A growing number of office workers are questioning whether their jobs serve any real purpose, according to a widely shared essay by a UK-based writer and tech entrepreneur who says the corporate world has become a theatre of meaningless activity.
Alex McCann, founder of personal development platform MidWeek, wrote in his Substack that many modern roles — particularly in large companies — appear to exist largely for show, with employees themselves often struggling to describe what they do. In what he calls “the death of the corporate job”, McCann argues that the traditional career path has become increasingly hollow, particularly for younger employees.
Rather than signalling the collapse of white-collar work, however, he suggests something subtler is taking place: a growing detachment between people and the roles they perform, as employees begin to treat their jobs as funding mechanisms for other priorities in life.
The ‘performance’ of work
McCann recounts a conversation with a consultant who told him she “facilitates stakeholder alignment across cross-functional workstreams” — before laughing and admitting she no longer knew what that meant. He uses the exchange to explore how much of modern work consists of meetings, reports, emails and presentations that often appear to serve no practical function.
“I keep meeting people who describe their jobs using words they’d never use in normal conversation,” McCann wrote. “They attend meetings about meetings. They create PowerPoints that no one reads, which get shared in emails no one opens, which generate tasks that don’t need doing.
“When you get people alone, after work… they’ll admit it. Their job is basically elaborate performance art. They’re professional email forwards. They’re human middleware between systems that could probably talk directly to each other.”
The idea echoes the late anthropologist David Graeber’s concept of “bullshit jobs” — roles that even those doing them suspect are pointless. But McCann says the problem has evolved into a kind of mutual deception, in which organisations and individuals tacitly agree to keep the system going for financial stability.
Jobs with ‘no substance’
McCann reflected on the daily spectacle of corporate life in London’s financial districts of the City and Canary Wharf, where commuters appear to be immersed in purposeful work. But behind the suits, lanyards and early-morning calls, he said the reality for many employees was a day filled with meetings that rarely led anywhere.
“[T]alk to those same people individually, and a different story emerges,” he wrote. “They’re in back-to-back meetings where nothing gets decided. They’re managing projects that exist primarily to justify the existence of project managers. They’re creating strategies for strategies, optimising things that didn’t need optimising, disrupting things that were working fine.”
He added: “A friend at a major bank recently told me about his typical day. He arrives at 8am, leaves at 8pm, and when I asked what he actually did in those 12 hours, he couldn’t point to a single tangible thing. ‘I enable decision-making,’ he said, then caught himself. ‘Whatever that means’.”
Inside the illusion
The rise of remote work during the pandemic, McCann argued, temporarily revealed the fragility of some roles. With physical presence no longer a performance tool, many found that their work took only a fraction of the day — or vanished altogether. As workers returned to the office, he wrote, the performance resumed, but belief in the work had faded.
“Now we’re back in offices, and everyone’s pretending again,” he noted. “But something’s shifted. The pretence feels different. More conscious. More exhausting.”
Some employees have responded by scaling back emotional investment in their roles. Instead, they fulfil the minimum required duties while reserving time and energy for creative or entrepreneurial projects. McCann said a person he spoke to described it as a kind of “corporate entrepreneurship” where staff use the salary, hardware and structure of a job to subsidise work they find meaningful elsewhere.
‘Expensive prison’: the reaction
McCann received over 500 public and private messages in response to his piece that he compiled into a follow-up essay. He found generational patterns in how people reacted. Older workers, especially those in their 50s, wrote about feeling regretful after spending decades in jobs they now considered empty. Meanwhile, younger professionals said they had never bought into the corporate dream in the first place.
One respondent described their well-paid role as an “expensive prison”. Another, in their 20s, said their parents saw them as lacking ambition because they were uninterested in “climbing towards more meaninglessness”.
Someone else said: “I make £120k to essentially be in meetings about meetings. My friend who’s a paramedic saves actual lives for £30k.”
The most striking pattern, McCann said, was that many workers had abandoned the idea that their job should offer fulfilment. Instead, they were establishing stronger boundaries and treating employment purely as a financial arrangement. He summarised this as “[t]he moment you stop believing in the corporate fiction is the moment you can start using it”.
When staff stop believing
The essays and the discussion they have triggered offer a warning sign that some employees may be disengaged not due to personal failings but because they no longer find purpose in their roles, and no longer expect to.
While traditional engagement strategies have focused on culture, perks and progression, McCann’s commentary suggests that some workers may be beyond such incentives. Instead, they are prioritising autonomy, flexibility and outside interests, and may leave suddenly if their job begins to interfere with those goals.
McCann does not predict an imminent collapse of corporate work, but rather a slow erosion of its emotional significance. Like organised religion, he argues, belief is fading even as the structures persist. The result is what he calls a “parallel economy”, where workers go through the motions of their job while directing their energy towards projects that matter to them.
For employers, the trend could present a long-term challenge: how to retain and motivate staff who no longer view their career as central to their identity. But it may also be an opportunity to rethink work design, communication and purpose — before the performance starts to fall apart.
William Furney is a Managing Editor at Black and White Trading Ltd based in Kingston upon Hull, UK. He is a prolific author and contributor at Workplace Wellbeing Professional, with over 127 published posts covering HR, employee engagement, and workplace wellbeing topics. His writing focuses on contemporary employment issues including pension schemes, employee health, financial struggles affecting workers, and broader workplace trends.
- William Furney
- William Furney
- William Furney
- William Furney
