Workplace Drama

I am 45, a man who spent more than two decades building a life around one company, and this week I became one of the 30,000 people laid off at Oracle. Even writing that feels unreal. My whole routine was tied to work: morning status checks, backlog grooming, release calls, escalations, quarterly planning, the usual cycle that made every week feel structured, even when it was exhausting. I worked in enterprise systems long enough that I started measuring my own value in uptime, deliverables, and how well I could handle a production incident without showing stress. That is maybe the part that is hardest now. The laptop is gone, the access is gone, the meetings are gone, but my brain is still running like there is an active sev-1 ticket somewhere with my name on it. I wake up early and think I forgot to answer an email. I sit down with coffee and mentally start building a task list, then remember there is no sprint, no roadmap, no manager asking for an update. It was not just a job to me, it was the frame around my whole adult life, and now the frame is missing. I am trying to stay balanced about it, because I understand companies make restructuring decisions based on margin pressure, headcount efficiency, and all the words people use in leadership calls. I am not saying every person there was cruel, because many were not. Some were decent people doing their own version of damage control. Still, when you give your best years to something and it ends in one controlled conversation, it does something ugly to your sense of self, and I do not think people speak plainly enough about that.

What gets me is not only fear about money, though that is obviously there, it is the silence that comes after a life of constant operational noise. My wife asked me yesterday what I wanted to do with the afternoon, and I honestly did not know how to answer. For years the answer was already decided by calendar invites, dependency mapping, cross-functional reviews, performance targets, and one more urgent thing dropping into the queue. I used to complain that work followed me home, but now home feels like work is haunting it. I went to the grocery store and caught myself thinking in project terms, like I was optimizing a workflow. I stood in the cereal aisle doing capacity planning in my head about bills for the next six months. Last night I opened my notebook, not because I had to, but because I wanted to document next steps like I was preparing for an architecture review. How do you stop doing that when work trained your brain for years to see everything as a process, a metric, a risk register? I am asking seriously. Did any of you lose a job that had become your identity and then find a way to come back to yourself, because right now I feel like an employee account that was deprovisioned before the human being attached to it was warned proper. I keep replaying little memories too. The late nights before migrations. The pride after a stable release. The dumb jokes in team chats. Even the annoying people feel important now because they were part of the system I belonged to. Maybe that sounds pathetic, I do not know. I just know I am grieving something bigger than a paycheck, and grief is a strange process when the thing that died was mostly made of routine, pressure, and habit.

I am trying to be fair with myself and fair with reality. At 45, I am not ancient, and I know there are still roles out there where my experience in enterprise software, stakeholder management, incident response, and large-scale platform operations can mean something. I know the market still needs people who can translate technical mess into plain decisions. But confidence is not a switch, and I cannot toggle it on because logic says I should. Today I updated my resume and for one full hour I just stared at the section listing accomplishments, wondering if any of it matters outside the building I attached it to. I wrote things like service reliability, migration support, customer impact reduction, and delivery execution, and it all read so clean on the page, while I felt completely messy in real life. Maybe that is what I hate most, the disconnect. Professionally, I can make a coherent narrative. Personally, I feel scrambled and honestly a bit ashamed, even though I know layoffs are not a moral failure. I walked around the block this evening and tried to think about anything else, the weather, dinner, the neighbor fixing his fence, but my mind went back to org charts and what I should have done different, even if maybe nothing would have changed. So I am here asking a simple question that does not feel simple at all: how do you stop thinking about work when work was the main thing that organized your mind, your days, your pride, and your future? Do you replace the structure first, or do you wait for the thoughts to slow down on their own. I do not need perfect advice. I think I just need to hear from someone who understands that when a career ends suddenly, the body leaves the office before the mind does.

I'm 32, I'm a man, and I work in IT, and people really dont understand how stressful this shit is unless they're in it. Everybody thinks tech is easy money, comfy chair, dark room, a few emails, then log off. That's the fantasy. The reality is waking up tense because overnight some idiot posted another "AI will replace engineers by next year" take, then opening Slack to three fires, two passive-aggressive messages, and a manager saying we need to "do more with less" like that isn't just corporate code for squeeze us until somebody breaks. Every week there's another layoff headline, and I'm supposed to act grateful I still have a job. Grateful for what? Being tracked, compared, and quietly threatened by automation while executives talk in smug little slogans like "adapt or die" and "AI is just a tool." Easy to say when it's not your neck on the block. I build things, fix things, stop disasters before anybody notices, and the second nothing explodes people assume I did nothing. That's IT. If everything works, nobody sees you. If one thing breaks, suddenly everybody's a pissed off expert asking what you even do all day. You're expected to answer fast, learn new tools faster, sit in pointless meetings, patch ancient junk nobody wants to fund, and then smile when leadership dumps some half-baked AI project on your desk and says "figure it out." Half the people are gone, the rest of us are just pretending the floor isn't cracking under our feet 😑

