Since when did we become the managers?

- She doesn’t even go here (to the office)

‘My Gen Z direct report makes me feel like an ancient relic. I am suddenly uncool, behind the times, and all my cultural references are cringe. Turns out a Wellness Action Plan is not taken seriously because of the acronym and you can’t ‘hold space’ for a meeting anymore.’ - Anon 

I’ve noticed the tone of my voice notes changing in the past year or so. Whereas before, I would be getting a rundown of people’s sordid weekend escapades (I cannot divulge many details through fear of getting censored), I’m now discussing the benefits of compassionate leadership versus the tough love approach. Gone are the days where I get 3 am voicemails of friends singing Rihanna’s Umbrella down the phone, I’m much more likely to get a 5 am pre-workout monologue about how many cashmere jumpers are needed to rotate in a work wardrobe. Apparently, Mongolia is the best for cashmere, if anyone is interested. 

As an anxious millennial who was pushed out of the nest (and crawled back in again several times to get more degrees) just after the financial crash of 2008, it seemed insurmountable that we’d ever be anything but lowly lackeys in charge of stationery orders. But after fifteen years of surviving the girl boss and lean-in era in our pit-stained Topshop blazers, we’ve finally climbed the ladder enough to add ‘senior’ or ‘manager’ onto our job titles. Technically, although I’d rather be violently sick into a bin than say it out loud, I’m a CEO, but even writing that sentence has made me squirm, and I’m not confident it will make it past the edit. 

When I first started my career many many moons ago, I remember that deep feeling of exhaustion that descended after leaving the office at 6 pm every day. I’d glance at the commuters who collectively looked as defeated as I was and wonder if films like ‘13 Going on 30’ and ‘Legally Blonde’ were propaganda tools to prevent the spread of communism. This couldn’t be the same ‘work’ they were depicting, surely? Why wasn’t I sprinting around a capital city in 5-inch sparkly Manolos and instead crying in the M&S loos, eating a discounted prawn mayo sandwich?

- Any science girlie knows you can’t get a perm wet for 24 hours

Credit: So, Have You Scene That?

Millennials are the municipal punching bags for all generations. We’ve been avocado toast munching knobheads who can’t afford a deposit, and the reason why the global population is declining. Millennials had the audacity to ruin the napkin industry, because who can afford napkins when you only buy food with a yellow reduced sticker on it?

We were also part of the last vestiges of the hazing culture at work (although I think this practice is still pretty widespread in finance and law), and I was regularly reminded what an utter piece of garbage I was for simply existing in the same space as my managers. One of my core memories of working a corporate job was being berated in front of the entire office for not CCing all the participants of an email thread, which is the reason why I still feel a sliver of terror whenever I click send on any email chain with multiple people in it. 

Accounts like _businesscasualty on Instagram parody the contradictions of millennial managers who simultaneously try to protect the boundaries of their team, whilst burning themselves out in the process. Because we know all too well what it’s like to be chewed out and spat back out over the slightest of work faux pas. 

- ‘Actually, we can’t and I don’t want to’

Credit: _businesscasualty

Laura*, who’s recently experienced the ascension to manager, says she ‘feels so much responsibility to be a good manager’ and wasn’t ‘prepared for the interpersonal difficulties of trying not to become ‘work mummy’ but also being a compassionate leader’. And what happens when you do need to have a tough conversation? Laura explains she finds it difficult to ‘sit in the space of a ‘horrible boss’ whilst crying inwardly because you hate the lack of inclusivity in the policies and procedures’. Once you become part of the managerial machine, it can be increasingly tricky to rage against the system you used to slag off when making a cup of tea in the communal kitchen in your Zara twinsuit. 

Corporate girlies don’t organise unless it’s for the good of Q2

Credit: Meditationsfortheanxiousmind

Meditationsfortheanxiousmind, a keen sociological observer, takes a more cynical standpoint on the millennial manager, a subset he refers to as the ‘corporate girlie’. Corporate girlie is matcha and muted aggression towards her subordinates. Corporate girlie is a forty-two-page slide deck edited on the Jubilee line, between 7 pm reformer pilates and a zero-waste supper club in Hackney Wick. Corporate girlie is ‘feminism that’s HR-approved, stripped of structural critique and turned into a hashtag.’  

One brief scan of the corporate girlie hashtag has me wishing I’d never looked at it in the first place. Like Meditationsfortheanxiousmind suggests, ‘it’s not girl power, it’s famine mindset’, her bio might read ‘be kind, even though last week she made an intern cry in the WeWork toilets’. Perhaps we’re more like Maggie Thatcher than we care to admit – we’ve got a seat at the table but locked the door, swallowed the key and pushed the other grindset girlies down the stairs.

