Last week, I had coffee with someone who works at a big consulting firm. She spent twenty minutes explaining her role to me. Not because it was complex, but because she was trying to convince herself it existed. "I facilitate stakeholder alignment across cross-functional workstreams," she said. Then laughed. "I genuinely don't know what that means anymore."

She's not alone. I keep meeting people who describe their jobs using words they'd never use in normal conversation. They attend meetings about meetings. They create PowerPoints that no one reads, which get shared in emails no one opens, which generate tasks that don't need doing.

The strangest part: everyone knows. When you get people alone, after work, maybe after they've had time to decompress, they'll admit it. Their job is basically elaborate performance art. They're professional email forwards. They're human middleware between systems that could probably talk directly to each other.

This isn't leading where you'd expect.

The Great Pretending
Walk through the City or Canary Wharf at 8am and you'll see thousands of people who look purposeful. Sharp suits, coffee in hand, calls already starting. The whole thing looks impressively important.

But talk to those same people individually, and a different story emerges. They're in back-to-back meetings where nothing gets decided. They're managing projects that exist primarily to justify the existence of project managers. They're creating strategies for strategies, optimising things that didn't need optimising, disrupting things that were working fine.

A friend at a major bank recently told me about his typical day. He arrives at 8am, leaves at 8pm, and when I asked what he actually did in those twelve hours, he couldn't point to a single tangible thing. "I enable decision-making," he said, then caught himself. "Whatever that means."

The pandemic pulled back the curtain for a moment. When everyone worked from home, it became obvious who was actually doing things and who was just... there. Some people's entire roles evaporated when they couldn't physically attend meetings. Others discovered they could do their "full-time" job in about three hours a day.

Now we're back in offices, and everyone's pretending again. But something's shifted. The pretence feels different. More conscious. More exhausting.


The hidden economy of nonsense
The anthropologist David Graeber called these "bullshit jobs", roles that even the people doing them suspect are pointless. But I think it's evolved beyond that. We've built entire ecosystems of mutual nonsense.

Consider the average corporate decision. It starts with someone identifying a "opportunity" (usually a non-problem). This triggers a cascade: analysts analyse, consultants consult, middle managers manage the consultation of the analysis. Workshops are held. Stakeholders are engaged. Decks are created.

Months later, something might happen. Usually, it's a minor adjustment that could have been made in an afternoon by anyone with common sense.

Everyone involved knows this. The analyst knows their model is largely guesswork. The consultant knows their framework is just common sense in a matrix. The manager knows the workshop is theatre. But they all need each other to maintain the illusion.

It's like a corporate version of the emperor's new clothes, everyone can see the emperor is naked, everyone knows everyone can see it, but we've all agreed to keep complimenting his outfit because our mortgages depend on it.

The parallel system
What's emerging is something very interesting. People are building parallel systems of actual value while maintaining their corporate personas.

I know developers who do their "official" job in the morning and build their own products in the afternoon. Marketers who run their agencies from their corporate desks. Consultants who've automated their actual deliverables and spend most of their time on side projects.

They're not quitting. They're using the corporate infrastructure, the steady salary, the laptop, the stability, as a platform for building something real. The corporate role hasn't died; it's become a funding mechanism for actual work.

One person I spoke to called it "corporate entrepreneurship", not in the LinkedIn way where you're an "intrapreneur" innovating within your company, but in the sense that you're using your corporate presence to subsidise your real work.

The Young and the Restless
This is particularly acute for people in their twenties. We entered the workforce just as the illusion was becoming impossible to maintain. We never had that period where we could believe our corporate roles were meaningful.

My friends from university are scattered across London's glass towers, and virtually none of them believe their job title describes anything real. They're "Growth Hackers" who've never hacked anything, "Digital Transformation Leads" transforming nothing, "Innovation Managers" managing the absence of innovation.

But instead of the existential crisis you'd expect, there's something else emerging. A kind of pragmatic acceptance coupled with creative subversion. They're showing up, playing the game, but building escape routes.

Nobody believes in the corporate role anymore, even while performing it perfectly. The belief is gone but the performance continues.

The commute as costume change
Watch Liverpool Street station at rush hour. It's not just people travelling to work, it's a mass transformation ritual. The person who boards at 7:15am isn't the same person who'll present in that 10am meeting.