A few months ago I was at my desk at 11:40 p.m. trying to fix a production issue after a full day of meetings, and my wife walked by and said, dead serious, "must be nice to just sit in front of a screen and wait for the end of the day." That one pissed me off in a way I can't even explain right. I wasn't waiting for shit. I was trying to stop a customer mess from turning into a full outage while replying to my boss, who wanted updates every fifteen minutes like I was some machine. I had cold coffee, a headache drilling behind my eye, and that tight feeling in my chest because all I could think was, if I screw this up, am I next? That's where my brain goes now. Not "how do I solve this nicely," just "if they cut me, how the hell do I pay the mortgage?" Because unlike the idiots on LinkedIn posting fake inspiration about "embracing change," I have an actual life attached to this paycheck. Mortgage. Bills. Groceries. Insurance. Repairs. Normal boring adult stuff that doesn't care about buzzwords. I don't get to romanticize instability. And what's really fun is when people act like working in IT means I should be thankful no matter how bad it gets. "At least you're not doing manual labor." Yeah, cool, thanks, because apparently mental exhaustion doesn't count unless you're bleeding on concrete. Try spending years in a field where the ground keeps moving, expectations keep multiplying, and every smug article hints you're old news by 35. You think hearing "AI can already code" ten thousand times doesn't get in your head? People who never touched a real production system talk like the job is just typing and googling. They have no clue what it's like to carry risk in your head every single day;

And before some smartass says, "well, just switch careers," yeah, sure, because that's easy when you're already exhausted, when the market is flooded, and when every job post wants one person to be developer, architect, support, security, cloud, analyst, and project manager for one mid paycheck. I read those listings and honestly want to laugh, except it's not funny, it's insulting. They want six jobs in one body and still want to lowball you because now there's this threat hanging over the whole field: perform harder, justify your existence every quarter, or get replaced by someone cheaper or some half-working AI stack plus one poor bastard left to babysit it. And people outside it still say dumb crap like, "but you work from home, how stressful can it be?" Are you kidding me? Stress doesn't vanish because the walls are yours. It follows you into the kitchen, into bed, into weekends, into the five minutes you're supposed to be relaxing before another notification hits. I used to actually like solving problems. I used to feel proud when I shipped something good or untangled a nasty issue nobody else could crack. Now it mostly feels like survival. Keep the checks coming, keep your head down, don't piss off the wrong manager, don't fall behind on the newest thing, don't become "redundant." That's the word they love, right? Not scared people with families, just "redundant." So yeah, I get angry when people trivialize this job, especially my own wife, because sitting in front of a screen is not the same as carrying a constant fear that one bad quarter, one reorg, one shiny AI demo, and your whole life gets shoved toward a cliff. Tell me, honestly, would you sleep well with that hanging over you all the time? Because I don't. I sleep like crap, I wake up angry, and I'm real tired of pretending this is normal.

It all started a year ago when I made what I thought was the best decision of my life. At 31, I believed it was time to leave my stable job in IT behind and dive into the world of entrepreneurship. With big dreams and a heart full of optimism, I launched my very own startup, a SaaS platform I was sure would revolutionize the industry. Like, genuinely, who knew the wave of AI would come crashing down like this?? I figured I had everything planned perfectly. But, man, was I wrong...

The competition was like nothing I could have ever imagined!!! Random people, just like me, were popping up everywhere, launching their own startups left and right. It was as if every corner I turned, there was a new challenger, a new innovation, leaving me perpetually chasing my own tail. The market felt saturated, and I started to doubt whether I even stood a chance in this vast ocean of tech geniuses. Every day felt like a losing battle and my once-thriving enthusiasm quickly turned into a somber reality.

To add insult to injury, finding my footing back into the job market has been nothing short of a nightmare. Who would have thought that stepping out for a bit would make re-entry so darn difficult??? I compiled my resume, updated my LinkedIn, and started the arduous process of networking, only to find out most employers were more interested in AI-savvy candidates or fresh graduates with the latest knowledge. Can you blame them, though? I mean, keeping up with technology nowadays feels like chasing a bullet train. Nonetheless, my confidence has taken a serious hit...

It's not that I regret my decision to pursue my own path, but, wow, it's been one heck of a ride that's left me questioning my choices. Why didn't anyone tell me that sometimes chasing your dreams smashes you right smack into a brick wall?? I asked myself if maybe I'd been too hopeful, too naïve, to think that an idea alone would secure success. I wonder how many others out there have been in my shoes, finding themselves between a rock and a hard place, trying to crawl out. It's tough, and I definitely did not anticipate this level of difficulty.

Looking back, one might call it a "learning experience," but I'm just trying to pick up the pieces now. At least, the lessons I've learned along the way could fill a book! But hey, life isn't about regrets, it's about moving forward, right? Though my venture didn't pan out as I had hoped, maybe another door will open... eventually. In the meantime, I'll keep pushing through, exploring new avenues, and retaining the hope that tomorrow might bring better opportunities! 😉 Am I alone in this, or are there others who feel this struggle, too??

yo, listen up, i'm just about fed up with this bullshit, man. i'm 25, right? good ol' quarter of a century and here i am, still living in my mom's basement. can't even get a damn job. fuck ai, bro. they keep saying how ai is the future and it's making our lives easier, blah, blah, blah. you know what? that's just a load of crap. i graduated, and all these companies are out here drooling over ai, replacing human workers like we're nothing. it's like, why even bother going to college, ya know? i'm racking up student loans, but for what? to be tossed aside by some piece of code? screw that.

