Very few people know who they really are, and too many people use their jobs to fill that void.

How would you handle a job full of workaholics with no boundaries? One guy recently vented about his current situation on Reddit. Here are the details.

Working with people whose whole identity is their job is exhausting

As someone whose identity is far removed from my job, working with people who are the opposite is just exhausting.

For reference, I work in a soul-sucking corporate position that treats us as if we have no lives outside our jobs.

This means routine mandatory overtime and weekend work, all for free.

Nothing is ever that urgent.

To me, being on my corporate laptop for any period of time is miserable, and I routinely work with people who seemingly have no identity outside of their corporate roles.

This means that I get emails after hours (I don’t answer), and calls on the weekend for some urgent task that turned out to be an account number nobody has looked at for six years, and didn’t even need to be changed.

If you don’t put in the same enthusiasm and energy, they look at you funny.

These people need hobbies.

Every time you speak with them, it’s like the building is going to burn down if you don’t complete a slideshow that nobody will pay attention to.

I don’t know if they’re just better at acting than I am, or if they truly tie their lives into their corporate positions.

I genuinely feel like I’m talking to worker ants or robots any time I need to engage with these people.

Excelling in corporate does require acting this way.

Whenever one of them pings me, I feel like I’m working with people who ask the teacher for homework, and their willingness to lick the boots of their bosses is flat out embarrassing.

Like, you really have nothing else you’d rather be doing at 5PM?

Why are you calling me at 9PM on a Friday night or 6AM Saturday morning?

Especially for no pay.

Do these people even sleep?

Do they have families?

Hobbies?

Sounds like probably not.

It baffles me.

My boss got on me yesterday because I stopped working on a bi-weekly presentation that literally nobody looks at.

It’s been near six months since I made one because it’s a huge waste of time, and shocker; nobody noticed until he asked me about it.

Corporate is a joke.

Corporate is a stage, and employees are merely players. Let’s see if Reddit could empathize with this.

Most immediately pointed out the toxicity of this mindset.

Others provided some larger perspective.

Some pulled examples from their own lives.

One person shared a particularly appalling example.

And most agreed on the same takeaway.

Almost nobody in the world gets paid enough for this nonsense.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.