Hindu cows. That is what places like this want.

I came into Insider today and had a hard time believing what I was seeing. TVs everywhere. Writing on the walls. Noise inside the office. Colors, objects, shelves, visual clutter. The whole place feels messy, loud, chaotic. Sometimes the sound suddenly rises for no reason. The only clearly good thing is that you are somewhere. You are in an office. You have internet, a chair, a desk, a stable place to work. That is the bait. Because once you look a little closer, the whole thing starts to feel dark.

I keep noticing things

I keep noticing things and each one feels too obvious to ignore. Even something as simple as a sentence on the wall. You know what it says? If you are not taking care of your customer, someone else will. And that tells you everything. It is not there to inspire you. It is there to push you. To remind you who matters and who does not. To turn you into a machine. To make sure your attention goes in one direction only. Produce. Serve. Perform. Give more. Live for the company's outcomes. Be useful. Stay useful. Not for yourself. For them.

I learned something else from a friend. If you become the best player on the team that year, they make you a shareholder. I had seen that once before on LinkedIn and wondered how it happened. The person was from my school too, one or two years above me in design. I was curious back then. Now I get it. And now that I get it, I also see how dark it is underneath. This place knows how to chain people to itself.

There is more to say about that. The way they turn work into identity. The way they inject little messages into people every day. The way they wash the brain slowly, not dramatically, just enough for you to stop resisting. You even see it in places where you should be left alone. Even in the bathroom. Even there, they are still talking to you. Still shaping you. Still telling you what kind of human you should become for them. They literally write it on the wall. Huge words. Big slogans. A giant customer centric with adjectives around it like a moral code. I looked at the ones that stood out first: tireless, stress resistant, nonstop. Read that again. Tireless. Stress resistant. Nonstop. That is not humane. That is not wisdom. That is not healthy ambition. That is a blueprint for a better slave. A better machine. A worker that keeps going no matter what breaks inside. And the worst part is they are not even hiding it.

They do not care about the workers

They do not care about the workers. They care about customers, numbers, growth, revenue. And to push those numbers higher, they use people. Openly. In your face. They tell you who the center is, and it is not you.

At the start I mentioned the TVs. Do you know what is always playing on them? Not anything useful. Not something about health. Not a practical update. Not something that would actually help people work better or live better. No. What plays on those screens is footage from past events. Happy faces. Group photos. People dancing. Loud laughter. Retreat clips. Team moments. Fake warmth. Manufactured energy. Why? Because they need you to believe people here are happy. They need you to believe this is a reward. They need to cover the wound. That is what all of it is for. The retreats. The shallow conversations. The forced smiles. The event footage. The cheap fun after long days. It is there to make you forget what is underneath. To distract you from the fact that your life is being spent in a place that wants as much from you as possible while giving back just enough comfort to keep you from leaving. The screens are not there to inform you. They are there to distract you. And what is funny is that they even distract you while you work. Those videos reduce focus. They pull your attention away. But they still put them there, because the goal is not actually the quality of your attention in that moment. The bigger goal is conditioning. Keep the atmosphere strong. Keep the illusion alive. Keep people emotionally managed. That matters more than your concentration.

And then there is the dopamine cycle

And then there is the dopamine cycle. They push people down, then give them little highs. Music, events, breakfast, snacks, drinks, nice desks, nice offices, promotions, retreats, the occasional public praise. People fall for it because they are tired and hungry and desperate for relief. So they dance. They laugh. They go on the trip. They post the picture. They feel alive again for a second. But what about the days before that? What about the dull pain of all the ordinary mornings? What about all the hours where something inside you knows this is not it? This is the same problem as waiting for Friday. Friday should not need to save you. If you are always waiting for the week to end, if the relief only comes when work pauses, if your joy depends on escaping your job for two days, the problem is not your mood. The problem is the structure of your life.

Places like this know how to trap people who are just uncomfortable enough to want out, but comfortable enough to stay. That is the trick. They build a cage that does not look like a cage. Promotions. Breakfast. Good coffee. Snacks. Parking. A nice laptop. A shiny office. A yearly retreat. A cool brand name. Just enough status to make you feel like leaving would be irrational. Just enough convenience to make your soul negotiable. But it is all decoration. It is all there to hide the larger pain.

I have seen other corporate places before and not all of them felt this shameless. But still, what do you expect in the end? You are inside a private company. The limits are whatever they decide. The rules are whatever they can get away with. Use people as much as possible. Push as far as possible. Manipulate as softly as possible. Call it culture. Call it growth. Call it excellence. It is still exploitation.

This place honestly feels like 1984 to me. Capitalism in one of its cleanest modern forms. Especially for young people. Make it look cool. Make it look ambitious. Make it look like the smart place to be. Give it a name, a building, a story, a little prestige. Then fill it with messages about endurance and output until people no longer know whether they are building a career or slowly giving themselves away. And people do give themselves away. They work for wages, for image, for a nice title, for the building, for the car they can now finance, for the status of having a respectable job. They complain on the way there. They feel slightly better during the day because human connection softens the damage. Then by evening they get happy because the day is ending. Tomorrow morning it starts again. The same resentment. The same tiredness. The same quiet hatred. But the company pulls them back in every time with some new polished comfort. That should not fool anyone.

I am saying all this while also seeing my own contradiction clearly

I am saying all this while also seeing my own contradiction clearly. In four days, I have a retreat. I will see my team face to face for the first time in a year. I am excited. They planned it well. I feel grateful. A lot of things are covered. For one week we will live well. I can enjoy that and still tell the truth. That comfort does not erase the deeper reality. That retreat should not make me forget that I am still not doing my calling. That is the real danger with places like this. Not that they hurt you openly. That would be easier to detect. The danger is that they can make you comfortable enough to betray yourself quietly. And meanwhile this company makes a lot of money. It serves multiple continents. It has hundreds of customers. It is big. It is successful. And still, look at how it treats people. Look at the values it puts on the wall. Look at the psychology of the place. This is modern slavery. Cleaned up. Branded well. Made to look like opportunity.