Joy Extraction

Was It Ever Fun?

Optimization

It started, as most petty revelations do, with a binge-watch: The Gilded Age, a weeknight chocolate bar, and a parade of pretend Vanderbilts in absurd costumes. The plot was campy and the dresses were more Bridgerton than Downton, but the backdrop was real: a time when robber barons shaped the world and wrote the rules. Money didn’t just talk—it built railroads, crushed unions, and decided who mattered. Watching it now, I couldn’t stop thinking about corporate hell. The gilded edges have dulled, but the architecture is the same.

McKinsey came later, and came quietly. James O. McKinsey founded the firm in 1926 and died young—long before he could see what it would become. The legacy was shaped not by its founder, but by men who perfected the art of looking neutral while holding enormous power. By the time I entered the workforce in the late ’80s, McKinsey wasn’t just a company—it was a quiet empire. It had already reshaped how leaders made decisions: frameworks over instincts, metrics over people, shareholders over everyone. No product. No fingerprints. Just a long trail of stripped-down organizations and hollowed-out careers.

And if McKinsey taught companies how to extract, the venture capital firms made it fashionable. They funded promises, demanded growth at any cost, and cashed out before the wreckage was fully visible. They didn’t build companies. They built valuations. When the math stopped working, they vanished. Same joyless system, just with Patagonia vests instead of pinstripes.

At least the old barons, for all their cruelty, left something behind. They built libraries, museums, concert halls. They endowed universities and funded symphonies—not always out of altruism, but the civic infrastructure still stands. Zuck and Elon? They’ve contributed nothing but chaos and control. One built a surveillance machine that masquerades as connection. The other trades government subsidies for cult status while treating labor like a rounding error. And then there’s Bezos—calm, calculated, and surgical. He didn’t just extract wealth. He extracted time. Workers tracked by the second. Retail crushed by convenience. A man who built the rails, owns the cloud, and still couldn’t be bothered to leave behind a library. Their monuments are their net worth. The rest of us get branded tote bags.

The Reckoning

The pandemic didn’t break work. It exposed what was already broken. It showed us that the joy had been leaking out for decades—squeezed dry by consultants, VCs, and efficiency zealots. What was once a place of camaraderie, mentorship, and creative momentum turned into a cost center. All of the best parts of work—serendipity, trust, shared purpose—were stripped for parts.

Work used to have rhythm. Ritual. The unspoken mentorship that happened when someone let you in on how they prepped for a big meeting or gave you a shot at presenting your work to someone three levels up. Now? Everyone’s “heads-down.” Meetings are templated. Recognition is a Slack emoji. Culture is a slide deck. There’s no room for wonder when the entire machine is built to optimize for speed and visibility.

McKinsey didn’t fire the joyful people. They just trained leadership to stop noticing them. From my perspective, the joyful people were ignored along with the apathetic people who never did, and still don’t, do anything at all.

I don’t have a clean answer for what comes next. But I do know this: money is still a global currency, but it’s not the only one. Power is leaking through the cracks—into voice, into attention, into refusal. And that’s the one thing the consultants never accounted for: what happens when people stop pretending the system works, and start imagining something that does. Maybe that’s the silver lining. Not a solution, but a shift. A widening of space for something less sterile and more real. But it won’t come from another deck. It’ll come from people who still remember what it felt like to build something worth staying late for.

Bitches, the future of work won’t come from the top. And it sure as hell won’t be written by people who’ve never made a thing in their lives.