I watched someone on my train recently. Hoodie and headphones at the start. By Clapham, he was in a shirt. By Bank, full suit. His posture changed with each addition. His face rearranged itself into something I can only describe as "professional neutral."

The reverse happens every evening. The gradual shedding of corporate identity as the train moves further from the centre. By the time people reach their actual homes, they're human again.

What actually dies
The corporate role isn't dying in some dramatic collapse. It's dying like religion died for many people, slowly, through diminishing belief rather than disappearing churches.

The structures remain. The offices still gleam. The meetings still happen. The emails still flow. But the faith that this activity means something, that it's building towards something worthwhile, that it justifies the life hours it consumes, that faith is evaporating.

What replaces it isn't clear yet. Maybe it's this parallel economy of people using corporate jobs as platforms. Maybe it's something we haven't seen yet. But the transition period, where we all pretend to believe in something we know is hollow, is unsustainable.

The most honest person I've met recently was a VP at a tech company who told me: "I manage a team of twelve people who create documents for other teams who create documents for senior leadership who don't read documents. I make £150k a year. It's completely absurd, and I'm riding it as long as I can while building something real on the side."

The opportunity in the emptiness
If you're reading this from inside one of these roles, feeling like you're going slightly mad from the cognitive dissonance, you're not alone. The madness isn't in you, it's in the system that asks you to pretend that forwarding emails is a career.

The moment you stop believing in the corporate fiction is the moment you can start using it. Once you see it as infrastructure rather than identity, as a resource rather than a calling, everything shifts.

Your corporate role doesn't need to be meaningful. It needs to be useful. Useful for building skills, for funding your real projects, for buying time while you figure out what matters to you.

The death of the corporate role isn't a crisis. It's freedom from having to pretend your spreadsheet about spreadsheets is your life's work.

Permission to stop pretending
So here's your permission slip, if you need one: you can stop pretending your corporate role is real. You can show up, do the tasks, attend the meetings, but you don't have to believe in it. You don't have to tie your identity to your email signature.

The people around you probably don't believe in it either. They're just waiting for someone else to admit it first.

The corporate role is dead. Long live whatever comes next.


I spent the last two days going through every single comment. 500 people wrote about their experiences. Dozens messaged privately.

Here's what stood out.

The salary gap

"I make £120k to essentially be in meetings about meetings. My friend who's a paramedic saves actual lives for £30k."

This comment appeared in different forms throughout. The gap between pay and value has become absurd. Master corporate language, earn six figures. Do something essential, scrape by.

Once you're earning that much for that little, every other option feels like failure. The money becomes its own trap. One person called it "expensive prison."

Different ages, different responses

People in their fifties wrote about wasted decades. They'd invested everything in careers that turned out to be nothing. Too late to pivot, too early to retire.

Twenty-somethings were relieved. They've never believed in corporate careers anyway. One wrote: "My parents think I lack ambition because I don't want to climb the ladder. But why would I want to climb toward more meaninglessness?"

Thirty and forty-somethings are stuck. They see through everything but have mortgages, school fees, responsibilities that make leaving feel impossible.


What lockdown exposed

During the pandemic, people discovered their full-time job took three hours. Some roles completely evaporated without physical meetings to attend.

Now we're back in offices, but everyone knows what everyone else knows. The belief is gone even as the performance continues.


How it sustains itself

"I manage twelve people. Four do actual work. The other eight... I don't know. But if I fire them, I lose headcount and budget. So we all pretend."

This shows exactly how the system perpetuates. Incentives that make honesty expensive and theatre profitable.

Failed exits

Several people shared stories of quitting to pursue meaning, running out of money, crawling back to worse corporate roles.

These were hard to read. The system punishes escape attempts by making re-entry even more soul-destroying.

The boundary shift

The comments revealed something significant. People have stopped trying to make corporate work meaningful. They've accepted it never will be.

Instead, they're establishing boundaries. Doing what's required, nothing more. Saving their energy for what matters outside. Building lives where work is just work.

The younger generation gets this instinctively. They never bought the lie about "career fulfilment" or "company family." They show up, perform adequately, go home.

Why this matters

Multiple people mentioned feeling less alone just knowing others see what they see.

One comment stuck with me: "I printed your article and put it on my desk. Every time I'm in another pointless meeting, I look at it and remember I'm not going mad."