i mean, let's be real here, ai is everywhere now. it's in our phones, in our homes, hell, it's even driving cars now! and while all these tech geeks are creaming their pants over it, folks like me can't catch a break. i apply for jobs left and right, scrolling through endless listings, and all i see is "experience with ai required," or "ai proficiency preferred." i ain't no tech wizard! i'm just a regular dude trying to get by. but no, all these companies want to invest in some shiny new robot that they don't even have to pay or give health benefits. yeah, real smart, isn't it? replacing real people with soulless, emotionless machines.

and don't even get me started on those automated recruitment processes. you think going through stacks of resumes would be a thing of the past. but nah, now i gotta deal with ai screening my application before it even hits a human's desk. yeah, that's right, good ol' mr. ai has decided i don't fit the criteria for half the jobs i apply for. excuse me, but how does a program with zero understanding of values, culture, or passion get to decide if i'm worthy of a job? i ain't saying i'm some kind of genius or anything, but damn, at least give a guy a fair shot. these algorithms they use are as biased as can be, and yet no one's calling them out. everyone's just nodding along like it's the new gospel or something.

what happened to the days when you could walk into an office, shake a hand, have a conversation, and get hired because they like you, they see potential in you? nah, now it's all about ticking the right boxes and having the right buzzwords on your resume. i get it, times are changing, gotta adapt and all that jazz, but it's no fun when you're left scrambling to keep up with this never-ending rat race. maybe i'll go back to school and get that "desired" ai proficiency or start networking with the right peeps, but damn, it feels like a losing battle sometimes. so, i ask you, reader, in this age of ai, where does a guy like me fit in?

fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuckkkkk AI, fuuuuuck!!!!!!!

I’m 23M and I finished my IT studies last year thinking I was at least stepping onto a road, even if it wasnt a perfect one. I actually did get one decent thing right after, a paid internship for 2 months, doing small dev tasks, fixing bugs, cleaning messy code, sitting in standups acting like I knew what “velocity” really meant. It was not glamorous but it felt real, like finally I was inside the system instead of just training for it. Then it ended, they said nice things, “you did well,” “we’ll keep your CV,” the usual polite exit lines, and after that it was just silence. Since then I’ve been applying everywhere for junior developer jobs, trainee jobs, “entry level” jobs that somehow still ask for 2 years of experience in three frameworks and cloud certs like they’re handing out pilot licenses. I’m not saying companies are evil for wanting good candidates, because I kind of get it, nobody wants to spend money training someone who might leave, and the market seems bad for everybody right now, not just me. But at the same time it’s hard not to take it personal when rejection emails stack up or, more common, when there is no reply at all. “We have decided to move forward with other candidates” starts to sound like background noise after a while. And the weird part is I can still explain the logic of it, I can still be rational, but that doesn’t stop the mood from sinking. Unemployment depression sounds dramatic when you say it out loud, maybe even too online, but what else do you call it when every day looks the same and your confidence gets slowly sanded down by job boards, fake motivation, and waiting?

What makes it worse for me, honestly, is AI. I know some people love it, some people say “adapt or die,” some say it’s just another tool like Google or Stack Overflow, and maybe for some jobs that’s true. I’m not trying to do the old man yelling at clouds thing at 23 😅. But I hate how it entered the conversation right when I was trying to begin. It already felt hard enough to get taken seriously as a junior dev, and now every article, podcast clip, LinkedIn post, and random recruiter comment sounds like, “junior coding will change,” “companies need fewer entry-level devs,” “AI can boost one senior into doing the work of three people.” Maybe some of that is hype, maybe alot of it is marketing, maybe companies are just using it as the newest excuse to freeze hiring, I honestly don’t know. I’m trying to stay fair about it. I know AI can help with boring tasks, documentation, debugging, whatever. I even used some of it during school and during the internship because not using it at all would be kind of fake. But I still resent it, because I spent years hearing that tech was safe, practical, future-proof, and now the same people are acting like the ladder got pulled up just when my turn came. It feels like someone changed the rules after the exam. And before anyone says “build projects,” yes, I did that, small web apps, GitHub commits, portfolio, CV rewrites, leetcode a bit, networking a bit, messages to old classmates, all of it. None of it turned into actual work. After months of this, even personal projects start to feel fake, like I’m making pretend products for no users just so I can maybe impress someone who will never answer the application anyway;

The hardest part is probably how ordinary it all looks from the outside. I live at home right now, I wake up, search listings, send applications, tweak cover letters, maybe study, maybe stare at the screen pretending I’m still “being productive,” then the day ends and technically nothing exploded. No big tragedy, no dramatic downfall, just a slow, dull shrinking. Friends from school are mixed too, some found jobs, some didn’t, some moved into support or data stuff or just gave up and took whatever paid rent. I don’t judge them, and I try not to judge myself either, because the economy is messy and the tech market is clearly not what we were promised. Still, there’s this embarassing feeling when someone asks, “So what are you doing now?” and the true answer is basically waiting. Waiting while trying to look active. Waiting while telling yourself you’re not lazy, not broken, not useless, just stuck. I don’t think unemployment automatically equals depression for every person, and I don’t want to throw that word around carelessly, but when your plans stop moving, your brain can stop moving too. You start thinking in smaller and smaller circles. You compare yourself to strangers. You read posts where people say “just keep grinding” or “the market will recover” like those phrases are food. Maybe they mean well. Maybe they’re right. But being told to stay positive when nothing changes can start to feel insulting, even if the advice isn’t wrong. So I’m asking, especially to anyone reading this who has been through something similar, how do you keep your head normal when your career hasn’t even started and already feels over? I’m still applying, still trying, still being realistic, but I’d be lying if I said this hasn’t changed how I see myself.

