Category: Burnout Diaries

By Ken Hollow, unwilling landlord to capitalism Remember when remote work was supposed to be freedom? No more commutes, no more office politics, just pajamas and productivity. Instead, what we got was corporate squatting. Your home isn’t yours anymore. It’s a branch office, a satellite hub, a place where capitalism pitches a tent in your…

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…

By Ken Hollow, unwilling facilitator of algorithmic nonsense Brainstorming was already group procrastination with sticky notes. But now, thanks to AI, we’ve leveled up to machine-assisted procrastination. Instead of a room full of people shouting buzzwords, you get a chatbot spitting out 200 buzzwords in 30 seconds. Progress? Spoiler: no. It’s the same garbage, just…

By Ken Hollow, reluctant reader of financial fantasies Quarterly reports are corporate fanfiction. That’s it. That’s the whole piece. Every three months, companies release a 40-page PDF filled with charts, buzzwords, and “narratives” that are less truthful than a Wattpad vampire romance. Shareholders nod, analysts pretend to understand, and somewhere an intern cries over Excel…

By Ken Hollow, unwilling participant in sticky-note theater Brainstorming is the corporate equivalent of a séance: a bunch of people gather in a room, chant buzzwords, scribble nonsense, and pretend they’ve summoned something meaningful. Spoiler: they haven’t. At best, you get a whiteboard full of “innovative” ideas that will never be implemented. At worst, you…

By Ken Hollow, reluctant fortune teller of corporate nonsense Let’s be honest: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are just tarot cards with pie charts. Managers shuffle them around, pretend to interpret them, and then use them to justify why you don’t get a raise this quarter. They’re less about truth and more about vibes, dressed up…

Another day, another round of “AI is here to kill everything you know and love.” Except, apparently, it’s not. According to The Wall Street Journal, enterprise software — the sprawling beast that runs HR, finance, compliance, and a thousand other cubicle nightmares — isn’t dying anytime soon. AI may be clever, but it’s not about…

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?…

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…

By Ken Hollow, reluctant tech correspondent with a migraine It finally happened: someone in Silicon Valley said the quiet part out loud. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted that the current wave of AI hype might look suspiciously like the dot-com bubble in its final Red Bull-fueled days. Billions have been poured into AI companies promising…