It was my fault for having feelings in the first place

The sooner you accept that work is not your family, the faster you’ll be at spotting when they’re trying to gaslight you into believing it is.

I’ve never been much of a crier. Though I pictured it many times in my head—the cinematic collapse into tears in a bathroom stall and someone running in there after me to tell me that they can relate. Nah, my breakdowns are much less interesting to watch. Someone says something that cuts a little too close, and instead of crying, I let it infect me from the inside me. Like ink pressed too deep, it stains the softer parts of my brain, the parts that should’ve come stamped with “handle with care.” I’d carry this new feeling around with me for weeks as it takes shape, and altering my entire chemistry.

I used to think I had a special tolerance for work. Maybe it’s the immigrant-parent thing. Work was the air we breathed. It’s the measure of whether we were good people. Effort was never optional, only assumed.

I could accept long hours, the projects that never ended, the managers who assumed I’d always pick up the slack on slack. I even believed that extra effort would eventually be noticed and sincerely appreciated. But that kind of belief builds that expectation around recognition which was the myth I fed myself to justify the grind.

But the longer I spent in the corporate cycle, the clearer it became: recognition is rarer than money. But unlike money, it doesn’t accumulate. You can pour yourself out and deliver beyond what was asked, and still find your worth tallied in likes, impressions, or some other metric designed to feel objective while stripping the human out of the work.¹

The hardest lesson has been remembering that work is transactional. And take this with a grain of salt because I’m not being cynical. In fact, I think that’s probably the most unemotional way to describe work. If you look at it through a math lens, you’d see that it makes a lot of sense. You give your hours, your energy, (sometimes even your health,) and in return you get a salary.

The problem is when we keep trying to turn that transaction into a relationship.

We mistake the illusion of culture for care.
We think loyalty matters.
Then one small flaw—one human crack—and suddenly you’re a liability.

Companies are not families. Employees are parts to a machine that runs until they decide to swap out the parts.

And yet, I can’t stop wondering why the expectation only seems to flow one way. Employees are told to bring their whole selves, go the extra mile, lean in, step up. Companies, meanwhile, posts about a strong company culture but pinch at the part where they can offer something of value.

Maybe this will matter even more as our workplaces become less human by design. Screens mediating every interaction, AI reshaping the boundaries of what counts as “work.” I can already feel the hunger for something messier, more alive…for the bosses and brands and coworkers who don’t just play pretend when it comes to humanity but actually practice it. If we are, as everyone says, heading into an age where machines will do the efficient parts, then the value of being human will have to rise…right? At least, I hope it does.

1. *i’m talking about social here, where the metrics are literal. but you could swap in almost any industry’s scoreboard and the sentiment holds.