hey guys, so here's the deal. i've been feeling majorly disinterested at work lately, and i'm not sure what's up with that. it's not like i'm dealing with anything super complicated or demanding, y'know? it's just that ever since the AI took over, it's like i'm floating through my tasks with zero enthusiasm. like, do you ever feel like you're just on autopilot?🤔 i can't be the only one who's feeling this way, right?

seriously, it's like this AI has taken over every little detail of my job. stuff that used to take brainpower is now a matter of just clicking a button and... bam, it's done. i'm not saying that's a bad thing, but what's left for me to do? maybe it's just that human touch that's missing, y'know?👌 everything's so automated that there's not much left for me to engage with. and really, where's the challenge? when there's no challenge, it feels like there's no point. don't you think the whole point of work is to keep our brains working, or am i missing something here?😅

i get that technology is advancing and all, but it makes me wonder what we're all supposed to do. it's kind of like machinery is taking away all the interesting bits, leaving us with the boring, mundane leftovers. as a guy working his butt off, i'm just standing there like, "what am i even doing here anymore?" sometimes i catch myself staring at the computer screen, wondering if i'm becoming part of the machine too. weird, right?😳 do you ever find yourself questioning the purpose of it all when AI is taking over?

you see, there's this nagging thought in the back of my head, "am i just part of a bigger system that's designed to phase me out?" it sounds dramatic but, c'mon man, we all hear that AI's eventually gonna do everything. my motivation is running on fumes, and i'm questioning everything about work these days. is it too much to ask for a little bit of meaning in what i do every day? deep down, i miss those moments when i felt completely absorbed in my tasks. but now, that's just a memory. so, what's the deal with losing interest like this? have any of you gone through the same thing, or am i just overthinking it? any thoughts would be awesome.✌️

i am 31, a man, and i started this new job 2 months ago, and the pattern looks bad from every angle i can measure. the onboarding was fast, the handoff was sloppy, and the team dynamic felt closed before i even got my badge working right. in the first week i tried to stay in my lane, learn the workflow, read the sop notes, watch the qa checks, and not break prod, but somehow every move i made turned into a small social failure. when i ask a question in standup, people go quiet like i pushed the wrong button. when i post in the group chat, i get the kind of reply that is tecnically polite but cold, like a ticket response and not a human one. at lunch, chairs are full untill i come near, then somehow nobody is hungry anymore. i know how that sounds, and i know people on the internet will say maybe it is in my head, maybe i am projecting, maybe this is just normal ramp-up friction. but when the same thing happens every day, in every channel, across every shift handover, it stops feeling random and starts looking like a trend line. i try to audit my own behavior like i am doing root-cause analysis on a failed deploy. was my tone off. did i miss a cue. did i over-explain. did i under-communicate. did i come in too eager, too stiff, too slow, too exact, too visible. i keep replaying each interaction like log review at 2 a.m., searching for the error code nobody wants to name. one senior guy corrects me in front of everybody for tiny process stuff, even when the actual kpi impact is zero. another person rewrites what i say in meetings and then gets nods for the exact same point. my manager says “give it time,” which sounds reasonable on paper, but in practice it lands like a placeholder, not support. after work i sit in my car and feel the whole day still running in my chest, like a machine that wont power down. depression is not a dramatic word here, it is just the most accurate one. i am eating less, sleeping weird, waking up with dread, then doing the full routine anyway because rent is real and adults dont get to blue-screen in public. i shower, i clock in, i update my tasks, i smile when needed, i say “good morning,” and i watch it drop dead in the air. maybe some of you know this exact thing, when a place is not openly abusive, not clearly hostile in a reportable way, but the enviroment is still rejecting you in a hundred tiny packets. what do you even do when no single event is huge, but the aggregate load is crushing. how do you tell if everybody hates you, or if you just entered a culture with bad documentation and worse empathy. how do you keep your self-respect when the room acts like your presence is a defect ticket no one wants assigned 😕

from an outside view, the facts are simple. i am still new. i do not control the legacy culture. teams can get weird around change, especially when throughput is stressed, deadlines are close, and people protect their part of the pipeline like it is private property. a new guy shows up, asks basic questions, touches process, slows velocity for a minute, and some people read that as risk. that does not make it right, but it makes it less mystic. i have started seeing that not every cold reaction means actual hate. some of it is ego, some burnout, some bad comms hygiene, some plain old cliques. still, the emotional result on my side is the same, and i dont want to lie about that. i feel lost a lot. i feel reduced. i feel like i am becoming smaller every day just to fit inside a system that already decided my value before my probation period is even half done. but i am trying to be objective and not turn one hard season into a final verdict on my whole life. so i started doing little controls. i keep notes on deliverables so i can see what is real and what is just fear. i verify requirements before execution, document blockers, close loops, and keep my language clean and short. i ask one person at a time instead of the whole room, because people perform less when there is no audience. i focus on qa, handoff quality, response time, and the small places where trust can actually be built. i do not overshare. i do not beg to be liked. i just try to be consistent, because consistency is boring and boring is often what makes people relax. i also remind myself that 2 months is not a full data set, even if it feels endless when you are depressed. a bad sprint is not the whole project. a rough team fit is not proof that a man is broken. maybe the answer to “what to do when everyone hates you?” is not one big heroic move. maybe it is smaller and less cinematic. keep your structure. protect your mind. talk to one safe person, even if it is awkward. update your resume quietly, not as defeat, but as capacity planning. keep learning the stack. keep your dignity off the floor. let time expose who is just guarded and who is truly cruel. and if this place never warms up, then maybe the hopeful thing is not forcing belonging where there is none, but understanding that another team, another manager, another floor, another job can still exist. i dont think i am doomed, even on the days i feel totaly unwanted. i think i am in a bad system, in a hard chapter, and chapters end. so i am asking you, honestly, what would you do here, and how would you keep your head clear without turning bitter. because i want to come out of this tired, maybe, but still decent, still standing, and still open to the idea that not everyone will hate me forever.

