It’s 3 AM. The blue light from the monitor paints my face in sickly hues as I stare at the sentence again: “Sometimes struggles with executive presence.” My finger hovers over the trackpad, a phantom tremor. I’ve read it 49 times now, maybe more. Was it Susan from marketing? Or perhaps Dave, who always looks at me like I just told him his tie was on fire? The words themselves aren’t particularly damning, not overtly. But in the hushed, polite language of the 360 review, “struggles with executive presence” is a shiv, disguised as a gentle suggestion. It’s designed to stick, to fester, to chip away at the very promotion I’ve been working towards for the last 9 months. My stomach churns, a familiar tightening sensation that has become a constant companion during this annual corporate ritual.

We’re told, with earnest smiles and carefully crafted HR slides, that these 360-degree reviews are for “development.” A chance to gain valuable insights, to grow, to see ourselves through the eyes of our peers, direct reports, and superiors. What a perfectly curated, corporate-speak delusion. The reality, as anyone who has navigated more than a single cycle knows, is far grittier. It’s an institutionalized system for score-settling, a bureaucratic outsourcing of difficult managerial duties, all meticulously disguised as objective

The screen glowed back at me, a blue-tinged mirror of my own exhaustion. It was Sunday night, past 11:32, and instead of winding down, I was scrolling. Not aimlessly, mind you, but with the grim determination of a field researcher. Every post, every story, every perfectly angled selfie was ‘market research.’ A familiar wave of nausea tightened in my gut, not from what I saw, but from the horrifying realization that I hadn’t had an original thought in weeks that wasn’t destined for a 15-second video, a carousel post, or a tweet that had to resonate with 2 specific trending hashtags. My signature, the very thing I’d spent years honing, felt less like an authentic mark and more like a stamped factory seal.

This isn’t just ‘creator burnout’ in the cute, self-care blog post sense. This is an industrial byproduct.

We talk about managing burnout like it’s a personal failing, a lack of discipline in our self-care routines. Did you meditate for 22 minutes today? Did you hydrate sufficiently? Did you set clear boundaries? These questions, however well-intentioned, entirely miss the point. The system itself, the very attention economy we operate within, is *designed* to burn you out. It doesn’t merely tolerate your constant output; it thrives on it, profits from your desperate, unending quest for engagement. Your exhaustion is a feature, not a bug, in the code. I used to believe

The persistent thrum of an idling engine vibrated up through the seat of my worn-out sedan, a familiar tremor that had become the unwelcome soundtrack to too many mornings. Outside, the brake lights ahead formed a crimson necklace stretching towards some invisible, indifferent horizon, the kind you see every third Tuesday or every other Wednesday. Another fifty-three minutes, maybe more, to traverse the same seventeen miles I’d driven countless times, all to reach a desk where I’d likely put on noise-cancelling headphones and join a video call with Sarah, whose office was barely thirty feet from mine. This daily ritual, this utterly absurd pilgrimage, feels increasingly like a relic from a bygone era, yet here we are, many of us in the Triad, still performing it. We’re caught in a loop, not entirely sure how to exit, even as the futility of it gnaws at our sense of well-being.

This isn’t about the joy of a good coffee shop or the serendipity of bumping into a colleague in the breakroom. Those are real benefits, yes, fleeting moments of connection in a world starved for it. But let’s be honest: for countless hours, for perhaps thirty-three hours a week, we’re strapping ourselves into metal boxes, burning precious fuel, and losing chunks of our lives just to occupy a physical space. A space often designed more for surveillance than

The rhythmic thud of the impact wrench echoed across the yard, a funeral dirge for Truck 12. Not a dead truck, mind you, but one condemned to be an organ donor. Mark, the operations manager, watched from the meager shade of his office, the grim satisfaction of solving one immediate problem warring with the sickening churn of knowing he was creating another. He’d signed off on it, of course. Ordered it. Truck 07, the workhorse of their long-haul fleet, needed a radiator, a very specific kind, and the only one available, sitting for two weeks on backorder from a supplier 239 miles away, wasn’t coming in. Not in time for the critical delivery due in 49 hours to a client who tolerated precisely zero delays.

This isn’t just about radiators. This is about the desperate alchemy of cannibalization, a dark art practiced not by failing businesses, but often by the most tenacious. It’s seen as a scarlet letter, a public admission of systemic failure, a sign that the wheels are truly coming off. But what if it’s the opposite? What if it’s a hyper-rational, albeit profoundly painful, act of triage in a system that has fundamentally failed *you*? It’s not a moral lapse; it’s a glaring symptom of deeper structural weaknesses. The supply chain, the very backbone of