I also used to enjoy coming into the office. That shifted, though, when the company I was working for got bought out twice by two major companies. When it was just the folks from the original startup - we'd grown to about 190 people by the time of the first acquisition - we all pretty much knew each other well, enjoyed working with one another, and were able to focus on the things that not only moved the needle for the company, but that we found interesting. We also had stock and hope that we'd build in enough value to strike it well. That happened in the first buy out, but - as expected - the proceeds from that buy out weren't evenly distributed. Everyone on the team suddenly knew their relative value to the company based on how much they made from the sale, regardless of what they contributed. Some folks straight up quit and moved on to bigger and better, while many of us wound up having to stay with the acquiring company. I joined the company late so saw little to no proceeds from the initial sale, so I watched all this happen as a mostly passive observer. When we got sold - twice - it was like a baseball player being traded in the night to a new team.

What I'm getting at here is that, when you;re working with a team of people who are all committed to the same end, who enjoy working with one another, and who believe they will share in the proceeds, you tend to create a sense of harmony. Working in that office in the way you describe - hours at the desk, quick over the shoulder help sessions, after work drinks and dinners - comes from that sense of camaraderie and common purpose. Take that away, and you wind up with angry people who feel their time and their lives have been exploited for someone else's gain - which is true for every single hierarchically structured company on the planet, which is, like, 90% of them. The sense of camaraderie can hide that feeling of exploitation, providing a false sense of community that is further exploited to make the investors richer. When that veil is lifted, as it was during the pandemic when people were expected to work as normal in the face of existential uncertainty all in the name of supporting the economy instead of caring for people, you;re left with a whole bunch of folks who see the whole system as bunk. That's where we are right now.

I refuse to work full time for another company now that I've realized this. But I am eager to get back to that sense of working with like-minded people for a common cause - that's something I think most of us crave. My answer is to find a way to build a co-operative business that allows all members to share in the proceeds equally and have greater control over their lives while truly working together toward a common goal rather than just making some VCs and their investors richer. I already do something similar with a group of consultant friends, which is cool - we pull each other in on jobs and charge each person's going rate, occasionally pushing each other to charge more since we're terrible at that sort of thing. I want to try and start some kind of co-operative business in my town as well and start to experiment more with this model - a coffee shop or a restaurant, potentially something small at first.

If we own our work and enjoy the full proceeds of that work, we tend to be happy. That is simply not how the corporate world is structured, and I believe that;s the source of so much work unhappiness.