Most of us genuinely cared. We wanted the team to win, because their success kept food on our table. But somewhere between surviving a daily commute just to sit in a cubicle and Zoom people who were working remotely anyway, something snapped for a friend of mine.
He wasn’t unmotivated, he was just tired of pretending this made sense.
Not a single task on his daily checklist requires him to physically touch a piece of paper or stand in the same room as another human being. A line of code doesn’t deploy faster, and a cloud server doesn’t run better, just because his body is sitting in a specific office chair. Physically being there adds literally zero functional value to what he produces.
Half the time it does the opposite, some days the office gets so loud he ends up cranking Metallica through his headphones just to hear himself think.
Why?
Researchers looked at hundreds of big companies. Most RTO mandates got announced right after the stock price dropped, not before. So it wasn’t a plan, and it didn’t even fix the stock price either. No extra profit, no better numbers, nothing. What it did do was make my friend miserable. Other studies looked at hybrid setups specifically. Same output, sometimes better, and way less quitting. (source)
So if it’s not about performance, what is it about?
He doesn’t know, perhaps..
The lease, signed years ago, when nobody saw any of this coming. A parking garage half empty on Fridays. A building full of floors some VP has to justify to a board. That’s the whole thing. “Culture” is just a nicer way of saying ‘we already paid for this space and we need bodies in the chairs so the math doesn’t look embarrassing.’
They keep saying “culture”, “alignment”, “energy in the room”. Sounds nice, means nothing, honestly, as nobody in a leadership meeting has ever said “collaboration went up because Nick sat at his desk instead of his kitchen table.” There’s no metric for it, it’s a feeling.
Presence has always meant physically-visible. A body in a chair. A voice that jumps in first.
Nobody checks any of it against what actually got produced, because production was never really the metric being used. Quiet turned into a synonym for absent somewhere along the way, and loudness got treated as proof of engagement no matter how empty the words were.
His silence meant he was actually fixing things. He ended up burning half his mental battery just performing the illusion of being “present” for people who couldn’t tell the difference. Yet in a room that rewards noise, deep focus gets misread as apathy. Expecting deep technical work in that environment is like asking a fish to fly.
Hammer
Nobody wants to break their own plate. The plate is his job, it feeds him, pays his rent, buys his groceries, secures his future. He’s not trying to sabotage the thing that pays him. That’s not rebellion, that’s just stupid, and he’s not wired for stupid.
Every pointless mandate is a small hit on that plate. Hours of round trip for a job that runs fine from a laptop, crack. Dressing up a real estate problem as a “culture initiative,” crack. Multiple large monitors, a mechanical keyboard that sounds like thunder, internet that never throttles, all sitting unused at home while the office insists it needs him more, crack. A metric that quietly shifts from “what got made” to “how present did you look,” crack. Crack and crack.
He got apathetic because caring takes energy, and he ran out of it defending a system that wasn’t defending him back.