Hi guys,

I work in IT as a tech lead. I manage a small team of four developers, and on paper it’s a good setup. Clear backlog. Stable product. Decent pay. No toxic drama. We run sprints, do code reviews, plan releases, fix bugs, and keep the usual pile of legacy stuff from falling over. A year ago I still got some kind of lift from solving problems. Not passion exactly, but momentum. Then I started using AI heavily at work. At first it felt like a power-up. Faster boilerplate. Cleaner regex. Better unit test coverage. Faster root-cause analysis. Fewer context switches. The PRs moved quicker. Standups got shorter. I looked more efficient. Management liked the output. My team liked that I could unblock them fast. But somewhere in that shift, my own drive just fell off a cliff. Now I open the laptop, look at Jira, and feel almost nothing. I can still do the job. That’s the strange part. I function. I answer Slack. I review architecture proposals. I write comments like “good direction, but watch for race conditions” or “let’s avoid tight coupling here.” I sound normal. But internally it feels flat, like the work got compressed into prompts, summaries, and generated options. “Garbage in, garbage out” still applies, sure, and I know skill still matters, but the part of me that used to enjoy the craft is quiet now. Has anyone else had that happen, where the friction goes down and somehow your motivation goes with it?

What bothers me most is that nothing is actually on fire. If my job were awful, this would be easier to explain. Instead, the metrics look fine. Velocity is fine. Incident count is fine. Stakeholders are fine. The team is fine. I’m the weird variable. I used to like breaking down a messy system and tracing the failure point through logs, service boundaries, and bad assumptions. I liked finding the one bad config that caused a cascade. I liked mentoring junior devs and seeing the light turn on when a hard concept clicked. Now AI handles the first-pass thinking so fast that my brain barely warms up. Need a draft API contract? Done. Need refactoring ideas? Done. Need test cases, SQL, migration notes, release comms, maybe even a postmortem outline? Done. I still verify everything, obviously. I know generated code can be subtly wrong, insecure, or just dumb in a confident way. I’m not outsourcing judgment. But I am outsourcing enough of the climb that I no longer feel the top of the hill. That’s the best way I can say it. The work feels pre-chewed. Efficient, yes. Satisfying, not really. Wierdly, even success feels thinner now. A clean deploy used to feel earned. Now it feels like I supervised a machine that helped me simulate effort. Maybe that sounds dramatic. Maybe it sounds lazy. Maybe it’s just adaptation lag. “The map is not the territory,” people say, and I think that fits here. The generated answer is not the same as understanding. The faster workflow is not the same as meaning; I also wonder if part of this is age, or burnout wearing a smarter mask, or just seeing too much of the pipeline too often.

The only reason I’m posting is because I don’t think this is permanent. It feels bleak sometimes, but not fatal. I’m trying to look at it like an engineering problem instead of a personality flaw. A system changed, so behavior changed. That means it can be tuned. I’ve started noticing small things that help. I keep some tasks AI-free on purpose, mostly design work and tricky debugging. I spend more time asking my team how they think, not just what they shipped. I try to treat AI like autocomplete with extra steps, not like a replacement for ownership. I’m also trying to reconnect with parts of tech that made me care in the first place: clean architecture, clear writing, mentoring, and building things that are boring in the good way, meaning reliable. One of my devs said, “maybe the fun part now is choosing what deserves human effort,” and that stuck with me 🙂. That feels more honest than pretending the old version of the job is coming back. Maybe motivation is not supposed to come from typing every line anymore. Maybe it has to come from judgment, restraint, taste, and helping other people grow. I don’t love my job right now. That part is true. But I do think I can build a version of it that I respect again, even if it looks different from what I pictured before. So I’m asking plainly: if your tools got better and your motivation got worse, how did you reset without blowing up your whole life? I’m not in crisis. I’m just trying to be honest about a shift I didn’t expect, and probly learn how to work with it instead of against it.

