Capitalism is bullshit

For the last ten years, I built a corporate career of high-paying bullshit, do-nothing email jobs. I know to some people this probably seems like a dream, but to me it felt like a golden cage, much like the one Taylor Swift swings inside in her music video for Look What You Made Me Do.

this cage was once just fine, am i allowed to cry? - taylor swift, ‘guilty as sin’

Over the years it felt more and more like a vestige of all the unearned privileges in our system that infuriate me. By virtue of me being a white woman who had the resources to go to college (even though my success in school was on my own merits and hard work), I was able to be paid $87 per hour to sit at my desk and dial into a Microsoft Teams meeting twice a day? To write the occasional email, and work on the occasional brain-numbing deliverable, which would then be iterated to hell in the levels above mine before being discarded as something they actually realized they didn’t need? It was soul-crushing to be paid to do nothing. Heartbreaking to have so much talent and creativity and intelligence brimming beneath my skin but be told “no, we don’t care about all that - just so long as you smile!”

I’ve never wanted to be rich (well maybe not ‘never’, I certainly dreamed of being a princess in my youth, and lusted after Coach and Dooney & Bourke purses as a tween). Money is something i both loathe and fear. I majored in finance because I’ve always had an affinity for math and numbers, but despised my finance classes. I was quick to realize that the stock market, something that’s always held my father hostage to its grasp, was bullshit. It was just made up. None of that money is real - it’s the concept of money.

I’ve seen the astrological chart of the NYSE. It’s very sinister, and they did that on purpose. The Algol of it all - they created that institution to exert great harm on natural beings, and they succeeded. And now my younger brother will burst through the door of our family home, yelling “I just made two thousand dollars on the stock market thanks to [company that is destroying the world]!” And I will say, “do you have that money in your bank account? can that money pay your rent and bills?” and he will of course say “no, but-” by which time I have retreated back to my bedroom, point made yet always falling on deaf ears.

I once enjoyed the corporate world. In 2017 and 2018, I had a job that valued my talents and creativity. I was gifted with a manager who believed in my neurodivergent brain and let me do things that were outside the box. I transformed a campaign to implement OneDrive from a set of boring, plain text emails into a comic strip series featuring an anti-hero protagonist named Chad. Chad was always doing the wrong thing: neglecting to back up his computer on OneDrive because of his arrogance, then walking too quickly through the halls of the office, bumping into someone and making them spill their coffee, and then losing all of his files. The tagline was punchy: “Don’t be like Chad. Back up your files on OneDrive today!”

Chad was a smash hit. We worked from the office three days a week then, and when I walked into the office I saw my baby Chad hung on cubicle walls, by the printer, in the cafeteria. I had alchemized what was presented to me as an email-writing task into a company-wide phenomenon, and then was inundated with creative asks. I did a short video clip featuring Taylor Swift’s Look What You Made Me Do (quelle coincidence!) that said ‘I’m sorry, your old files can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Because they’re dead!’ I wrote a breakup letter to Skype when we migrated to Microsoft Teams that ended up becoming the most-viewed post ever on Accenture’s intranet. I was 23 and miserable and an alcoholic but at least my work fulfilled me.

But then I moved to Los Angeles and switched jobs out of necessity. In my interviews my creativity, youth, and innovation was a hot topic. They were an old bank, founded during the Great Depression, and they wanted to move into the future so they could compete with the tech companies expanding into banking. They’d gotten the lowest employee engagement score company-wide, an appalling 33%, on the most recent survey. I would get free rein to do whatever I wanted to bring that score up.

However, the culture was different from what I was used to. They wanted what I was on the surface - a white, smart, attractive woman - but none of the personality that I had to offer. Any sign of my neurodivergence was taken as an attack. I had two friends who were gay and one mentor who was a creative genius, but everyone else - especially my manager - didn’t know what to do with me and my ‘differences.’

Though we met weekly, my manager never gave me feedback or told me anything was wrong. But then year-end came and I got a ‘needs improvement’ performance review score and no raise. This happened two years in a row before I petitioned for a new manager, who informed me that if I had gotten another bad performance review, I would have been put on a PIP (another thing my old manager had never told me). I still didn’t understand my bad ratings, as I was doing my job and turning in what was asked of me on time. I had also raised employee engagement from 33% to 89% in one year, which is what they asked me to do!

In winter 2020 i was diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed adderall, and my productivity improved. That was not the end of my problems, however, as I received in error a message from one of my managers openly talking shit about me and my work. I took a screenshot and sent it to my manager, and the offending hater apologized profusely, but I was never comfortable with him again. I hadn’t even done the thing he had complained about (reusing old content in a monthly newsletter), but now I was privy to this culture of people more senior and better-paid than me spreading lies and talking shit about my work. You simply can’t put that cat back in the bag!

Spring 2022 arrived, and my company began a ‘return-to-office’ campaign, which was obviously met by GREAT anger. The CEO’s RTO message became the most-viewed article ever on the Capital Group intranet, like a sinister foil to my highly-praised satirical breakup letter. I spent a full day refreshing the page and watching as more and more negative comments rolled in, topping out at over a thousand by day’s end.

