Have you ever wondered why everyone in corporate life is always in such a goddamn hurry?
"URGENT."
"Need an answer by EOP."
"ASAP"
"Please prioritize this request."
There's the simple answer to why everyone is in such a hurry... and then there is the deeper, more complex, and somewhat terrifying answer.
The Simple Answer
The simple answer is that time is money.
More hustle means more output/productivity. And that means more revenue/profit at the end of the quarter.
Better financial results means higher stock price. Money.
And on its most basic level, thats why. Because the company stands to benefit when more money is made. So they drive you faster.
They create a sense of urgency about things that are not actually urgent.
For example, it is an objective fact that nothing actually breaks—i.e. no one dies—if I don't hit my sales quota each quarter. The sun will keep rising each morning. The earth will continue to spin on its axis.
Yet you'd think a nuclear bomb would go off if I didn't deliver 25% YoY growth.
Now, this is the part where we hold two truths, one in each hand.
It is true that yes, there’s a ton of manufactured urgency in corporate life.
It is also true that you as an employee—especially if you’re an employee who is also a shareholder—benefit at least indirectly (if not directly) from the “more, more, more” culture of urgency. My bonus and my Amazon stock RSUs are two great examples.
However, as with so many things in life, there are more than two truths at play.
And when you have only two hands, holding them all simultaneously starts to get tricky.
But let’s try, by looking deeper at the less simple explanation for why everyone is such in a damn hurry in corporate life.
The Less Simple, Kinda Scary Answer
The more nefarious reason that corporate environments are built to be light-speed meat grinders is this:
When you are in a constant hustle mode—when it feels like every second ticking away is working against you—your body will enter a state of fight-or-flight.
Your nervous system is pushed into a state of arousal—meaning it is spiking adrenaline, flooding your brain with cortisol, quickening your heartbeat, dilating your eyes, widening your blood vessels. Readying you.
Your body is evolved to perceive urgency, whether real or manufactured, as a threat.
Because in nature, urgency only exists in a few very special circumstances, for example:
You see something you can kill and/or eat to survive.
You (or your young) are about to be killed and/or eaten and you need to survive.
You see a potential mate for procreation so the species can survive.
See the common thread? Survival.
Fight-or-flight is about your whole body’s drive for survival.
So when that email or slack message comes through with URGENT stamped all over it and Greg is having a meltdown at your desk and your boss Susan is coming down the corridor with a grim look on her face, you feel that shock of adrenaline and your palms start to sweat..
… in the midst of all of that, your prehistoric little lizard brain is only absorbing one thing:
“This is about survival. I must survive.”
You know what else happens when your little lizard brain goes in to fight-or-flight mode to survive?
Your prefrontal cortex—the part of your brain responsible for decision making, planning, and most importantly critical thought—shuts down.
It goes offline.
Because nature knows that critical thinking isn't the most useful response when survival is on the line.
So now we come to the important question.
Who stands to gain from you being in a constant state of fight-or-flight at work?
It doesn’t make intuitive sense, right?
Why would a corporate employer want tens of thousands of highly-skilled, intelligent, educated people working for them to be in a state where critical thinking shuts down?
Isn't that antithetical to what you want as an employer?
In 1999, my über-Boss, Jeff Bezos, was interviewed by CNET’s Wendy Walsh about comments he wrote in a shareholder letter to the effect that Amazon employees should wake up “terrified” each morning. You can imagine that sentiment got a lot of press attention.
Walsh asked him to clarify what he meant:
Bezos: I ask everybody around here to wake up terrified every morning—their sheets drenched in sweat—but to be very precise about what it is they’re afraid of. They shouldn’t be afraid of our competitors; they should be afraid of our customers … those are the folks we have a relationship with. Those are the folks who send us money. And I believe that our customers are loyal to us right up until the point that somebody offers them a better service.
Walsh (smirking): So to better qualify that fear, it’s like a fear of abandonment?
Bezos (laughing): I think that’s right. You know, you gotta do a good job, and you have to earn the loyalty of customers every day.
Are you ready to hold competing truths simultaneously again?
It’s true that customer loyalty has to be earned.
It’s true that customers can and do jump to the best product/offer.
