When I was a young man, after dropping out of the disappointing CU Boulder, I took a job at Macaroni Grill, a chain Italian restaurant. Basically an Olive Garden clone. I loved to cook. Still do. But what I ran into was a tsunami of counterproductive corporate horseshit. Totally transparent "team building" nonsense. They told me they were my family. Not just "Welcome to the Macaroni Grill family" and then they shut up. No, the manager went on and on about how we're a family now, and families are there for each other, etc. Every week there was a staff meeting and we got the family speech. It was Manson. And we had to sing the Macaroni Grill song start of every shift. Every day! Bizarrely manipulative and offputting shit. It was insulting. Yet everyone but me seemed to love it. If they didn't love it, they convincingly pretended to love it. (One guy, a young sous chef, quietly acknowledged "I know man, but...") I couldn't stand it, and I couldn't pretend to love it either. I acually got called in to the manager's office for not singing the macaroni song with sufficient enthusiasm, lol. I told the guy I just want to cook. I have no interest in singing or being in a new family. What is all this nonsense? Why do I have to sing a song at all? Why not just rate my performace by my cooking? I still think it's a fair question. Dude had no answers. He was just confused because everyone else loves singing the Macaroni Song every day. Ya, well not me! So I never even made it to Line Cook. I was on pasta prep, then down to veggie chopper, and I even remember being the dishwasher briefly. I think I just stopped turning up is how I quit that job. I arrived so keen about cooking and left only a few months later completely demotivated by all their horseshit. By the end, I was not a good employee. I did what I had to but no enthusiasm at all.
That's how I feel now. I feel like an unenthusiastic employee being smiled at and lied to by people who don't know how to do anything but follow their script, and surrounded by easily manipulated morons.
I know I'm not alone in feeling this way. I don't think western governments have any idea the scale of the crisis of faith which they have caused, but they've lost their keenest supporters. Who's going to weld shit? Harvest the wheat, farm cows, drive the trucks? Who's going to fight Russia? Purple haired girls? The third worlders who just arrived? Laptop progressives? Good luck.
No, I can't remember how the Macaroni Song goes.
