Disillusionment is a process that varies by context (relationships, careers, major events) but generally moves from idealization to disappointment and is characterized by a loss of enthusiasm, the identification of meaningful flaws, and a search for coping mechanisms potentially leading to detachment or a crisis point. See also: early adulthood.
GETTING STARTED
Transitioning from college to career is an adventure. For me, it meant a new city, new challenges, new friends, new everything. Existing on my own seemed entirely possible and actually somewhat straightforward. Granted, I stacked the deck in my favor as much as possible. I had a solid job that came with a preposterous starting bonus which made establishing my nascent independence eminently manageable. For the moment, I was sitting pretty. I had no concept of how much harder and more complicated my life would become following these twilight months separating college and corporate life, but this particular beginning, auspicious and brimming with expectation, was a shot of pure exhilaration.
Exhilarating? Yes. Glamourous? Not quite. I slept on a friend’s lumbar-fouling futon for a few weeks while searching for apartments. It was the loathsome sort of sleeping arrangement so uncomfortable that one must get legally drunk to achieve even a few precious moments of unconsciousness, but the price was right. Sufficiently motivated by back pain and the desire to get settled, I wrangled a half-decent, unfurnished apartment and moved in without delay.
The first night in my first place, I slept on the living room floor cocooned in my decade old L.L. Bean sleeping bag. The streetlights poured in through curtainless windows bathing me in amber light. It didn’t matter. Comfort was not a priority. Curtains were not a priority. What mattered most was maintaining independence, and I was doing it. I knew with certainty that help was not coming, and that knowledge provided unparalleled clarity of purpose: no bailout position at the non-existent family business, no cheeky little rent subsidies, no spot on the phone plan. There was no Plan B. There was Plan Me.
That said, nice girls don’t necessarily want to hold hands with Spartan maniacs who sleep on the floor. I needed to get settled in a bit. A mattress and bedding were high on the list, but also furniture, kitchen bullshit, business clothes. The list went on and on. Then the administrative items: getting a local bank account, an in-state driver’s license, a new dentist and doctor, and a bunch of other piddly tasks too numerous and menial to catalogue here. Thus, a young man learned how a significant portion of being a functioning adult who lives under a roof and sleeps in a bed, has healthy teeth in his head, and holds hands from time to time, is piddly tasks and bullshit. PT&B is a fact of life. Somehow, thanks to the font of early 20s energy and the willingness to tie a mattress to the roof, everything came together.
With a rudimentary homebase established, I was ready for the real work to begin. My start date arrived, and I suited up, showed up, rolled into the office, and… nothing. Not a soul on the entire floor aside from a few admins who reacted to my presence like I was a grown baby left on their doorstep. It makes sense in retrospect. This was a traveling profession. No one worth payroll (to a consulting firm) is in the office on a Monday. They are at a client site racking up sweet, sweet billable hours. This was an initial ripple of reality. The seduction was over. Me, along with the other half-dozen or so fresh bags of blood trickling in that morning, were there for one reason: produce hours that the firm’s partners could charge to clients.
Herdlike, the handful of us filtered over to an L-shaped cluster of desks overlooking downtown. The area was appropriately dubbed “the bullpen” and offered one hell of a view. If nothing else, the optics of the job almost always delivered, and, for some, glamour was enough to go on. Over the next few weeks, I befriended most of my start class, the group of peers I would share this odd journey with. For me, it was another found family, like the fraternity had been in college, and I came to love these smart, ambitious, and capable men and women like siblings I never had. This was the A-Team. Young guns. Shiny pennies all ‘round. We were in for a rough go, but at least we were in it together.
WELCOME WARNING
Each new hire is assigned an OBA. If I was still a consultant, I would just let that acronym hang in the air, and carry on like you knew what I meant. Consultants love acronyms. Acronyms and rewards points, but I digress. An OBA is an Onboarding Advisor, also known colloquially as an Onboarding Buddy. Mine was a gal named Kristen who had been with the firm for just over one year. It took almost a month for us to meet in person as she was travelling full time and needed another to-do list item on her calendar like a drowning man needs a brick. Eventually, we made a face-to-face happen over the course of an elevator ride. Message received.
