Something is happening in American workplaces right now that doesn't have a clean name yet. It isn't quiet quitting. It isn't a labor shortage. It isn't even cynicism, exactly — though cynicism is part of it. It's closer to a collective exhaustion with being asked to perform enthusiasm for goals that have nothing to do with you. With being handed a number and told that the number is the point. With the slow, grinding awareness that the margin is the mission, and you are the means.

People are frustrated. And not in the way that gets resolved with a town hall or a new benefits package. This is something older and more honest than that — the frustration of recognizing that you've been enrolled in a project you didn't agree to, one that keeps dressing itself up in the language of opportunity and growth while meaning something much simpler: generate revenue, keep your head down, and don't ask what it's for.

Edward Abbey said that. He was talking about something else — the American West, unchecked development, the desert being carved up for a return on investment — but he might as well have been sitting in your 9 a.m. sales meeting. Because the logic is identical. Grow. Expand. Capture. And when someone asks why, the answer is: because that's what growth does. It grows.

The Mandate from Above

Here's what the people doing the work are experiencing: margins compress, so the pressure to produce intensifies. Budgets tighten, so headcount does too — meaning the same humans generate more output for flatter compensation. And somewhere along the way, someone makes a decision, maybe unconsciously, that the human beings inside the machine are a cost center first and people second.

This is not malice. Most of the time it isn't. It's the logical end of a system that measures the wrong things obsessively and the right things not at all. You can run a report on revenue per employee. You cannot run a report on whether someone still believes in what they're doing. So one gets managed and one gets ignored, and eventually the gap between them becomes a chasm that no quarterly all-hands can bridge.

The workers feel this gap. They feel it when the language of the business is all velocity and pipeline and headwinds. They feel it when the feedback they receive is always calibrated to what the business needs rather than what they actually need. They feel it when they look around the table — or the Zoom grid — and realize that everyone is performing a version of engagement they stopped genuinely feeling sometime last year.

The Masquerade

There's a second layer to this, and it might be the more corrosive one. It's not just that the work has become about the margin. It's that no one will say so plainly.

Everything is dressed up. The layoff is a "restructuring for long-term health." The increased quota is a "growth opportunity." The benefits cut is a "benefits modernization." Every difficult truth arrives wearing a costume, and the people receiving it are expected to accept the costume at face value, or at least pretend to. Over time, this erodes something fundamental — the basic sense that the words coming at you mean what they say.

We have built an entire professional culture around the managed transmission of information, and we have confused that management with communication. They are not the same thing. Communication requires two people who are genuinely attempting to understand each other. What we mostly have instead is selling — everyone selling something to everyone else, all the time, in every direction. The manager sells the initiative to the team. The team sells their productivity to the manager. The company sells its culture to candidates. The candidates sell their enthusiasm to the company. And somewhere in all of that selling, the actual thing — the truth of what's happening and how it feels — goes unspoken.

People are getting sick of it. Not loudly, most of the time. Quietly. In the way that people stop volunteering opinions, stop asking questions in meetings, stop offering the extra effort they once gave freely. The disengagement isn't announced. It accumulates.

What Comes Next

There has to be a crossroads. That's not optimism — it's just physics. A system that extracts more than it restores eventually runs out of what it's extracting. The question is what form the correction takes and how long people can hold on until it arrives.

Because the workers are doing the math, whether they frame it that way or not. They're asking: Is this sustainable? Not in the buzzword sense — in the literal, personal sense. Can I keep doing this, at this pace, under these conditions, for this kind of recognition, for another year? Another two? What am I waiting for, exactly?

Some will leave. Some already have. Some will stay and go quiet. A smaller number will find or build something that operates on a different set of assumptions — places where the purpose isn't dressed up, where growth is a byproduct of doing something well rather than the objective in itself. Where people are the point, not the instrument.

That shift is slow. It doesn't happen in a news cycle or a fiscal quarter. But it is happening, unevenly, in the spaces where someone decided to stop performing and start being honest about what the work actually is and what it actually asks of people.

The best shops I walk into — the ones that still feel like something — are run by people who never fully bought the growth mandate. Not because they don't care about money or survival, but because they understood, somewhere along the way, that the business is in service of the people, not the other way around. That sounds simple. It turns out to be radical.

You can't go on like this forever. Neither can anyone else. That's not a threat or a promise. It's just the thing that's true, that almost no one will say out loud in a meeting — the thing that everyone goes home thinking.

Growth for the sake of growth. The ideology of the cancer cell. Abbey knew it. The workers know it. The question now is whether the people setting the mandate will figure it out before the organism stops functioning.

My guess is: some of them will. Probably not enough. But some.