Someone posted online this week about corporate team days, and within about forty comments it had become a proper catharsis session. The butcher’s paper. The coloured Post-its. Leadership doing their twelve minutes of performed empathy before quietly disappearing. The pre-assigned groups, because nothing accelerates team cohesion like being seated next to the person who replies-all to everything.

The OP nailed it: the barriers and opportunities written on that butcher’s paper are the same ones from five years ago. Nothing gets followed through. The paper gets photographed, uploaded somewhere, and dies quietly in a shared drive nobody visits.

Someone posted on Reddit this week asking whether they were going to spend the rest of their career reviewing AI-generated code. They mentioned that colleagues were boasting about not having written a single line of code in months. That markdown lists of ideas were showing up in meetings, obviously AI-generated, presented as thinking. That the expectation had quietly shifted: a good engineer now “supervises AI” and “focuses on the bigger picture.”

Someone shared an article about Australia’s productivity slump in one of the finance forums I occasionally dip into, and the comments section was exactly what you’d expect: half the people blaming migrants, half blaming “LNP cronies,” and a handful of people actually engaging with the substance. The article itself was worth reading. The response to it was a decent snapshot of why we can’t have nice things.

Let me try to untangle some of this, because I find it genuinely interesting, and because the usual political takes on it miss almost everything important.

There’s a particular kind of workplace fatigue that doesn’t come from doing too much work. It comes from watching someone else do none, and then having to explain to yourself why you’re still annoyed about it.

Someone posted about this recently online and it hit a nerve, judging by the response. The scenario will be familiar to anyone who has worked in an office for more than about six months. A colleague who is perpetually, visibly, performatively slammed. Every question requires a meeting. Every meeting gets rescheduled. Every rescheduled meeting becomes a 45-minute tour through unrelated anecdotes before the original question gets quietly abandoned. And yet somehow this person radiates the energy of someone holding the whole operation together by sheer force of personal sacrifice.

There’s a post doing the rounds online at the moment — probably rage bait, probably reposted for the thousandth time — but it touched a nerve with me, and I’ve been thinking about it all morning. The premise: a homeowner hides 100 miniature rubber ducks around their house and leaves a note for their cleaner asking them to find all the ducks and put them in a jar, as a way of verifying that a proper deep clean was done.