The Corporate Middle Is Collapsing
Corporate jobs are losing their ability to convince anyone they matter.
Between 19-47% of workers now consider their jobs socially useless, depending on which study you trust. When Shopify deleted 12,000 calendar events and freed 95,000 hours, nobody noticed. Executives spend 23 hours weekly in meetings, up from 10 in the 1960s. The performance is the job.
Gervais Principle
For the rest of the article to make sense you should read Venkatesh Rao’s breakdown on the three corporate tiers:
Sociopaths at the top: clear-eyed about the game
Losers at the bottom: rationally coasting for a paycheck
Clueless in the middle: true believers who really care about alignment in meetings
Everyone thinks the Clueless are the biggest suckers. They work the hardest, trapped trying to appease both their superiors and their subordinates.
But what if the Clueless actually were better off?
Why the Clueless Could Believe
They believed their work mattered. Movies like Office Space and Fight Club showed us this reality was starting to crack. It took most normal people several years before the existential dread crept in when the other meaning structures began to collapse.
Previous generations had religion, tight-knit communities, geographic identity, shared culture. Work was work. You did your job then went home and lived. The Clueless could genuinely care about team-building exercises because they weren’t desperately searching for transcendence in a conference room.
But when all other meaning structures collapsed work became the last place to find identity, purpose, status, and community. Now we “bring your whole self to work!” and the result is exhausting performance of authenticity where nobody believes anybody, including themselves.
The Clueless could believe the corporate mission because they didn’t need it to be their entire life’s meaning. That’s gone now.
Online as Accelerant
Too much information destroyed the illusion. It’s hard to maintain belief when your feed is flooded with confessions about working only 5-10 hours per week and quiet quitting the rest. Middle managers discovered their meetings existed to prove meetings were happening. The analysts realized their spreadsheets went into a black hole. The number of posts and essays on this are growing. Just check the engagement numbers on
’s “The Death of the Corporate Job.”Zoomers never even formed a real Clueless layer. 43% have zero interest in traditional corporate paths. 47% are openly coasting. Pre-sorted into Losers and aspiring Sociopaths from day one. Perhaps the closest thing to the Clueless for Zoomers are the product mommies posting their daily email job routines while getting company matchas.
What’s Left When the Middle Collapses
The Loser splits two ways: Extract value while “building the real thing.” But most lack the drive to execute. The others coast in quiet desperation.
The Sociopath also has options.
Type One chases memetic achievement. Money for status, the appearance of winning, and podcast appearances. Morning routine achievers and Ed Mylett’s “21 days in a week” lives here. But then there’s Silicon Valley grindcore: 9am to 9pm, six days a week. And while there’s still memetic clout ambitions it also feels more like... religion replacement? Forget 996, why not buy Prophetic AI and work 24/7?
It’s hard to tell who’s performing and who genuinely found their church in the grind. Both are working nonstop. Both appear to lack traditional meaning structures. One plays to an audience. The other found genuine purpose in the work itself, even if that purpose is manufactured.
Type Two isn’t replacing religion or chasing status. They’re calculating escape velocity.
The playbook has been growing since the 2000s: sacrifice friendships now, get rich later, relax in some distant future. Except realistically, only a small percentage make it out.
What’s new isn’t the plan but the intensity of wanting out.
This shift also has its own status. The real flex now is becoming a farmer. Having eight kids, no smartphone, owning land. Pam Anderson without makeup tending her garden. David Beckham as an English countryman on his farm. Touch grass, make generational wealth, and never have to perform again. The internet is for poor people.
The Only Move Left
In many ways, the Clueless were better off. They had meaning through genuine belief, supported by religion, community, and purpose outside work. They showed up Monday believing their work mattered.
You can’t go back and you can’t unknow what you know.
So the only coherent move: extract enough to build meaning outside the system.
Type 2 Sociopaths understand this. They’re working ruthlessly to escape. Most won’t make it because the drive required is rare and the odds are long. But it’s the only path that makes sense once you see the performance for what it is.
The Clueless were right about one thing: you need something real to live for. They just picked the wrong place to find it.