The Honest Expiration Date

Refreshing the screen doesn’t make the blinking cursor go away. It’s 11:01 PM on a Tuesday, and I’m staring at a text box that asks me to summarize my ‘Greatest Accomplishments’ for the year. This follows the 41 minutes I spent just now standing in front of my open refrigerator, finally throwing away a jar of pimento-stuffed olives that had been haunting the back of the shelf since 2021.

The olives were easier. They had an expiration date. They were honest about what they had become. This text box, however, demands that I pretend the chaotic, reactive, and often frustrating 301 days of this fiscal year were actually part of a deliberate, strategic master plan. I have to translate the time I spent fixing a printer while someone cried in the breakroom into ‘facilitating technical infrastructure and emotional resilience within the team.’ It is a lie. We all know it’s a lie. My manager knows it’s a lie, and the HR representative who will scan this for 11 seconds before filing it in a digital graveyard knows it’s a lie.

Corporate Grooming Rituals

Writing this feels like writing fan fiction for a brand that doesn’t exist. We are told these reviews are for our development, a roadmap for our professional evolution. Yet, if I were to be truly honest-to say that I spent 21 percent of my time wondering why we have 31-minute meetings to discuss things that could be solved in a single sentence-I would be labeled as ‘not a team player.’

Instead, I must use the approved lexicon. I must ‘leverage’ and ‘pivot’ and ‘align.’ I find myself wondering when we stopped speaking like humans and started speaking like poorly programmed algorithms.

I once read a Zoo Guide that described how certain primates perform grooming rituals not just for hygiene, but to maintain a social hierarchy that everyone implicitly understands. That is what this is. This is corporate grooming. We are picking the metaphorical lice off each other’s resumes to prove we belong in the tribe, all while knowing that the budget for our raises was settled 11 weeks ago in a room we weren’t invited to.

Quantifying Human Transformation

I think of Elena P.K., a woman I met who coordinates education programs in a maximum-security prison. Her version of a performance review is fundamentally different from the one I’m currently avoiding. In her world, ‘success’ isn’t a graph that goes up; it’s the absence of a riot. It’s the 1 student who finally learns to read after 41 years of illiteracy.

Elena P.K. had to quantify human transformation into data points. She told me about a time she missed a deadline for a ‘strategic alignment’ report because she was busy talking a 21-year-old out of a panic attack. In her review, that hour was ‘unaccounted for.’ It was a gap in her productivity. We’ve built a system that rewards the reporting of the work more than the work itself. I often find myself doing things just so I can say I did them, which is a peculiar form of psychological self-mutilation. I wonder if the olives I threw away felt this way-preserved in brine, looking perfect on the outside, but completely hollow and long since past their usefulness.

The Rebranding of Failure

This annual ritual institutionalizes a specific brand of corporate gaslighting. We are asked to set 11 goals for the coming year, fully aware that by February, a global shift or a sudden change in leadership will render 101 percent of those goals obsolete. Yet, come next November, we will be judged on how well we hit those phantom targets.

It creates a culture where the most successful people are not the most productive, but the best storytellers. They are the ones who can take a catastrophic failure and rebrand it as a ‘learning-rich pivot.’ I’ve seen people get promoted because they were excellent at filling out their 21-page self-evaluations, while the quiet worker who actually kept the department running stayed at the same level for 11 years. It’s a game of mirrors.

We have traded the messy truth of human effort for the sterile comfort of a spreadsheet.

The Armor of HR

There is a deep, underlying fear that if we stop doing this, the whole structure will collapse. If we admit that we can’t actually measure a human being’s value with a 1-to-5 scale, then how do we decide who gets the 3 percent raise? The truth is, those decisions are almost always made based on gut feelings, personal biases, and the remaining 11 percent of the budget after the executives take their share. The review is just the paper trail to prevent lawsuits. It’s the armor HR wears.

I’ve often thought that if we spent the 501 hours a year we waste on these forms actually talking to each other, we might actually solve some problems. But talking is dangerous. Talking is unscripted. Talking leads to the kind of radical honesty that corporate environments are designed to suppress. I remember Elena P.K. saying that in her facility, they don’t have the luxury of ‘performance charades.’ If you aren’t authentic, you lose the trust of the inmates, and in her world, trust is the only currency that keeps you safe. I wish I worked in a world where the stakes were that clear.

The Linguistic Masquerade

I keep coming back to the idea of professional fiction. We are all novelists now, drafting the epic saga of our own utility. I look at my ‘Areas for Improvement’ section. I’m supposed to list 1 or 2 things I’m bad at, but not things that are *actually* bad. I can’t say ‘I have a tendency to check out of meetings the moment someone uses the word synergy.’

I’m currently on page 11 of a 21-page document, and I can feel my soul slowly leaking out through my fingertips. I accidentally typed the word ‘help’ in the middle of a paragraph about quarterly deliverables. I deleted it, but the sentiment remains. Does anyone ever actually read these? Or is it like the terms and conditions on a software update-something we all click ‘agree’ to so we can just get on with our lives?

Killing the Ritual

If we want to fix work, we have to start by killing the annual review. We need a system that acknowledges the fluid, messy, and non-linear nature of human effort. We need metrics that value the 1 person who stayed late to help a colleague over the 1 person who hit their KPIs but left a trail of resentment in their wake. But that requires a level of trust and vulnerability that most organizations aren’t ready for.

It’s much easier to just keep filing the forms. It’s much easier to keep pretending that the olives are still fresh. I look at the trash can where the olives now sit, and I feel a strange sense of envy. They are done with the charade. They are no longer required to be part of the pantry’s ‘strategic vision.’ They are just gone.

I, on the other hand, have 11 more boxes to fill before I can go to sleep, and I still haven’t figured out how to explain why my ‘stakeholder alignment’ was so low in June without mentioning that my stakeholder was a person who spent 41 minutes of every meeting talking about their cat.

The Final Choice

I’ll tell the story they want to hear. I’ll use the words they want me to use. I’ll pretend that everything is ‘aligned’ and ‘leveraged.’ But as I do, I’ll be thinking about Elena P.K. and her 1 student, and the 1 real thing that happened this year that will never, ever make it onto a form. How much of our lives are we willing to sacrifice to the altar of a bureaucratic ritual that doesn’t even believe in its own existence?

I keep coming back to the blinking cursor, and I suppose I’ll just keep typing.