I am the quiet one at work only talk to customers and one other co worker but besides that I keep to myself at work. When I make a mistake the manager side eyes me and tells me to read things back to the customer which I did and still do. I have dyslexia of which Ive told the management about but I still get a side eye when I dont read something right or count numbers correctly. I called out for a dentist appointment told the managers a month before the date and when I got back the next day it felt like everyone was mad at me or something? I dont know I could just be overthinking I just needed a place to get my thoughts out really. Theres also a work group chat that I havent ever been invited to join either but that might be a good thing for my overthinking

So now I am on my hospitalization leave because I have delicate pregnancy. But ever since before this she used to spread rumors and bad mouth our employees and technically she is the source of office politics. Then when I went on leave I heard from my friend whom I hired told me that the CEO and my asz kis sing subordinate were talking about me and showing people my mistakes where in fact those frking mistakes were her instructions. Im kind of bothered with her personality at it seems she is a pathological liar but seeking integeity from her people. Its really kind o toxic and it almost affects my peacd of mind. I am currently looking for a new job where my efforts and dedication will be worthwhile.

I’m 25, a guy, and I only recently got my first real IT job, like actual badge, actual standups, actual tickets, actual “can you jump on a quick call?” stuff. I should feel lucky, and I do, but I also feel weirdly on edge all the time becuase of AI. Every week there’s some new post, some “thought leader,” some dude on LinkedIn saying junior devs are cooked, help desks are done, entry level is dead, learn ten tools by friday or get left behind!! It gets in my head bad. I’ll be fixing a small bug or writing docs and then suddenly I’m thinking, wow, a bot could probably do half of this faster than me??? Then I spiral and start looking at job boards, salary threads, videos, and “the future of work” takes at 1 a.m. like that is somehow helping. It isn’t. It just makes me more tired and more jumpy at work the next day. One of the seniors told me, “AI is a tool, not your replacement, unless you stop learning,” and that helped for like two hours. Then my brain went right back to, okay but what if he’s just trying to be nice?? I know fear can be useful in small doses. It can push you to learn. I’ve used it to study more, ask better questions, and stop pretending I know stuff I don’t know. But too much fear is just noise. It makes me check Slack like I’m waiting for a breakup text. It makes every small mistake feel like proof I’m done for. Last month I messed up a config in a test env and nothing major happened, but my hands were legit shaking. My manager was chill about it, said “that’s why we have review,” and moved on. I did not move on!!! I was still replaying it in my head on the train home, thinking, great, first I make mistakes, then AI gets better, then I’m gone. That’s what I mean by caring too much. Not caring in a healthy way. Caring in a “my chest feels tight over a Jira ticket” way. And I keep asking myself, how do normal people not let this stuff eat them alive? Do you ever feel embarrased by how much your brain can turn one small worry into a whole fake disaster??? I try to be polite, do my work, learn fast, and not complain too much. I’m not anti-AI either. Some of it is honestly useful. It helps me understand code quicker, summarize logs, and get unstuck. But the same thing helping me also scares me, and that contradiction is frying me a bit 😅

What I’m trying now is maybe less “how do I stop caring” and more “how do I care the normal amount??” Maybe that’s the real question. Becuase zero care would be dumb. I don’t want to coast and wake up obsolete in two years. But max care is also dumb. It turns life into this constant background panic where even a decent day feels fake, like doom is just loading in the background. A friend of mine, not in tech, said something simple: “you are borrowing stress from a future that has not invoiced you yet.” Corny?? Yeah, a little. But also true. I noticed the days I feel least insane are the boring days. I do my tasks. I write down what I learned. I ask one good question. I log off. I cook something basic. I go outside. I stop reading “AI will replace everyone!!!” posts written by people who make money from saying wild stuff!!! That part matters alot. The internet rewards certainty, and the truth is nobody fully knows how this plays out. Some jobs will change hard. Some roles will shrink. Some new ones will pop up. A lot of regular work will probably become “use tools well and check the output.” That sounds more realistic to me than either extreme. I also try to remember what companies still need: someone reliable, someone calm, someone who can talk to humans, notice context, own mistakes, and keep learning. Bots can generate, sure. But workplaces are messy. People are messy. Systems are messy. There is still value in a person who can sit in the mess and not make it worse; I’m trying to believe that counts for something. My personal opinion is that fear should be a signal, not a lifestyle. Learn the tools. Keep your basics strong. Save a bit of money if you can. Be kind to coworkers. Touch grass, seriously. And maybe stop treating every headline like prophecy??? I’m saying this to myself as much as anyone reading. If you’re in the same spot, how do you stop doom-thinking all day?? Do you set limits, mute certain words, talk to people, pray, work out, what?? I’d really like to know, because I’m tired of giving so much emotional energy to a future that may not even happen the way I picture it. I want to keep caring, just less wildly, less personally, less like every update in tech is a direct threat to my right to exist. That seems fair, right???

so here's the thing, I'm just trying to find a way to make some decent money while I'm still stuck in this endless cycle of textbooks, exams, and the overwhelming stress that comes with being a 22-year-old college student. you know the drill; trying to juggle studies, a social life that’s barely alive, and the never-ending pressure of student loans and bills sneaking up on me like a damn ninja in the dark. we're all just trying to get by, right? but damn, it's like a twisted game of survival out here and lately, I've stumbled upon something that's got me seriously scratching my head.

