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 at a desk and sitting on Zoom with 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 one part of his work requires him to 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. Being there makes literally no practical difference to what he does.
Half the time, it does the opposite. Some days the office gets so loud that he ends up cranking Metallica through his headphones just to hear himself think.
Why?
Researchers looked at hundreds of big companies. Most return-to-office requirements were announced right after the stock price dropped, not before. So it wasn’t a plan, and it didn’t fix the stock price either. No extra profit, no better numbers, nothing. What it did was make my friend miserable. Other studies looked at arrangements where people split their time between home and the office. The work was the same, sometimes better, and far fewer people quit. (source)
So if it’s not about performance, what is it about?
He doesn’t know. Perhaps it’s 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 people sitting in it so the math doesn’t look embarrassing.’
They keep saying “culture,” “alignment,” and “energy in the room.” Sounds nice. Means nothing, honestly. Nobody in a meeting among managers has ever said, “Collaboration went up because Nick sat at his desk instead of his kitchen table.” There’s no way to measure it. It’s a feeling.
Presence has always meant being physically visible. A body in a chair. A voice that jumps in first.
Nobody checks any of it against what actually got done because the work was never really the standard 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 performing the illusion of being “present” for people who couldn’t tell the difference. 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, and 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 travel for a job that runs fine from a laptop, crack. Dressing up an expensive building problem as a “culture initiative,” crack. Multiple large monitors, a mechanical keyboard that sounds like thunder, and internet that never throttles, all sitting unused at home while the office insists it needs him more, crack. A standard 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.