When the World You Were Raised to Live In No Longer Exists

On promises, disappointment, and the work we were told would make us adults.

I remember the excitement of my first corporate job. Donning my lanyard and slacks on the downtown C train. My responsible work bag signaling to my neighbor that I, too, was part of the cubicle masses. I emailed and pitched and spoke up in meetings. I earned approving nods from my manager in his crisp, white shirt — a gold star in my grown-up classroom. The plastic keycard around my neck affirmed my existence in this adult world.

Filled with wobbly confidence, I assured myself that I had picked this fig from my Sylvia Plath fig tree carefully. She was shapely, purply, and greenish-brown. A responsible, forward-looking fig. A fig that promised health insurance, stability, and an acceptable answer to “So, what exactly do you do?”

But then, something interesting happened: a low-lying scent of decay crept in. Within months, it dawned on me that maybe, just maybe, I was on the wrong path. Looking into my basket, I noticed speckles on the fading skin — sure signs of inner rot and the fine print of what seemed to be a strict NO RETURNS policy.

I was perplexed. I thought I’d done it all correctly: earned the points, beaten the curve, and filled my CV with sexy internships and freelance work. I thought this was where it would all coalesce. Real life would begin. I would schmooze and smile, circle back and climb. Finally have the life I wanted. Only now I saw that the soil was unsuitable, the terrain too uneven. Had I built my identity around something already dying?

On some level I understood that work, by design, wasn’t meant to be fun. That generations of people before me had walked this road and seemed more or less content with their lives. And sure, there were always car payments and divorce and death and too-high taxes, but overall, en masse, no one seemed to have major qualms with the state of the order.

Gone were the days of the monarch and the serf. Plus, we had penicillin now. This was the land of free trade and cold brew on tap and pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. The land of the United Nations and Medicaid. The land where we Westerners could check off the charitable donations box with a Live Aid performance or a celeb-studded supergroup rendition of Michael Jackson’s “We Are The World.”

So how was it possible that not even I — college degree, LinkedIn-certified, fully subscribed to the myth of merit — was buying it? Was there a fatal flaw about myself I’d yet to discover? Perhaps everyone secretly felt this way. Perhaps I was navel-gazing too much, spending too much of my day in my head and attaching unnecessary meaning to the coffee machine until it felt like a souring joke jukebox.

What I once mistook for burnout, I now see as a kind of mourning. The sting of a broken promise.

But there was a time when that promise was real. Or, at the very least, believable. The social contract was clear: work hard, stay loyal, and you’ll earn stability. Five, ten, even twenty years at a company mattered. Wages rose with productivity. A college degree was a passport, not a gamble.

It was never perfect, but it was coherent. It offered a ladder. You could watch the big boss pulling into his parking space with hopeful certainty — if you climbed long enough, you, too, would have a designated place to park your swanky new Mercedes. Plaque and all. Work could be transcendent.

Sure, you needed to pay for, attend, and complete your degree, but higher earning potential and a whisper of a sense of meaning felt almost like a guarantee. And maybe the filing and stapling didn’t fill your bucket, per se, but for the small price of 40 hours out of your week, and a couple hundred thousand dollars in college loans, you could attain the life you were promised.

Yet all I seemed to find was a slew of overhead fluorescence and poor work-life balance brags; the soft hum of a PowerPoint buffering in the background. Jumping paywalls because finance wouldn’t pay for The New York Times digital subscription. Downloading an article on how housing is outpacing wages for a faceless, dialing-in boss. All of this delicately held together by existential-dread-inducing small talk (“Can you believe it’s eighty degrees in October?”), $24 an hour, and a 3pm-Diet-Coke to keep the voices at bay.

Besides, everyone else seemed to be fine with it. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, quietly gushing over twenty dollar cocktails about the slog of Slack messages and the terrible PTO. It was a mere testament to a rewarding professional atmosphere. This was what it was all about.

But it seems that somewhere along the line, work stopped being a livelihood and became a lifestyle. It was the very embodiment of our actualization in a capitalist society, and our yearning to matter was converted into a business model. We sought out ourselves in our jobs, and “do what you love” became less of a mantra and more of a management strategy: a sleight of hand that turned passion into low-paying — or, dare I say, unpaid — labor.

I began to confuse my inability to love work with a personal defect, as if meaninglessness were a failure of attitude rather than design. At first, I thought I was the only one feeling this way. But the fatigue has become ambient, lurking beneath every conversation. Even the peers with “dream jobs” have that same hollow look — lids heavy, eyes full of sleep: as if we’re all waking up mid-dream to realize the promise of adulthood has quietly expired.

We’re told we’re unmotivated, entitled, lazy. That we want too much, too soon. That it’s the moral failure of Millennials, symbolically reified with each purchase of an avocado toast. That Gen Z doesn’t want to work anymore. That the coddled and over-supported youth have grown weak and limp.

Modernity had delivered the answer: capitalism, democracy, and utopian tech in sleek packaging — the ultimate embodiment of human progress. And progress was the myth that justified everything: the burnout, the debt, the endless grind. If the system wasn’t working, the problem must be us.

We’re told to be grateful for the “flexibility” when what we’ve really lost is stability. Told to meditate, hydrate, and get back to work. Told that the dream is alive — that we just haven’t optimized ourselves enough to reach it. That we’re just a bullet journal, a questionable TikTok Adderall gummy, or a 5-to-9-before-my-9-to-5 away from maximum efficiency.

And to be frank, there’s something eerie about it all. Something sinister about system that fails this completely while still convincing its participants that it’s their fault. Placing the onus on the consumer comes as no surprise, I suppose. But what if we were never meant to win? What if the game was designed to reward belief, instead of participation?

Just like love, labor demands reciprocity. You can’t build a relationship with a system that ghosts you. So maybe what we’re experiencing isn’t apathy, but rather grief. And somewhere amidst it all, there’s a quiet knowing that the machinery can’t keep running this way forever. That the endless, fruitless chase isn’t sustainable.

Maybe it’s not that nobody wants to work anymore. Maybe it’s that nobody wants to play a rigged game. And maybe we’re only beginning to see it for what it is: not a series of personal failures, but a machine built to exhaust belief and convert hope into profit, whirring in the background of every Zoom call, every email thread, every fluorescent-lit office floor.

We talk about burnout like it’s an individual problem, but it’s a symptom of something much larger. A system that was never meant to sustain us this way. And recognizing that — that the world we were raised to inhabit is fractured — might be the first step. Taking a long, hard look at what we’ve been asked to accept as normal, and asking if it has to be.

As David Graeber wrote, “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.” Maybe this is our chance to take that seriously: to question the ladders we’ve been climbing, the metrics we chase, and the meaning we’ve been told work will give us.