The Price of Corporate Culture

Hypocrisy Meets Moral Indignation

When I burnt out 18 months ago and left my career, one lingering effect, when catching up with social media feeds, was what I came to call scrolling scorn.

That corrosive mix of emotions that surfaces the moment a post collides with your values and version of reality.

The dissonance between how a company sells its culture and how it actually felt to live inside it smoulders.

Those little flashes of rhetoric seem to stir up the sensitive nervous system, with anger, frustration, and betrayal rising to the surface.

You see people believing themselves to be self appointed authorities, their tone swollen with certainty, patronising in its delivery. Each post compounds the injustice. Their performance of virtue clashes with your memory of harm.

It is a strange moral enquiry: your values get trampled, then paraded back at you in borrowed finery.

So how do we lessen the sting in a world where businesses bombard us with toxic positivity, without hardening into a corporate cynic?

It helps to remember that these posts are theatre. Branding, not truth. Performance, not reality. And we do not owe them our outrage. That energy belongs elsewhere.

Indifference, like any skill, is developed with practice. Each time you refuse to engage, neutrality grows stronger, alleviating the pessimism.

And while those who remain inside the machine may act as though your suffering was imagined, it cannot be. The body does not fabricate collapse. Perspectives and coping strategies differ. But the consequences are real.

Work culture is not evenly distributed. Some are shielded by their own aggrandisement; others take the full weight of the meaningless words. Too often, those proclaiming a business’s virtues are by definition the very ones least bruised by it.

Strength is not enduring until you break. It is knowing your limits before you collapse. And that clinging indignation, the residue of violated values, can be reshaped into something else: a commitment to authenticity, to care, to living the values you wish had been honoured.

So when the scroll pauses on a post that stirs contempt, remember that freedom lies within. Their theatre is not your stage. The only culture worth tending is the one you carry with you, the one you choose each day to live by.