Happy Capitalist Holidays!

As of yesterday I'm officially on my Christmas break, which at over two weeks long is my longest holiday of the year. I've really been looking forward to it, and this year I think I also really needed it.

After my mental health hiatus things at work initially got a bit better. To my employer's credit, they did take the whole thing seriously and made some changes to alleviate the worst of my issues when I came back. Things were a bit awkward for a while, but at least not quite as bad.

Then Black Friday/Cyber week came around and all hell broke loose again. Lots of unpaid overtime and artificially created stress. The only thing that helped me power through that one was that I knew it affected others just as badly and that at least there was a definite end date to this particular craziness.

On my penultimate day of work, the leader of the division back at HQ gave what was supposed to be a Christmas speech, broadcast to several hundred people at once, and it was some of the most tone-deaf, uninspiring stuff I've ever heard.

He briefly praised our hard work during Cyber week, just to follow it up with saying that we should work like it's Cyber week every week, which I think didn't go down well with anyone. Comments I heard from colleagues afterwards included "if we did that, I'd have to resign" and "my hair would be white within a month". (It was also in direct contradiction of a HR-sponsored training we'd had only the other week, where the trainer had emphasised that like athletes, we can't be operating at our absolute peak performance every day of the week.)

He said that it was okay to enjoy the holidays and to not think about work for a bit, just to immediately backtrack and emphasise that we still should check on our website all the time, because people shop a lot during the holidays! (Some of us were going to do that anyway, but I thought the fact that he had the urge to remind everyone to not relax too much even over Christmas was telling.)

He talked about how even though we hadn't achieved the double-digit growth he wanted this year, we were going to aim for 16% again next year. As another colleague put it afterwards: "I thought the point of this kind of speech was to say 'we are planning to do x, y and z next year, and based on that we expect to be able to achieve this much growth', you can't just give us a number and nothing else!" But that's exactly how this guy seems to operate: throw out a number, pound the table about it in every meeting and let everyone else figure it out.

Finally, another guy in the room with him felt the need to add that "the money we make for the business is very important" which just made my stomach drop even further. I never thought I'd miss the lofty speeches about how we were revolutionising the industry or making the world a better place - I never fully believed them, but at least they allowed for that glimmer of hope that money wasn't everything and that maybe we could achieve some good things along the way. I definitely preferred that over this new era of unashamed corporate greed.

All of this doesn't make me terribly hopeful for the next year, even if there are some wonderful people around me further down the ladder who I know are trying their best. Happy holidays, everyone!