Photo by Thanh Lâm.
If you want to assess the state of the modern workforce with a single search on a single platform, we know which one you should use. And no, it’s not LinkedIn. Sure, LI has your third cousin’s AI-generated head shot and posts about what their divorce taught them about B2B sales. But that is nothing compared to what we found on Pinterest.
For this story to make sense, it will help to know that we came up during the height of dotcom and web 2.0 stickers. The joyful, late 2000s where you might have a PC or a Mac but honestly who can tell cause the whole thing is covered in obscure logos and ThinkGeek jokes. Our obsession with sticker culture persists. So much so that RSG stickers are on laptops and water bottles (sure) but also on lampposts and bridges in several major, global metropolitan areas. We have no idea how they got there but people sometimes send pictures and that’s pretty lovely.
OK, back to the state of the modern workplace. We’re working on new stickers and our designer asked about fonts and vibes. So off to the Pinterest mines we go. With no idea what awaits. We enter the words “work stickers” and the results come back. There are dumpsters that are on fire. There are several urgent cries for help using the [esc] key. There are angry frogs in front of laptops, frogs offering emotional support to get through the day, and there’s even a cute frog advertising an end-of-life journal. Friends, it is bleak times on the work sticker page.
Bleak and getting bleaker
Bleak stickers are one thing. Bleak out in the actual real world is another thing entirely.
We try not to eavesdrop. But if you’re on a city bus taking a loud work call during rush hour, the entire bus is listening. Hell, several of us will pull up your LI profile just for kicks. Public transit has rules, folks. Likewise, if you’re at a coffee shop with tight tables complaining about your boss, we may look engaged in our own cortado bliss, but our listening ears are wide open. Again, not for spy reasons. But because it’s really helpful to understand the state of the modern workforce. And, in particular, the state of what passes for work advice these days.
In coffee shops and on transit, there are two buckets of work advice on repeat. And they show up for everything from how to get your upcoming vacation approved. To how to get your next startup funded.
On the one hand, there’s a lot of this-is-fine-meme personified. Sure, it’s all shit but what do you expect? Capitalism is gonna capitalism. Best you can hope for is to endure it </shrug>. On the other hand, we’re no-sleep-no-hobbies-just-work‘ing our way to greatness. Sure, we’re exhausted, but how do you expect to win at capitalism if you’re asleep? Do the markets sleep? Wait, they do? Well, ok, but while they’re snoozing, that’s when you can outwit them!
It’s worth noting that neither of these are particularly appealing options. At the risk of explaining the joke and rendering it unfunny, sitting in a room that’s on fire is very much not fine. And we’ve talked at length about the diminishing returns on overwork as a personality.
While it may seem like these are coming from totally different schools of thought, they’re not. If you’re someone who is new to the workforce or just trying to navigate your role within it, they bottom out at the same uninspired place. Too fucking bad, there’s nothing you can do about it.
Brace yourselves. Here comes the hopeful bit…
This turns out to be a big ol’ lie.
Late-stage cynicism
Look, we should say up front: late-stage capitalism? Not humanity’s finest moment. Grotesque and unprecedented concentrations of wealth. Breathtaking exploitation, oppression, and immiseration. Shameful waste and scarcity of human necessities that can and should be abundant. A trillion-dollar pay packageare you fucking serious? As a socioeconomic system of allocating resource and influence, be so for real right now. It’s hot garbage. No argument there.
But as a worldview on how to relate to work? As a thing to say to your friend with a shrug when they are going through a shitty time at work? “Welp, that’s late-stage capitalism for you.” It’s worse than useless.
Like, it sounds smart. It sounds like you’ve spent some time with critical theory. Like you’re making a succinct observation about the structural incentives and systemic pressures that create and perpetuate exploitative labour conditions. But, with love in our hearts and support for your eventual and fiery revolution, what it actually does in that moment is punt.
It punts on accountability. The global capitalist system is not going to take accountability for a shitty workplace, but the management team owns that, and that’s a group of actual people, and no one should let them off the hook. Capitalism isn’t skipping 1:1s, giving toxic feedback, or changing goals frameworks every quarter — fucking Mike is doing that. We should all be very skeptical of any worldview on work that allows him to shift that responsibility elsewhere.
It also punts on agency. Sarah Stein Lubrano talks in her book about System Justification Theory, and the counter-intuitive finding that the people most oppressed or disadvantaged by a system are often its fiercest defenders. More particularly, that people who feel like there are no better alternatives to the current system end up propping up the status quo, even when it harms them. It’s worth considering that, in practical terms, every time you answer someone’s hardships at work with “welp, that’s late-stage capitalism for you,” you make it seem inevitable. And that perceived inevitability is exactly what helps it persist.
If we want work to be better, we need possibility, not futility. We need people to see that better work is possible and real. Maybe for you that means post-revolutionary Marxist work or distributed self-managed workplaces, though we’ve gotta be honest that we’ve worked with a lot of folks coming from orgs like that and they have some…rough stories of their own. But you don’t have to look that far away to find it anyhow. We see it all the time.
The third-cohort effect
A very cool thing about our work is when we get to work with the same company over and over as they grow. We see an initial cohort of their managers in their early growth. And then later a new crop. And then another. We have client organizations where we’ve seen leads grow to managers, to directors, to VPs. Orgs where we’ve met hundreds of their managers, spanning years.
And one thing we talk about is what starts to happen in the third cohort. By the third cohort we’re often working with leaders whose own bosses we’ve already met, and who have had a year or more to put their skills into practice. When you ask them things like, “how many of you have regular, useful 1:1s with your own boss?” every hand goes up. How does feedback flow in your team? What are the org’s priorities? How do we determine compensation? Over and over the third-cohort folks have clear, positive, shoulders-down answers to these questions. It doesn’t even seem particularly odd to them.
This is hard to do, to be clear, but their orgs are doing it. They’re doing it in a variety of countries, under a gradient of economic systems from US-capitalism, to more socialist/labour-forward Northern European economies, to pan-global orgs where the Singapore folks join in PJs while the Berliners sip beer and the LA folks look like they just woke up. They ask questions, they reflect, they joke with each other, and they talk about what kind of culture they want to create and how to take care of their people. They aren’t cynical, and they aren’t naïve either. They’re in there doing the work.
Like, what can we say? Yes, late-stage capitalism is a mess. But also yes, these people are finding meaning and connection and fulfillment in their work despite it. And yes it is a repeatable phenomenon. And yes it can happen in your workplace, too. But it takes more nuance than the hardcore grindset failsons. And it takes more vulnerability than calling it all an inevitability of the system and walking away. And it takes a lot of hard work.
It takes actually reckoning with how power works in organizations and how, especially if you’re in management, to honour and navigate that instead of pretending it away. It takes a ton of skill-building, and humility about how weak those skills are for most people in management. It takes being willing to push back on your own bosses, sometimes at the risk of losing your own job, and sometimes on your way out the door if the differences really are irreconcilable. You can learn how to do these things. You can make things better.
But you don’t have to. You can check out and cash your pay and have Chat summarize your meetings and have Claude write your emails and tell yourself that anything more than that is being a shill for the system. You can give your friend at the coffee shop the same advice. If that’s what you need to do to get by, okay.
All we’re saying is that it could be good.
— Melissa & Johnathan