At this time I was struggling greatly with anxiety and panic attacks as well as a host of UTI- and endometriosis-related health issues, so I submitted notes from both my doctor and therapist to HR for an RTO exemption. HR responded by setting up a (virtual) meeting with me, during which they told me that while they understood multiple medical professionals wanted me to continue working from home, they thought it would be best if I came into the office at least three days a week. My continued refusal to do so became a ticking clock hanging over my head, which I ignored because these people had no real power over me and there was just no chance I was commuting two hours a day to satisfy their egos.

That winter I started conversations with my manager and senior manager about getting promoted. After my bumpy first three years (though I still don’t actually know what I did ‘wrong’ those first two years besides be neurodivergent and have undiagnosed ADHD), I had been doing amazing work this year thanks to my adderall, and was working well above the scope of my listed responsibilities.

I put together a spreadsheet listing the responsibilities for my current job, the level above it, and the level above that, and demonstrated that I was already performing the job duties of someone two levels above my role. I met with my manager who agreed with my conclusions, and then with my senior manager. Manny the Manager, how I despise thee. He said, straight to my face, “I don’t think you’re doing nearly as good work as you think you’re doing.” When I asked for further details, there weren’t any. I immediately clocked that he was talking about my refusal to come back to the office, though he full well knew about my health issues.

This incident made me so angry that started to threaten to contact a lawyer about ADA violations during Benefits’ monthly meetings where they pressured me to come back to the office, which was likely my downfall. A few months later I was laid off along with my two gay friends and my creative genius mentor.

When you get laid off, people love to tell you ‘it’s nothing about you’ and ‘you didn’t do anything wrong.’ What a load of shit. I have a brain, I have incredible pattern recognition skills, and I know that being laid off had everything to do with me and my lack of obedience.

All your life you’re told that what these big. fancy companies want is the best and brightest minds. But that’s not true. They want the best and brightest OBEDIENT minds. The best and brightest minds that live by hierarchy and respect (fear) authority. Bright minds like mine? Minds that come with autism, adhd, queerness, outside-the-box thinking, and a healthy relationship with the word ‘no’? Those simply won’t do here - or, they’ll do until they become too much of a threat to the empire, and then they’ll be discarded with a large enough severance to prevent the aforementioned ADA lawsuit.

Six months later I found another job, fully remote and higher-paying, but significantly more boring and do-nothing. No gay people for me to be friends with, just neurotypical, boring, married men and women with kids who talked nonstop about Disneyland visits, soccer practice, and insurance prices. I stuck out like a sore thumb even through the screen, and stopped talking about myself and my life entirely because they clearly didn’t want to hear it.

There I sat for a year and a half, chained to my home and my laptop nine hours a day, twiddling my thumbs, reading, learning about astrology, and procrastinating the little work I had because it was so mind-numbingly boring I thought it might break me. Everyone deeply feared our Director and bowed to her everytime she spoke, which I didn’t understand. I talked to her like a normal person because that’s who she was to me. She seemed to like me a lot.

Then one day in March 2025 - nearly two years to the day since I was last laid off - I was laid off again. This time I knew it wasn’t my ‘fault,’ I hadn’t threatened lawsuits against anyone and I was not in HR’s bad graces. They just needed to cut costs and ultimately I didn’t really do anything to bring in money. My team’s leader, a Trump supporter, sent me an email about ‘unusual times’ that I didn’t dignify with a response.

Three months later they called me and asked if I would come back, and I said no.

Now I work in food service part-time while I grow my astrology business. I make less than $20 an hour, but I do something real. I see people every day, which my Leo Venus deeply appreciates because I LOVE to serve a look. All of my favorite jobs over my lifetime have been customer-facing: my retail jobs at American Eagle and Ann Taylor LOFT, being a pastry chef at a small Charlottesville bakery in college, and now being a host at a semi-upscale restaurant near my parents’ house.

I work so much harder than I ever worked at my do-nothing email job for less than 1/4 of the pay, but isn’t that always the case? The hardest workers are the ones working minimum wage jobs. I set up tables for parties of bankers and consultants and they drink bottles and bottles of top-shelf wine on an expense account while they laugh about making the world a worse place for everyone but the richest people. I don’t envy them. I’d rather make my small non-living than sell my soul to their god of greed.

I’m 32 now, I’ve lived many lives in the 11 years since I graduated from college. I’ve worked at four corporate jobs, lived in three states, traveled far and wide. Thanks to said travel and alcoholism I’ve been incredibly deep in credit card debt. I dug myself out, then got sober.

I’m not a ‘normal’ woman and I don’t want to live a ‘normal’ life. The master has offered me the keys to his kingdom on multiple occasions, on the condition that I leave my empathy and everything ‘weird’ about me at the door. Every time, I’ve said no.

I believe in a better world, and part of that is saying no to the old world that leaves people behind because of their race, class, immigration status, disability status, and gender. I defended my participation in capitalism fiercely for nearly a decade, but I’m older and wiser now and, honestly, fuck it all. I can’t wait to watch this white man’s world burn. You’ll find me there, handing out marshmallows to toast as the flames reduce to ashes.

XOXO,
Jesse