entire, soul crushing apparatus of pretend work. "PC LOAD LETTER" is a perfect three word poem about the existential agony of being a sentient being forced to argue with a stupid, malevolent machine. It is a form of vicarious cathartic release for the office-abled.

Part III: The Cleansing Fire

Into this sterile cathedral, this court of castrated knights performing their hollow rituals, this nursery of "Girl Boss PM’s" and “Podcast-pilled middle managers” walks a real god. An honest god. The unforgiving God of the Market, and its new prophet is Artificial Intelligence.

Capitalism is a forest fire. It does not apologize. Joseph Schumpeter called this ‘creative destruction’. The creation of the new demands the annihilation of the old. Kodak didn't get a veto on the digital camera because film developers had mortgages. The guild of horse-carriage makers didn't get to file an injunction against Henry Ford. The market is a killing field, not a nature preserve. And if these corporate behemoths are subject to Darwin's law, why in the name of supply-side Jesus do you, an individual employee, believe you are a protected species?

The AI is the fire, and all the bullshit jobs are the dry tinder. All the symbol shuffling, the jargon-filled emails, the pointless slide decks, the press releases drained of all meaning, the spreadsheet manipulations. This isn't human work. It is machine work that we, for a brief, strange century, forced humans to do. The AI is not coming for the artists (ok, its coming for them too), the philosophers, the carpenters, the caretakers. It is not coming for the human. It is coming for the robot. And if your job feels robotic, you should be terrified.

The current spectacle is breathtaking in its hypocrisy. A tech company fires a fifth of its staff while its CEO posts on LinkedIn about being "all in on AI." The Philippines watches 300,000 call center jobs evaporate into chatbot vapor. And what is your response, soft-handed descendant of peasants? You post TikToks of your aesthetic apathy and demand your Excel spreadsheets be declared UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

This comfort is a competitive disadvantage wrapped in a suicide pact. While you negotiate a four-day workweek, hungry workers in Manila and Mumbai are upskilling with frantic, existential purpose. 86% of Filipino white collar workers already use AI daily, not to protect their jobs, but to evolve beyond them. They know the tsunami is coming. They are learning to build the ark. You are still arguing about the definition of a hybrid work model. You are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, complaining that the orchestra is playing off-key.

Protection doesn't protect, it mummifies. The Soviet Union tried the ultimate experiment in job protection: guaranteed employment for all. The result? "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work." An entire economy of theatrical productivity. Sound familiar?

From the pews of the Cathedral of Bullshit, the hand-wringers advance three pathetic prayers, each more contemptible than the last.

1. The first pathetic prayer: "But we need more time to reskill!" You had forty years. You spent it learning the advanced functions of Microsoft Office. The universe does not offer remedial courses for the obsolete. Halting progress to spare the feelings of the redundant is like banning the automobile to protect the fragile ego of the horseshoe-maker. The market does not owe you relevance.

2. The second prayer, the whine of the house slave who fears the field: "But it’s not fair! Inequality will explode!" You’re angry the master has a new, more efficient whip, not that you’re a slave. You beg for a more comfortable servitude. If AI doubles productivity but corporations pocket all the gains, that is not a failure of technology. It is a failure of power. In Iceland, automation led to four-day workweeks. The problem isn't the robots; it's that your boss owns the robots. Fight for the spoils of the revolution, not against the revolution itself.

3. The final and most blasphemous lie: "My job gives me meaning and dignity!" This is Stockholm Syndrome with dental benefits. If your identity is a job title and your dignity is derived from color coding a spreadsheet, your soul was foreclosed on years ago. For most of human history, work was toil. Meaning came from God, family, community, art, and the earth. The modern equation of job = identity is the masterpiece of corporate propaganda. Automation does not steal your meaning; it reveals, in the most brutal and public way possible, that you never had any to begin with.

Return to the Chapel

John stands frozen at the podium. In this moment of suspended animation, he sees it all. The Diet Coke has turned to acid in his stomach. The conference room becomes a medieval chamber, his colleagues transformed into painted courtiers performing silent rituals for a dead king. He sees Santa Claus in the corner, grinning his vacant, commercial grin. He sees the ghost of a medieval knight, shaking his head at the pitifully low stakes of this "battle." He sees a million offices in a million cities, millions of Johns bleeding their one wild and precious life into slide decks that will be forgotten in forty seconds. He sees the industrial printer on Floor 12, jammed again, shrieking like a tortured animal.

He sees it all. And he knows, with the cold certainty of a coroner, that he is already dead.

He clicks the button.

"Slide one," John says, his voice hollow as a tomb. The first slide appears. Comic Sans. It’s perfect. Everything here is a joke. Why not use the joke font?

"As you can see from our KPI dashboard," he continues, the dead liturgy flowing effortlessly, "we must leverage our core competencies to paradigm-shift our value-add proposition going forward."

Nobody stops him. The executive in the front row is on ChatGPT, asking it to summarize the presentation that hasn't even finished.

"In conclusion," John says, "we must innovate or die."

Polite, ghostly applause. A few "great job, John" murmurs. The projector dies.

John remains. He stares at the blank wall. Next quarter, an AI will generate these slides. The quarter after that, there won't be a quarter. Not for him. But he will be here tomorrow at nine. Because the cage door is open. It has always been open. But to step through it would be to admit the last fifteen years were a lie.

He returns to his desk. Refreshes his email. Seventeen new messages about nothing. He reads them all. The knight never removes his armor. It has rusted shut, and he is grateful for it. The weight is a constant, reassuring reminder that he is carrying a great burden. That he is a grown up. He isn’t naïve, he knows work is important. He is a pillar of a collapsing temple, a loyal servant to a dead god, and he would rather be crushed by the rubble than admit the sky is empty.

The printer on Floor 12 is still screaming. That is the sound of the future. It is not a polite knock. It is a battering ram. The fire is here. We are not defending jobs from destruction. We are defending corpses from cremation.