I Love It Here

The boss says it without a trace of irony. "I'm here every day. I love coming in." And his managers — the guard dogs, the ones whose entire function is to stand between him and the people who do the work — nod and say it too, and they mean it, because for them it's also true. It is fun. It's the most fun they have all week. The thing nobody says, not in the all-hands, not in the offsite, not in the cheerful little survey asking how connected you feel: it's only fun for them.

Watch the morning. The boss walks the floor and the floor performs. Heads come up. The smiles arrive half a second before he does and dissolve half a second after he passes — practiced, load-bearing smiles, the mouth fully committed and the eyes never invited. It's a parade, and he's the float. The office was never an office. It's a route, and he is the one man who gets to walk down the middle of it while everyone else is arranged along the curb to wave.

Strip the org chart off and it's an ego trip with a lease. He shows up because showing up is the product — not the work, the homage. Every floor he crosses is a feed; every forced smile is a like, delivered in person, in real time, by humans who can't scroll past him. He is buying engagement the most expensive way ever devised: rent, parking, catering, the whole staged room, all of it overhead on a single appetite — being looked at like that, daily, by people who have no option but to look.

The guard dogs live on the scraps of it. A like trickles down the chain and lands on the manager, who has no kingdom of his own and so borrows this one. He gets the forced friendship, the lunches no one can decline, the small daily ration of power that comes from deciding when you may leave, whether your weekend survives, how your raise gets worded. He infantilizes on a schedule and calls it mentoring. The cruelty isn't even strategic — it's recreational. This is the only court he will ever be a minor noble in, and he is not about to waste a single morning of it.

So the archaic ritual holds. Adults drive across a city to file into rented boxes, badge in, and arrange themselves around a man who feeds on the arranging. They comply. They thank him for the opportunity to comply. Somewhere a memo explains that this is about collaboration, about serendipity, about the energy of the room — and the energy of the room is one man's blood sugar against everyone else's cortisol, and the memo knows it, because the memo was written by a guard dog who needed a reason on letterhead.

The fully evolved version wants more than the genuflection. Material assets bore him; he already has those. So the building learns to acquire people as ornaments — the hire chosen to be decorative, the human downgraded to a status object and seated near him so the parade has a centerpiece, while everyone is made to watch, because a trophy nobody witnesses is just furniture. The horror was never that one man wants the symbol. It's that the structure will rearrange actual people into symbols on request, restock the centerpiece like a snack bar, and file the whole thing under "culture."

And none of it — not the commute, not the rent, not the room replenished on cue — is about efficiency. Say the quiet part in full: if it were about output, the output already proved it didn't need the room. The four-year experiment settled that, globally, with receipts. So the room is about something else, and the something else is the parade. The only thing the office optimizes is the throughput of daily tribute per executive — how cleanly the economically cornered can be made to file past, smile, and bow, on time, every morning, at scale.

The tell is the language. "I love it here." Of course he does. It's his kingdom; you're merely zoned for it. He loves it for the exact reason the float loves the parade and the parade means nothing to the curb. And here's the part that should keep you up — the Kafka part — how many on the route have quietly decided the manager is their friend, that the smile is mutual, that the homage is rapport. They bow every morning and have rewritten it, inside their own heads, as belonging. That isn't a side effect. That is the entire product. He doesn't only want the bow. He wants you to believe you meant it.