Meeting Kristen was unsettling. Sure, she had achieved the facade of a high-powered businesswoman through fashion and comportment, but her drawn face and brittle eyes spoke to me louder than the click-clack of fancy shoes. This woman was spent. Beneath the clothes and makeup, she reminded me of an old hotel washcloth, bleached white and wrung out, ready to rip apart at the slightest misapplication of force. Her manner had the flighty, anxious characteristic of a bird, and she flitted from topic to topic. I honestly questioned her general wellness.
After exchanging rapid fire pleasantries, she slipped into robotic consulting speech to “set expectations” of what I could expect from her as an advisor and to reassure me about how great an opportunity it was to start my career with the firm, like regurgitating chewed up worms to a hatchling. I would come to recognize these sanitary, sanctioned soundbites as Consulting Doublespeak. She was rattling off reasons to stay, but the undercurrent in her eyes was reticent, like she hoped I was smart enough to know she was lying and perhaps draw my own conclusions. The dissonance I perceived fueled a growing apprehension. Surely, I was overthinking.
It turned out to be the only occasion Kristen and I would meet in person. She left the firm a few months later. I began to get the sense I had been fooled. But how? And by whom? And for what purpose? Surely, I was on the right path. I was twenty-two years old with a starting salary flirting with six-figures. In the Rust Belt city where I was based that felt like being a billionaire. I was poised for the glamour of a fast-paced lifestyle: fortune 500 companies flying me to their location; my time billed at hundreds of dollars per hour; striding through airports suited and booted on a twice-weekly basis; luxury hotels, an expense account; fancy dinners; five weeks paid vacation. This was Mad Men adjacent. This was Draper-esque. This was the life I wanted. No one mentioned a catch. Wait, there’s not a catch, right?
UTILIZATION UBER ALLES
My uneasiness persisted. I noticed there was subtext to everything. Reading between the lines was de rigueur to see the message behind the message. Even work itself was not straightforward. I was at the office. I was at my laptop. I was completing assigned tasks. I was working, right? Wrong. Technically, I was what consultants call “on the beach.” To do actual work, I had to get “staffed” on a project so the hours I worked (or, more likely, an approved portion of them) could be billed to a client. Otherwise, I earned the firm diddley. I could be in the office banging out low impact bullshit eleven hours a day, which I was, but, in the eyes of the firm, I might as well have had my toes in the sand sucking down umbrella drinks.
We were deadweight on the company dime until we got staffed: a bunch of low-utilization money-losers waiting to be shuffled out through the bureaucracy of performance reviews, improvement plans, and pariah status. No one said any of this out loud of course. We got to figure it out ourselves by observing who from the years ahead of us got forced out or fired then drawing our own conclusions from the rumor mill. The general consensus: get staffed, get billing, or get gone.
So, how does one get staffed? Good question. Essentially, you have the task of repeatedly interviewing for a job within your job again and again every few months. First, find a manager or partner or someone with pull and a billable project, then convince them to put you on it. To make that happen, you need to build a network within the firm and/or work non-billable hours creating pitch decks or doing research to help sell the work. If you breakthrough and subsequently prove yourself competent and agreeable, there is a chance you can continue with that team or have your manager help you land your next project. Easy, right? Maybe, maybe not. There are many factors at play, and the first project can be the slipperiest of bitches.
I was on the beach for about two months. That’s a long time taking pay to feel useless. An odd sense of guilt and anxiety crept over me like I was an imposter play-acting at having a big-boy job. I would drive in early to the office each morning and stay late. Eventually, I had nothing tangible to do. Most of the new hires were in the same boat. Some people stopped showing up to the office at all. That didn’t seem like a smart move even if coming in was mostly for optics. I kept showing face, kept shaking trees, and kept talking to people, but without the conveyor belt of accomplishment college provided my sense of self had begun to waver.
Then one morning, the partner who hired me walked by the bullpen then came back later to ask me how to fix something in Excel. He disappeared into his office then materialized again to ask if I wanted to get on his project. Just like that. I had finally been struck by lightning after weeks of standing in an open field holding a metal rod to the sky. He said I would start soon, but before I “rolled on” to the project there was a much discussed item of business to attend to: mandatory firm wide training for all new hires. “Fuck, yeah” I thought. I was finally in business.
