My lady love works in corporate America, having worked hard for her education and being able to work from home since 2020. When the company transitioned to remote work, they pivoted their entire corporate structure to support it permanently. This includes real estate dealings, shifting office space for outside leasing, blah blah blah, things that don’t really affect the job so I won’t go on too long about them.

The shift in company culture that took place in 2020 made online meetings a necessity (for some reason) and they occur at regular intervals. These meetings are almost always an agenda that could have been handled internally through email communication. But there is an underlying agenda to maintain tabs on employees and force a sense of company culture on everyone.

It is obvious from the jump of every meeting where people are pretending to give a shit about how the folks from other departments are doing. A polite conversation about nothing ensues before the meeting can get underway. It’s all such an unnecessary bit of theater that it defies reason.

Why can’t people just do their job and not be forced into participating in this garbage? Company culture is going to be one of the artifacts of the way the world used to work before we all realized how many jobs didn’t need the office in the first place. That section of the veil was lifted and everyone saw it for the misdirect it was. Now there is no unseeing it.

Some people enjoy the culture aspect of working for a company, and there are plenty of places for them to install themselves for their entire career. But everyone I know who ever has to deal with it feels as though it is a thing to be endured, not enjoyed.