When the Swindlers Swindle Themselves
How the Myth of the ‘Corporate Family’ Erodes Integrity and Traps the Mind
Content note: Polemic prose that may trigger the LinkedIn lovers.
Like so many of society’s trends, company culture, also known as ‘workplace culture’, is a scam.
I should know. I worked in marketing agencies for decades.
Integrity is not something you need to proclaim, yet hustle culture’s need to be seen being seen has turned bright people blind to their own values.
So intent are we on winning that losing now feels like an exception defining the rule.
When you want something so badly you decide it cannot be any other way, that is when truth ends up slumped over the lies in a shallow grave.
Once the truth is buried, all that is left to talk about are slogans.
Now that we cannot speak amongst ourselves without chanting our wares, have we become deaf to the empty words and forgotten how to interact genuinely?
Everything feels dusted with disingenuous Saharan sand after the rain.
The idea of corporate families is an oxymoron. Why does no one stop to think what that actually means? That your colleagues will get on your nerves like siblings, that seniority will be full of outdated ideas like your parents, and that Christmas will be even more cringe and exhausting than the real one.
Why is the word family used to evoke all that love and care that so rarely exists in the day-to-day experience of family life?
Families are ruthless. They want what is best, and if you are not in charge you had better prepare for the stress of being a child in a world ruled by someone else’s expectations.
The corporate family trope is designed to bind you by blood to the machine. You are no longer an employee free to choose your next move; you are trapped in the psychological warfare of familial obligation, duty-bound to do whatever it takes because what could be more important than family?
But what is more important than that? Your mental health, perhaps. How many suffer as a direct result of family, whether through upbringing or biology?
Too many people endure mediocre careers and mediocre pay just to earn the right to pull a cracker at year-end celebrations.
I get on with my family exceptionally well, and that is likely because I have lived abroad for most of my adult life. Imagine spending forty hours a week with your real family. That is what we are being sold in the office. Gather around the dining table and let us do a puzzle together. Do not worry, you can have an hour’s break at midday. Right, kiddo, you collect the blue pieces. Love, can you start on the edges? You get the idea.
So why do we buy into it? “Oh, they sound like a lovely team.” “Oh, I bet their Christmas is a riot.” #christmasjumpers, no, it is marketing. The reality is that someone burnt the roast, and grandad had too many sherries and said something inappropriate. Nobody wants to be there; everyone just thinks everyone else wants to be there. Welcome, pluralistic ignorance.
A generation or two ago, we would have been glad to find respite in a room of quietly busy strangers. We would have been excited to return to our own families for dinner, rather than already exhausted by the corporate mistress and her business bastards.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have exited the corporate machine, and the so-called family did not show up to my funeral.
I now get to focus my care and attention on the people who deserve it. I had lost the energy for my real life while maintaining the mask of the corporate one. I intend to resist putting it on again for as long as I can.