Wake up, journal about manifesting, hun hustle whilst getting in 10,000 steps and repeat

And what of the men? If we’re replicating the power structures they created, they probably shouldn’t get off scot free. Mark*, a millennial manager in tech, says: ‘I tell my team verbatim, ‘If you get your work done on time and at quality, I couldn’t care less how you did it.’’ He also doesn’t believe in a ‘gold standard’ and instead encourages his team to ‘aim for bronze’. 

Trevor Bardsley*, a manager in one of the biggest companies in the land, laments how: ‘I used to be told exactly what to do every day and now I’m telling everyone what to do.’ He now ‘uses LinkedIn more than Facebook’ and tells his friends he’ll ‘circle back when asked about Friday night pints.’ Corporate lingo has now seeped into our authentic selves, blurring the lines between manager and mere mortal wanting to let off steam with a seven-quid Punk IPA; a watered-down version of your prior ability to conjugate verbs not related to action points.      

Round of pints: £36. Filling the emptiness in your soul for 2 hours: priceless.

To return to Laura* (truth be told, I could have just published her response and left it at that), if we chip away enough at the fallacy of corporate, we’re left with the rubble of our perceived inadequacy in our sweaty hands. 

‘How on earth have I ended up in this role? I feel like I’m barely functioning as a person in my personal life, but somehow I’m responsible for a budget and a team. It feels really strange because I’m searching for an adult when I feel uncertain. But I’ve now become the ‘adult’ to go to.’ 

The evolution of humanity has gone from hunter-gatherer to Google Meet in the space of 10,000 years. Maybe we were never met to ‘jump on a call’ or have ten people editing one piece of evergreen content that nobody’s going to read. Perhaps the reason we’re feeling so anxious is that we can’t biohack any more productivity into our gut biome without overdosing on kefir and sauterkaut. 

But actually, could you pass me the pickles, please? The C-suite awaits. 

* All names are fictionalised for the sake of people’s career trajectories.

Why a Cholesterol Check Has Got Me Thinking About My Impermanence

Fats, glorious fats

Perhaps I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but I’m a secret hypochondriac. With every unexpected ache and twinge (which after the age of thirty ramps up in frequency), I tend to start writing my will in my head, wondering which of my nieces would like my first edition copy of A Hundred Years of Solitude and if I did enough writing to consider it a ‘legacy’: spoiler, I didn’t. 

I also automatically assume that every plane I get on will crash, despite the likelihood of this happening being around 1 in 13 million, as well as thinking that I’ll be one of the seventeen people who die in lifts each year. My Google search reads something like: 

“Why does my left side hurt?

Are tingling toes normal?

Can a headache be a sign of cancer?

How do you know if a lift is faulty?
”

— MYSELF AT 3AM

However, low-level hypochondria doesn’t exist in a vacuum. I have a fairly legitimate reason to be concerned; hearts in my family seem to have an expiry date of between fifty and sixty years. My Granddad had a heart attack whilst he was in Portugal on holiday, to be precise. My Dad had a heart attack whilst he was in a meeting at work and didn’t tell anyone until the meeting had finished; his PA had to perform CPR on him. Luckily, he was able to get to the hospital in time for emergency surgery, but my Granddad wasn’t so fortunate. And to top it all off, my brother has recently been told his cholesterol is unusually high for his age and is taking statins at age thirty-something. 

I’ve always felt as if I had a ticking clock in my chest, with the hands slowly corroding and the face starting to melt– not to be overly dramatic or anything. But faced with all this empirical evidence (and with my brother’s insistent WhatsApp messages that we’ve drawn the short straw with dodgy tickers), I was compelled to stare the prospect of my mortality right in the eye. Because once you know about your cholesterol levels, you can’t unknow them; it’s a Schrödinger's cat of arteries, both possibilities are true– one box contains a Rebecca surrounded with custard tarts, parma ham, and chocolate eclairs, the other box is a despondent Rebecca reluctantly shoving dry quinoa into her face, shedding a singular tear.

Rebecca in happier times surrounded by pistachio croissants and full-fat milk lattes

Due to Sam’s and my nomadic lifestyle, I am somewhat of a medical tourist these days and have gotten various parts of my body scrutinised across the globe (if you’re in Vietnam, I can recommend an excellent dentist), so I booked a full medical screening as I’m now approaching my mid-thirties and I did enough binge drinking in my early twenties to kill a herd of wild horses. If someone is taking my blood, then they might as well run it for all markers of early death and give me something else to worry about in the dead of the night when my brain’s playing the top hits of all the embarrassing things I’ve done in my life: yes – thank you brain – I do remember in A-Level English when I said gonorrhoea instead of Goneril in front of the whole class when we were studying King Lear. 

