Category: Burnout Diaries
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By Ken Hollow, reluctant goal-setter and spreadsheet victim Every January, normal people lie to themselves with New Year’s resolutions: “I’ll run every day. I’ll stop eating sugar. I’ll finally learn French.” By February, it’s over. Corporate life does the exact same thing, except it calls them OKRs — Objectives and Key Results — and wraps…
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By Ken Hollow, reluctant novelist of corporate fiction Performance reviews are supposed to measure your work. In reality, they’re creative writing assignments where everyone pretends. You pretend you’ve “grown.” Your manager pretends they’ve “coached.” HR pretends this whole charade matters. It’s fiction — bad fiction — written under fluorescent lighting. The Self-Assessment Saga The first…
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By Ken Hollow, unwilling PR casualty and buzzword hostage Press releases are the cockroaches of corporate communication. Eternal, indestructible, and impossible to kill. Every company insists they need one, even though no one reads them except journalists who skim for quotes to mock and interns forced to format them in Word. But the real crime?…
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By Ken Hollow, unwilling gardener of corporate metaphors If one more brand manager tells me to “pick the low-hanging fruit,” I’m going to climb the corporate tree and throw the whole orchard at them. Business metaphors are the empty calories of corporate speak — they sound nourishing, but all they do is rot your brain…
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By Ken Hollow, trapped in an infinite feedback loop of buzzwords If I die young, bury me in an Outlook calendar invite. Cause of death: “Just circling back.” My tombstone will read: “Per my last email.” Corporate jargon has many crimes, but none so insidious as the eternal loop of circling back, touching base, looping…
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By Ken Hollow, survivor of 4,000 Slack pings and counting I have seen the face of hell, and it is a recurring calendar invite labeled “Quick Sync.” There is no such thing as a quick sync. There is only the slow death of my soul as six people talk in circles for 45 minutes, then…
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By Ken Hollow, professional tab juggler and part-time actual worker Every freelancer has their own productivity kryptonite. For some, it’s TikTok. For others, it’s the sudden urge to reorganize the spice rack. For me? It’s the client group chat. Slack. WhatsApp. Facebook Messenger. One client even insists on using Telegram “for the vibes.” They call…
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By Ken Hollow, freelance chameleon and reluctant trend hopper Every Monday, I check my analytics like a responsible content creator who pretends to enjoy numbers. And every Monday, the platforms collectively decide I am no longer the person I was last week. Last week? Oh, I was a motivational lifestyle guru. The week before that?…
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By Ken Hollow, freelance prisoner of pastel purgatory The text came in at 8:14 a.m., right when I was pretending to do my morning routine and not just staring at my phone in bed. “Hey, it’s just a quick edit.” From Nana Vix. Those six words are the freelance equivalent of “We need to talk.”…
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There’s a romanticized image of “working in digital marketing” that gets passed around on LinkedIn — all minimalist coffee shops, sleek laptops, and people in turtlenecks nodding thoughtfully over pie charts. In this fantasy, you spend your days “driving engagement” and “leveraging data,” occasionally pausing to sip an oat latte and update your personal brand…