apparently, there's this whole gig where you can get paid to talk to lonely guys online. sounds sketchy as hell, doesn't it? i mean, is it really just talking, or does it quickly take a turn into a steaming pile of regret? i'm sitting here wondering if this is some kind of smooth-talking nightmare or if it's genuinely something I could do without losing my damn mind. the idea of talking to random dudes might not sound too bad at first glance. hell, i could earn some cash and maybe even forget that mountain of student loan debt breathing down my neck, but is it worth the potential weirdness? and honestly, what’s stopping some creepos from crossing the boundaries? i mean, let's get real for a second. remember that episode of 'black mirror' with the wholly unintended consequences? it doesn’t take a genius to foresee how things can go south in a heartbeat with people hidden behind screens, safe in their anonymity while i'm just trying to break free from my broke-ass situation. i'm definitely not about to turn into a digital therapist for some dudes who can't seem to function in society without playing therapist myself afterwards. no thanks. have any of you brave souls tried this? any horror stories that could save my naive ass from taking a misstep here? also, wasn't there a time when people paid for other more substantial, face-to-face things instead of just cheap talk on the internet? seems like we're living in some bizarre-ass timeline.

the whole "get-paid-to-chat" thing makes me wonder if i've somehow walked into the twilight zone, while also making me panic just a tad about the ease of virtual manipulation. sure, this could be harmless and maybe even hilariously entertaining, but i can't shake off the feeling that it could be slippery as hell. is this just a slightly more sanitized version of the classic 'sugar daddy' scenario minus the sugar? can't help but think about stories you hear in the news about people getting doxxed and dragged through the mud because they thought they could make a few bucks chatting away online. and do these guys really get anything out of it besides emptying their wallets for the promise of a meaningful connection? makes me think of Taylor Swift's "Blank Space" with its themes of failed illusions. i find it mind-numbingly bizarre that there’s a market for this at all, though i guess loneliness itself is an equally intense, bizarre thing. just seems like there should be about a thousand exclamatory signs warning people off from it. if you’ve done this gig, how the hell did it play out for you? no bs, give me the raw truth. because that's honestly what I'm craving right now. should i take the leap, or just continue to silently freak out about my impending financial doom? what's the worst that could happen, right? or does trying to justify it only mean risking what's left of my sanity and three shredded strands of dignity? and this low-key ruminating is not even out of desperation—just sheer curiosity, because a girl needs options in this financially unstable world of ours. let's not sugarcoat it, we’re all looking for that side hustle that doesn’t make us hate waking up in the morning more than we already do. if you've managed to survive or thrive in this, spill the beans.

Being 31 sucks, man. Three months ago, I found myself on the ass-end of a layoff. My company had the nerve to tell me it was all 'cause of AI. Seriously? It's way more convenient to pin it on some sexy-tech revolution to pacify the stakeholders than to admit they just don't give a damn about those who actually bust their chops on the ground. Does anybody else sense this BS?

I've been scouring for jobs, pounding the pavement, and combing through job sites till my eyeballs gave out. Three months have gone by, and voilà—zilch, nada, nothing! Every "We regret to inform you" email slices deeper. Somehow that whole "dream big, you can achieve anything" mantra outran its welcome when all the job openings want people with no life, endless patience, and a unicorn-level of expertise. Are any of these hiring managers in touch with reality?

Nothing makes sense anymore. Each day is like re-living the Groundhog Day loop but without Bill Murray's charm. People say, "You just gotta keep plugging away," but when you've got rent gnawing at your heels and the radio's blurting out how AI's making sectors disappear, you start to think, "Why's this brick wall so damn peaceful?" Alan Watts once said, "The meaning of life is just to be alive." Right now, that's easier said than done. Who even has time to listen to that anymore?

It feels like drowning, frankly. It's not like I'm new to challenges, but fighting for a mere slice of the pie when it's been swiped out by non-human hands feels like some bad plot twist. You'd think there's a magic portal out of this numb-nuts existence, but no. All I want is to stop feeling like a hamster in a wheel, spinning with nowhere to get off. Does anyone out there get it? Or is existential crisis just a Tuesday thing now?

I vent not with malice but out of desperation and a sorta-shaky hope that commiseration might exist beyond my four walls. Maybe it’s time to pivot and think beyond what was once considered job security - maybe I'm just supposed to keep calm and carry on? Whatever dull wisdom that might hold, life sure feels meaningless right now. Staring at these walls makes as much sense as the crap I've been fed about AI. Are we left to merely grit our teeth and shout into the void without getting drowned out?

So over the last couple of months me and an ex friend have had a falling out, we were friends for a couple of years in work and we fell out over something very silly and small and not worth falling out over but my ex friend made it in to the biggest thing and since then she has made my life miserable in work. Yesterday I tried to hold out a lifeline and make up to her because yesterday was the last straw and I decided to tell her that the way she talked to me wasn't on. Well she has blamed me over the friendship breaking down, that she has covered for me over things that I don't even know that I have done wrong, that I have argued with her even though she has argued back and the thing I 'argued' over was something that I wasn't going to agree with her anyway cause I like to keep my routine as it is. And other things that she has put it on me. Don't get me wrong I know I am not perfect and I do things that annoy others but to me they aren't things to fall out over. And she has done a lot of things as well so it's definitely not all one way. But basically she doesn't want to be my friend anymore and today she literally couldn't be in the same area as me not matter the same room.

Okay, so I know I tagged it as "workplace drama" but it's more like college drama. I was a 3D animation major tho, and I was in a classroom of 9 students in my 3rd year, so I feel like it's kind of alike. Anyways, I have a story that, in retrospect, I definetely had a part in the drama, but I also definitely suffered from it at the time. I just want to know your opinion on if I was being a bit paranoid (which I felt I was sometimes) or not.