It’s true that keeping customers takes dedication and commitment.
and
It’s also true that waking up every day afraid is a fucking miserable way to spend what is sure to be a very short life.
It’s also true that a fear of constant abandonment in any sphere—whether personal or professional—will create an absolute truckload of mental health problems for you.
It’s also true that anxiety about work being the first thing entering your thoughts in the morning is not normal and not healthy and not good.
You might be wondering, especially if you’re an Amazonian: I call bullshit, Matt. isn't thinking critically what we're all about? Isn't that why we have a culture of doc writing instead of Powerpoint? To force us to slow down?
Yes and no.
Employers—especially those with meat-grinder reputations like Amazon—do indeed want you thinking critically… but about only one thing.
Their business.
So while you're there, in their four walls—and ideally, also in the shower and at the breakfast table and on your commute and in between innings at your kids’ little league game and at dinner with your spouse—they will create an environment where everything else fades to black.
Urgency has a way of using its noise to drown everything else out, regardless of importance.
So yeah, sure, docs are intended to create a “slow-down, critical thinking” mechanism.
In reality, I’ve worked at Amazon over 9 years. Do you have any idea how many “slow-down, critical-thinking” 6-pager docs I have churned out in absolute bleary-eyed panic at 2am because of a leadership escalation at 11pm for a meeting that’s just been called for 9am?
Just because it’s intended to do something doesn’t mean it’s actually doing that.
(Kind of like your company’s IT helpdesk. Designed to solve problems, but only opening yet another fucking trouble ticket.)
So back to the question at hand - what does an employer have to gain by putting you in fight-or-flight mode?
Quite simply: your tunnel vision.
When you’re in fight-or-flight and focused only on survival, and “survival” is wrapped up 24/7 in your company’s mission - guess what is going to get your laser focus?
That’s right. Daddy Warbucks’ bottom line.
Meaning your personal need for survival gets hijacked by and in service to the company’s need for survival.
In nature, there’s a word for that.
Think I’m wrong? To see this in action, all you have to do is look back to the pandemic, about a year after we all went into work-from-home mode.
Remember what happened in 2021/2022, when we all finally realized we probably weren’t going to die and we were all now firmly entrenched in a new way of working? A new daily rhythm that was totally divorced from a physical office with physical coworkers and physical bosses? Where you got to throw a load of laundry in between meetings, or play with your kids, or sit down with your spouse on the couch for a few minutes with a cup of coffee to connect and talk during lunch?
Remember how you suddenly realized there were other things in life outside that office that brought you fulfillment?
Remember how you started wondering what kind of legacy you’d leave behind?
Remember how you took conference calls from the middle of the forest, staring up at the trees with leaves gently swaying in dappled sunlight while you walked and talked?
Remember how you exhaled?
That was your prefrontal cortex coming back online.
That was your critical thinking, your deep thinking, coming back online.
That was your humanity coming back online.
And what happened next?
The Great Resignation.
Employees left corporate life in droves - convinced that they could no longer plug back into what they now saw as The Matrix.
And what did employers do?
Enact RTO mandates.
RTO is about many things—real estate, innovation, supervision, collaboration, creativity, management skills (or lack thereof)—but more than anything else, it’s about one thing.
Control.
It’s about making sure you are in a physical environment shaped to the liking of your employer for as long and as often as possible.
Because employees with fight-or-flight tunnel vision are committed to survival - which in this case means the survival of the company.
Survival Isn’t Enough. Not Anymore.
We’re not being chased by bears anymore. You still need to survive, sure, but survival now is more about having enough money than it is about how fast you can outrun a predator.
Which means survival isn’t the same game. And neither is thriving.
So… What Do We Do?
I can’t solve the corporate culture crisis or come up with a solution for the late-stage capitalist hellscape we live in. But I can tell you what I’ve learned in nearly 20 years of corporate life that has helped me to slow down and get perspective.
That’s part of what this Substack is all about.
But the next post will be some seriously practical tips, tricks, and exercises that I use on a daily basis. They’re not perfect, and different things work well for different people. But I can tell you what’s worked—and working—for me these days with nearly two decades under my belt. I’ll tell you what I’ve tried and abandoned as well, because maybe what didn’t work for me will work for you.
Make sure to subscribe - part 2 comes next week!