KOOL-AID ANYONE?
Training for a company with hundreds of thousands of employees is not a thrown-together thing, it’s a multi-day event. The firm had hundreds if not thousands of dedicated resources involved in designing and executing every aspect of these experiences. In fact, they invested tens of millions in building a dedicated training facility in the central United States. Leadership would probably tout the “campus” as a firmwide commitment to developing a new generation of future leaders or some bullshit like that. Others might accurately describe it as an isolated compound created to perpetuate a corporate agenda. Tomato, potato. Regardless, my friends and I could either embrace the opportunity or go find a new job.
The firm flew us and hundreds of other first year analysts from around the country in for four days. The training was pushed as a chance to network and grow our personal brand. Even early on this sort of talk rung hollow. We had already heard all sorts of first and second-hand accounts about what went on at this place. Everyone was tracked and monitored. Cameras everywhere. People getting fired for unknown reasons. Partners in analyst’s rooms and vice-versa engaging in late night networking. Not good. The food, however, was supposed to be tremendous. Some advice: if you find yourself in an unfamiliar place with a group of people espousing any kind of belief system and their food is delicious, start marking the exits.
The “university” lived up to its reputation. It was like an upscale resort, beautiful, big, new, but with a complimentary sense of shared apprehension. We got bused in from the airport and were now miles off the beaten track. Leaving would require permission. Noted. We were instructed to leave our bags with staff who then ushered us into a cavernous auditorium set with circular tables. Seating was assigned. Weeks before arriving, we were required to complete pre-work which included personality tests and “anonymous” surveys. Using that information, they seated us by our “working style” labeled with varicolored dots.
I was seated with the red dots. Interesting. I’m a suspicious New England fuck by nature, so I answered all of the surveys as dishonestly as possible. I didn’t trust these people. The look in the eyes of my onboarding advisor, Kristen, put me on early alert. There was zero chance I was offering up a partial psychological profile to Big Brother. Fuck that. I sat and surveyed the auditorium in silence as the red dots chattered away excitedly. Typical fucking red dots. No awareness.
Eventually, the lights began to dim. Hush fell, and the show began. The production value was commendable. We’re talking lights, music, and of course a PowerPoint presentation projected on a massive screen loaded with pre-recorded soundbites from firm leadership. They even brought in a motivational speaker. He was wildly energetic and continuously pulled people from the crowd to stand and describe how their “personal brand” would “create value” for the firm. The scene recalled a revival tent with a charlatan preacher calling people forth to testify and be saved. I searched the expressions of those selected and noted two distinct emotions: either fear or zeal.
I exchanged a long-distance look with my start-class buddy, Jay, and mouthed: “What the fuck?” He returned a serious look and agreed with his eyes. At least I wasn’t the only one picking up a bad vibe. Staff hustled us to the next room after the event concluded, but I worked my way over to Jay through a throng of budding acolytes. We stood shoulder to shoulder filtering forward through the crowd. “What the fuck is this? A fucking cult?” I hissed. He turned to me and cocked his head. “Later,” he said, his face was a mask of concern. “What the actual fuck?” I thought. It’s just a job. What are they going to do? Murder us? No. There was too much downside potential for the firm with straight murder. All the same, we both had the temperature of the room. Tension pervaded: unspoken, intentional, and severe.
The four days passed under these conditions. There were many more group sessions, a case study, and other curiosities to keep us off balance. I don’t rattle easily, and I threw up every morning from stress. I was not the only one. Sleep deprived and teetering on the edge of a fight or flight response, we were mentally deteriorating at this place. What gives? This was supposed to be a training, right? Or was this the training? I was familiar with the concept and potential utility of hazing, but this experience surpassed the sort of artificial adversity designed to bond units together. This felt sinister. It was a filtering mechanism and an ultimatum. We were being encouraged en masse to accept a doctrine under mental duress, at a facility which we could not readily leave, for a faceless organization whose senior members profited from our servitude. In terms of career, it was a gun to the head. Not good. Not good at all. My eyes were wide open and looking for the door.
Onward. Always.
Half Good Hiker