Can you feel the specific, grinding pressure behind your ears when you have to nod at a PowerPoint slide that claims a new CRM integration is ‘world-changing’? It is a physiological response, a silent protest from the nervous system against the requirement of artificial joy. We are living in an era where it is no longer enough to simply do the work. You must also perform a ritual of emotional submission. You must be ‘stoked’ about the quarterly roadmap. You must be ‘passionate’ about optimizing the click-through rates of banner ads that 95% of the population actively avoids. It’s a strange, heavy mask to wear for 45 hours a week, and the weight of it is starting to crack the floorboards of our collective sanity.

This demand for passion is the most insidious trick of modern management. It reframes a simple business transaction-your specialized labor in exchange for their currency-as a moral calling. If you aren’t excited about the 15% increase in user retention, are you even a ‘team player’? If you don’t ‘bleed’ the company colors, are you a liability?

The Passionate Hazmat Specialist

Take Cameron A., a hazmat disposal coordinator I spoke with recently. Cameron has spent 15 years dealing with the literal sludge of industrial progress. His job involves 55-gallon drums of substances that could melt your boots if you look at them wrong. In any sane world, Cameron’s value would be measured by his precision, his 105-page safety logs, and the fact that he hasn’t caused an environmental catastrophe in over a decade. But during his last performance review, his manager told him he needed to ‘work on his energy.’ They wanted him to show more ‘enthusiasm’ for the new waste-tracking software.

Cameron A. doesn’t ‘resonate’ with chemical waste. He respects it because if he doesn’t, he dies. He treats the software as a tool, not a religious experience. Yet, the corporate machine requires him to perform a character-the Passionate Hazmat Specialist-or risk being labeled as ‘disengaged.’ This is the emotional labor that nobody puts on a resume, yet it consumes more calories than the actual tasks at hand. It creates a feedback loop of insincerity. When everyone is forced to be excited, nobody can be honest. If a project is a disaster, but the culture demands ‘relentless positivity,’ the disaster will continue until it hits a wall, because dissent is seen as a lack of commitment.

The Relief of an Honest Transaction

There is a profound exhaustion that comes from this. It’s different from the tiredness of physical labor. It’s a thinning of the self. When you spend your day pretending to care about things that are objectively trivial, you begin to lose the ability to care about things that actually matter. Your empathy becomes a finite resource that you’ve wasted on a brand refresh.

The mask is a mortgage, and the smile is the interest rate.

This is why I find myself gravitating toward the few remaining honest transactions in our lives. There is something deeply grounding about a relationship that doesn’t require a performance. When you need a tool, or a piece of technology, you don’t want a ‘journey.’ You want a solution. You want a provider that says, ‘Here is the product, here is the price, and we will stand by it if it breaks.’ In a world where we’re asked to pretend that a spreadsheet is a religious experience, there is something deeply grounding about a simple, honest purchase-like getting a new phone from

Bomba.md where the price is just the price and the warranty is an actual legal document, not a vibe check. It’s a relief to interact with a system that doesn’t demand you ‘love’ it back. It just does what it says on the box.

The Hidden Cost of ‘Yes’

There is a hidden cost to the ‘yes’ we give so freely in the office. Every time we feign excitement for a ‘pivot’ that we know is a mistake, we are chipping away at our own integrity. We are telling our brains that our internal reality doesn’t matter as much as the external projection. Over time, that becomes a dangerous habit. It makes us easier to manipulate and harder to satisfy. We become 25 different versions of ourselves, depending on which manager is in the room.

I’m not suggesting we all become cynical or that we stop trying to find meaning in what we do. Meaning is vital. But meaning and ‘corporate passion’ are not the same thing. Meaning is found in the 35 minutes you spend helping a colleague solve a genuine problem. It’s found in the 85 hours of hard work you put into a project you actually believe in. It’s not found in the mandatory ‘fun’ of a Friday afternoon Zoom mixer where everyone is required to wear a silly hat and talk about their ‘wins.’

Reclaiming Neutrality

We need to reclaim the right to be neutral. To be professional without being performative. A business is a group of people organized to provide a service or a product. It is not a family, and it is not a cult. When we blur those lines, we invite the kind of exploitation that hides behind a ‘mission statement.’ We see 65% of workers reporting burnout, and we wonder why, while simultaneously asking them to ‘bring their whole selves to work.’ Maybe we don’t want to bring our whole selves. Maybe we want to bring our skills, our time, and our focus, and keep our ‘whole selves’ for the people who actually know us.

If we want to fix the culture of work, we have to start by being honest about the transaction. We have to allow for the possibility that someone can be excellent at their job while also thinking it’s just a job. We have to stop punishing the Camerons of the world for refusing to smile at the sludge. Until we do, we will all just be sitting in 15-minute stand-up meetings, nodding our heads and wondering why our jaws ache so much.