I feel like the atmosphere in my class degraded the more time passed. In my 1st year, it was mostly okay, I was discovering how 3D softwares worked and just trying to make at least a decent job with what I understood. I managed to model the second most important character, create some assets, animate and even voice act as the leading character in that movie (I'm a bit embarrassed about how my voice acting turned out, but I'm still proud I had the opportunity to do it) ! Group wise, it was also mostly okay, I just didn't talk all that much, though I would a little bit with people I thought I could be friends with. There was just this thing that bothered me a bit towards the end of the 1st year. I was talking with two upperclassmen, and the classmate that I was hanging around with (that was sitting behind me, let's call him Foo) was looking at us talking with a sort of angry expression while I had my back turned ? When I turned around to look at him again, I asked what was going on and like...he kept going defensive and was like "wow, so I can't look anymore ?" or "okay, then I'm not looking anymore" while pouting and things along those lines. To this day, I think it was weird, but also at the time, I was genuinely confused and was wondering if something was wrong.

Second year, however, was the WORST for me, I literally tried to fail as much as possible so that I'd get expelled and not have to go to college anymore. That was probably because I had a conversation with some of my teammates about who they'd want to work with if they had the chance to choose, and from that conversation, with a quick math, I realized that practically nobody wanted to work with me, and it weighed on me for the rest of the year. There was also this rampant "he said she said" thing going on. For example, a teammate (let's call her G-A) came up to me telling me how she found the way the way Foo smiled creepy or how the leader of our film for the second year (I'll call him G-B) was acting before leaving and other things. I remember the first time she came to me to gossip, I wanted to cry a bit because I didn't want to associate myself with gossip like that...I still ended up gossiping sometimes because I gotta survive and try to fit in this class somehow (which I failed to do so). I was thinking that, maybe I could be friends with her and that we could get along. I also tried my best to open up to her a little bit about what I liked and whatnot, because I was struggling with speaking up and was mostly silent. I'm absolutely ashamed I joined in this, and I do not wish to get myself entangled like that or feel as misrable as this ever again. If it isn't G-A, it was Foo who was kind of bothering me because I kept catching him staring at me. I think there were definitely some times where I thought I did catch him, but yeah, most of the time I did catch him staring. And everytime he'd go defensive.

3rd year of college was also a bad year. Foo's staring problem got worse, especially because I was seated next to him. Overtime, I've grown tired of it. My last straw was when I was trying to look at the board that was on my right, and Foo also happened to be seated on my right, and he proceeded to go all like "you were looking at me". I tried to explain to him that I wanted to look at the board, but he insisted that I was looking at him. From that day, I've decided to not talk to him anymore or to even look at him for the rest of the year. I was that petty 😅​. Apart from this, I was criticized by G-A over my work flow even though I was in the process of making something, the parts of the animatic that I was in charge of ended up not making it to the final animatic footage (G-A told me that I didn't do much for the team one day EVEN THOUGH I tried to greyscale the shots that were in the animatic to the best of my ability knowing my parts weren't included), almost every prop I made ended up being replaced by one another teammate did, the people in the team didn't include me in the animating team (even though I could animate just fine), Foo one day decided it was a good idea to take an object that I did to shade it without warning me when I clearly stated in the group chat that I'd take care of it. Basically, no matter what I tried to do, it didn't feel like my contributions were good enough to make it to the final product according to the entire team. Only a poster that was important in the film along with a few assets (that you don't even see that much) ended up making it, and even then, the poster almost got replaced by Foo's own version of the poster. The only reason my version was picked was because the main prof visibly had mixed feelings concerning Foo's version, and I looked at the prof like "please don't choose it". There was also this one time where G-A decided that we should add TeamViewer out of nowhere. From what I understood, we could basically take control of a computer remotely. I didn't really like that plan because of how sudden it was, and at this point I was a little paranoid, so I made it seem like I complied with it at campus while not installing TeamViewer at home, partly because I didn't understand how to even set it up, but mostly because I didn't like the idea of people accessing my computer at home from campus. Turns out, days later, G-A tried to access my computer via TeamViewer from campus, but because I didn't set it up at home, it didn't work. She said it was so that she could do some normal maps of textures of some posters, but in my eyes, TeamViewer isn't needed for this kind of thing because you can convert pictures into normal maps online, so it was at least a bit suspiscious to me. Apart from this, the group in itself still had a problem with gossiping and drama, so much that one of the leaders of the group ended up gathering everyone around a table to try and address the elephant in the room. The atmosphere got bad overtime, and with how little I had when it comes to assignments for the last movie, the main prof eventually told me I could not come to campus at a certain point because it would be pointless for me to show up only to not do anything the entire day. The moment I knew it was time for me to not go to campus anymore, I was literally out of there, I could not stand spending more time with those classmates anymore.

The more I type about this, the more I'm like "wow, college sucked :D", but I'm so used to things not going well in some aspects that I can't help but laugh. I guess I just want to have a trace of this story somewhere so that I don't forget about it. Again, please feel free to tell me your opinion about it, maybe I'll get a good laugh out of this. Thank you for reading this whole novel, and I wish you a good day/night <33