We're all trapped in the same broken system. At minimum, we can stop pretending we believe in it.

Where this goes

Based on the comments, millions of people are mentally checked out while physically present. Using corporate stability to fund actual life. Refusing to let work define them.

The corporate world won't reform. But individuals are finding ways to survive it intact.

The death of the corporate job is happening quietly. 500 people commenting that they've stopped believing, thousands more nodding along.

Still building TrueNorth because the comments convinced me we need tools for understanding ourselves beyond job titles. (Waitlist in Bio)

Six months trying to get someone to fit an air source heat pump. Six months. Not because it's particularly harder than any other heating installation, it's because nobody has the qualification to put it in. Most plumbers are already booked solid for the next six months. Why spend time getting certified when you're turning down work? The few that already have the qualification set their price. £2,500 per day we were quoted. Still haven't found anyone.

This perfectly captures the moment. Six months of calls. Endless voicemails. The qualified installers know their worth. Meanwhile, my friends with masters degrees fight for jobs that might disappear next year.

The numbers paint a harrowing picture. There are 25.6 million homes in the UK. The average plumber is over 50. The construction industry needs 937,000 new workers by 2032. At the same time, tech companies secured £2.9 billion in UK investment last year, most of it going toward AI that replaces knowledge workers.

Corporate work scales infinitely, one AI model replaces a thousand analysts. Physical reality doesn't scale. Every broken boiler needs human hands. Every faulty wire needs human expertise.


Our generation of knowledge workers is navigating unprecedented career volatility. We're experiencing automation and AI disrupting roles faster than previous generations. Trained for linear progression in an era demanding constant pivots. Promised that good degrees guaranteed good careers, only to graduate into the gig economy and endless restructures.

I see it everywhere. Friends in finance watching algorithms do analysis they spent years learning. Consultants seeing AI produce better decks in minutes. Developers realising that coding might not be the safe bet they thought.

Work is splitting into two surviving categories: practical and personal. If your job involves fixing physical things or genuine human connection, you're probably safe. Everything else, the vast middle of knowledge work, is vulnerable.

Some of my friends are diving deeper into specialisation, betting they can stay ahead of the machines. Others pivot to coaching, therapy, anything requiring emotional intelligence. A few even consider trades, though starting plumbing at 30 with student loans isn't realistic.

Most are just stuck. Watching. Waiting. Adding vague buzzwords to their LinkedIn profiles. Every gathering eventually turns to the same topic, who's been laid off, who's pivoting, who's still pretending everything's fine.

The next generation will probably figure this out. They'll watch graduates struggle for £25k entry jobs while apprentice electricians start at more. They'll see what happened to us and adjust. But we're not the next generation. We're this one, caught between what we were promised and what's actually happening.

The housing crisis brings it into focus. 221,000 new homes last year, each needing plumbers, electricians, carpenters. Plus maintenance forever. The physical world makes constant demands that no amount of AI can meet. Yet we trained a generation for abstraction, not reality.

Parents now talk about their children learning "practical skills." Friends discuss backup plans that would have seemed ridiculous five years ago. The shift is happening, just slowly.

Most displaced knowledge workers won't become tradespeople. The transition is too hard, too late. Instead, we'll adapt within our constraints. Some will manage machines. Some will serve humans directly. Many will accept less to stay employed.

For those caught in this shift, which is most of us, the real challenge is understanding what kind of work we're actually suited for. School taught us to chase prestige, follow templates, want what everyone wanted. It never taught us to understand our own wiring. What energises versus drains us. How we actually work versus how we think we should work.

That's the crucial skill now. Not coding. Not prompt engineering. Understanding yourself clearly enough to navigate a landscape that changes faster than any career guide can track.



The plumber charging whatever they want doesn't need to figure out their next move. But knowledge workers watching their roles evaporate do. They need to understand what human elements can't be automated. What they're genuinely good at versus what they forced themselves to learn. What work actually fits how their brain operates.

The death of the corporate worker reveals what we should have known all along, that chasing external markers of success without understanding internal drivers was always going to end badly. We just thought we had more time.

Most of us don't know what actually suits us. We never had to. The path was clear, the progression linear, the expectations obvious. Now it's all uncertain. And uncertainty demands self-knowledge.