Live Laugh Consult: Corporate is designed to kill your humanness

Truly, 2023 Jessie would be so disappointed if she knew I was now slogging away in management consulting, of all evils I could have chosen from.

At Boston College, which is where I went for undergrad, I prided myself in being a Marketing major who’d eventually support musical artists in their careers and promote art that made people feel deeply. I swore off all the finance bro bores: AI startups, investment banking, trading, and of course, consulting, because the only thing I’d hear when someone told me they were pursing those fields was, “I’m boring, greedy, and too afraid to do something meaningful. I’d also kiss Sam Altman if he gave me a $10K sign-on bonus.”

That begs the question of how a hater like me landed in management consulting. Last October, I resigned from a toxic job right before accepting a promotion, and then I poured myself into growing my eating disorder recovery coaching business and taking on two contract jobs. I had planned to go all-in on growing my coaching business when a friend recommended I apply for a Strategy position at a management consulting company. Within six weeks, I tossed in my resume for kicks and giggles, magically finagled my way through the interviews, and accepted this company’s offer and moved to Thousand Oaks (this was all made possible only through major dissociation).

It’s been two months since I started working at this consulting firm, and the appeal is frustratingly undeniable. Besides the generous compensation, which is more than double of an entry-level position in the music industry, there’s company-sponsored experiences I cannot afford, intelligent people who work so hard you’d think we’re curing climate change, and a fabricated sense of security that hits me every time I say “I work in consulting.”

Now, these new people I’m meeting in Thousand Oaks are probably looking at me and thinking I’m boring, greedy, and too afraid to do something meaningful.

But that brings me to my point: if I continue in this job for years and subscribe to all its demands, I know I will become exactly that. Work-obsessed, gray-haired, AI-dependent. I will have sold my artistic creativity, sleep, and youth to capitalism, all so I can get a sexy one-liner on my LinkedIn that suggests I’ve mastered PowerPoints.

Of course I’m afraid my coworkers might stumble upon this essay one day and conclude that this newb is unfit for the industry, that I’m incompetent and lacking resilience, and that’s why I had never considered anything beyond the music industry. But I’m just expressing my thoughts, and I know very well that if I disable myself from being honest, I will become the exact robot corporate wants me to become. Unfeeling, with my head down and a primed readiness to respond to Teams chats in 0.2 seconds at 12am. God forbid I am not a rocket-emoji-abusing LinkedIn thought leader praising every inch of this company and worshipping everything we do.

If you’ve made it this far, reading my thoughts is the equivalent of you asking me “How are you?” … and actually listening. So thank you. On this note, my challenge for you is to resist the pressure to become so robotic and work-focused that you allow corporate demands to crush human connection, honesty, and vulnerability. Without vigilantly resisting capitalism’s incurable hunger, you and I will inevitably become slaves to it. That is the only way capitalism can continue to flourish – if it keeps us small, quiet, and perfectly productive.

I don’t know if my feelings about consulting will change, or if I will continue to feel this way but just get more accustomed to this industry. One thing I know is that I want to keep making time to write, read, talk to friends, and coach eating disorder clients. If I let this job take away those things from me, I will have no one to blame but myself.

So until I figure out whether this is my long-term path, I’m committing myself to being the girl who’ll start off every conversation with a genuine “How are you?”

I invite you to do the same. Get to know your co-workers and what they do when they're not moving needles, circling back, and presenting their screens (properly). Steal back some time from capitalism, and resist its persistent hunger by expressing your true self.

It really is that deep.

That Tuesday one-on-one was just a small glimpse into the pressure cooker that is corporate. You don’t have time to talk about your feelings, frankly because you hardly have enough time to process your own. Your day is determined by your schedule, which often consists of sitting on back-to-back calls and chasing manufactured deadlines. By the time Friday rolls around, your shoulders are so tense they feel like bricks, and you pitifully realize you had no time to cook a homemade meal, go to the gym, and still get at least seven hours of sleep for at least half the week.

Even now, I feel that writing is a form of resistance. During weekdays, I am usually so exhausted after work that all I’m capable of doing is doom-scrolling and consuming content that will block out my stress. But writing forces me to slow down, get honest with myself, and shine light on my emotions – even if they seem ungrateful or difficult.

It’s not that my coworkers aren’t interesting or funny people. They’re really kind and enjoyable. But I can tell that most people’s mind, energy, and time is so consumed by the never-ending demands of work that they often seem too similar to each other. They have the same kind of humor, the same habit of wolfing down lunch to get to the next meeting, the same lingo, and the same die-hard dedication to consulting (live, laugh, consult).

Last Tuesday morning, I couldn’t share my screen properly during a client call, and the deliverables I spent all night crunching out didn’t end up getting shown during the meeting. And as a cherry on the top, I got a long text from a colleague with feedback on what I should change in my deliverables, and in the midst of my sleep deprivation, I read that text and just started breaking down like a child.

I know I’m new to this hard ass industry, but is there no room for affirmation in consulting? Even a “great work” would have been enough. Instead, it feels like the hard work you put in behind-the-scenes is expected, while the errors you make, like a typo on an email or the failure to share your screen, are so reputation-ending and visible.

I had a one-on-one meeting with a colleague right after that client call, and she started by asking everyone’s favorite opening line, “How are you?”

That question raised mixed feelings. My heart was pumping as she asked. Do I tell her that I was crying in my room just ten minutes ago, or do I just say “Good, you?” and move onto our meeting agenda? I felt like an incompetent, needy, and over-emotional person for wanting to express how I actually felt: overwhelmed, fatigued, pressured to get up to speed as quickly as possible. We had thirty minutes for this check-in, and there were at least four deliverables we needed to chat through. I could see Microsoft Team’s timer marking off how many seconds had already passed.

But my honesty peeked through. “A bit overwhelmed," I admitted. "It was just a bunch of small things..."

There was some awkward silence, and then a “mhm, yeah" from my colleague.

And then my mouth moved before my nervous system could catch up: “But it’s okay.”

It’s okay. It’s always the thing we tack onto the end of every damn sentence that communicates anything but feeling okay. “Someone I love died, but it’s okay.” “I just got broken up with, but it’s okay.” “I feel mentally ill, but it’s okay.” “I’m always tired, but it’s okay.” “I just cried at 10am because I couldn’t share a screen. A SCREEN, OF ALL UNIMPORTANT THINGS. But it’s okay.”

We are all, myself included, so uncomfortable with admitting that we’re not completely okay, because anything that isn’t good, perfect, or okay is a direct threat to our productivity. Because during that Tuesday 1-1 with my colleague, I could either spend thirty precious minutes talking about work, or I could risk steering the conversation away from the agenda and towards our human feelings instead. The complicated, contradictory, and confusing mess they can often be. And doing the latter too much makes you look unprofessional and difficult to work with, even though it is one of the best reminders that we’re all imperfect human beings just trying to do our best.