We were caught in a vice: working too much, sleeping too little, and failing to maintain our health.

Eventually the reaper calls. Waking up too early squeezes available time at the outset, releasing cortisol from the stress of trying to making the impossible fit.

You either skip breakfast or eat garbage of some sort, not having a few minutes to prepare something good. Decency is the first thing to get cut. You replace it with something not fit for service.

Then you sit in traffic for an hour, getting further stressed about idiots doing idiotic things as usual, as you realize your time is being squeezed further and now you’ll have to cut more corners somewhere to make up today. What additional essential item will you choose to sacrifice in hopes of salvaging something in this mess?

Perpetual compromise cultivates a bad result. You cheat and borrow and then can’t stop borrowing as you try to keep from drowning.

You get to work and there are multiple urgent tasks that need immediate attention. Management insists on briefs for all of them so they can brief their management, and writing these briefs with accurate and detailed analysis takes away time from actually getting those tasks done.

Your work is further interrupted by several meetings in which you are listed as required by someone who should not schedule your time that way. How will you ever get work done when all this time is spent on communicating and socializing, taking away the opportunity to accomplish anything?

You are not allowed to say “No status now. Status at end of day.” because managers are meeting now to fret over what workers have pending. The tight status monitoring interlocks tasks with a primal panic. Everyone is only concerned with their individual obligations instead of considering the function of the whole.

Lunch is curtailed, either replaced by sugar snacks or some sort of fast food junk that can be eaten in a few minutes. There is no time to have a proper meal.

Finally when the remaining energy is lowest, you get an hour or two and take care of all the urgent work that was held up by mandatory talking, and now the day is over. Priorities were inverted to achieve the worst possible qualitative result. What a terrible use of a good day!

You get back in the car, drive in traffic for an hour in communion with fools, and arrive at home. You might have errands that need to be done, but might postpone them to the weekend from exhaustion.

There might not be time for dinner, thought maybe you can pick up something overpriced and unhealthy for take-out.

Watch a show or two to clear your head and go to sleep to do it all again.

With this routine you are walking towards an early grave after an extended torture of crazed living in a mad rush of senselessness.

Who will stop this violent ignorance? Not your manager, who must urgently report status to his superiors, happily interrupting your prioritized work to provide him with cover so he can appear on top of a bad situation his actions contribute to remaining bad.