I couldn’t help but see the irony of my situation when, as I was consulting with my doctor, she gave me a handwritten list of all the food I needed to try in Melacca. This wasn’t an official part of the medical screening, but I appreciated the sentiment nonetheless. However, it was evident that most of the foods on the list were either deep-fried or high in saturated fats; in fact, the roti canai (one of Malaysia’s best breakfast items, in my opinion) is probably 85% ghee and 15% more ghee. It was the Schrödinger’s cat of arteries slinking into the room again, tail covered in triglycerides. I was standing at the precipice of having a life with reduced roti canai consumption – and was this a world I even wanted to inhabit? Perhaps the unknowing of my cholesterol levels was a happy oblivion. But I couldn’t help but wonder (with my best Carrie Bradshaw impression), would the sacrifice of knowledge lead to twenty years from now, where I’m in a meeting about AI corruption of water supplies on Mars, pretending I’m not having a heart attack like my Dad? 

Food recommendations free of charge

I don’t want to bemoan the chronic underfunding of the NHS, but I was able to get an appointment within two days, and my test results came the same day, so I didn’t need to mope around being overly existential about butter. I was sent a PDF via WhatsApp with the advice I needed to make lifestyle changes. The results were in, and they weren’t dreadful, but they weren’t brilliant either. Anxious to see everything through the lens of academic success, I compared my scores with my brother, and I’d done better than him on every lipid profile. He was in the E minus territory, whereas I was a D to a C plus; my good fats were well within the healthy range, which I would like to attribute to my stalwart determination to find porridge in whatever country we’re in. 

But it was a slight cause for concern, and deep down, I know I have a penchant for ‘treats’, except they aren’t really ‘treats’ and more just commonplace in my daily routine. Emotional eating is my go-to coping mechanism, I’ll have a white chocolate cookie when I’m stressed, I’ll have a pistachio croissant when I’m sad, I’ll celebrate it being Wednesday with a mango sticky rice, and then, because it’s the weekend, I’ll travel to some obscure bakery because it sells milk chocolate buns with eyes on. I’ve been living on borrowed treat time and the truth is finally out in the open, quinoa-munching Rebecca needs to emerge from her box-prison and ask what aisle the chia seeds are in.

Would travel upwards of an hour again

Butter now has to be regarded as a foe and not a friend, only to be fraternised with on a weekly basis at best. I can’t use kaya toast to plug the void in my existence anymore, and I’ll need to find a replacement; something like ultra-marathons or learning how to ferment pickles should do the trick. Expect me to start posting my Strava maps on my Instagram stories imminently, saying things like: ‘great pace for the first 5km but dipped after my achilles heel twinged’.

And I can’t even return to binge-drinking because that’s also bad for cholesterol, and not to mention increasingly exhausting these days. Hangovers now last half a week and come with crippling anxiety and thoughts of my A-level English class when I confused a Shakespeare character with an STI. I much prefer activities like looking at particularly nice trees and birds, and endlessly doomscrolling Instagram Reels, because I’ve banned myself from TikTok after spending up to 5 hours on the app each day. 

‘In moderation’ is not something that’s synonymous with my personality. I swing from obsession to drought and back around again. I’ll read entire books in the space of a day and then not read anything for two months; I’ll take up hobbies like painting and draw jellyfish and rabbits for a week straight, buy all the equipment and then never pick up a brush again. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything ‘moderately’ in my life, so having one custard cream from the packet instead of eight doesn’t sound that fun to me.

Sorry Sachertorte, I’m breaking up with you

I’ve got six months before I need to be retested. As a recovering ‘gifted and talented’ pupil (although I got kicked out in year seven because I wasn’t very good at Maths), I feel the inherent need to ace my cholesterol scores – now all I can think about is oily fish and avocados. I’ve implemented a training regime where I’ve ripped off a popular brand of interval training classes and now shout things such as:

“One minute of burpees, followed by squat pulses. Rest period in three minutes. Can you go any faster? Climb that hill, everyone.
”

— Aerobics instructor reincarnation

Sometimes being insufferable is preferable to the alternative. I guess it’s marginally better to be the kind of person who gets up at 5 am to go barefoot running, than a person slowly filling their arteries with profiteroles. 

Look Kirby Car, we were never that serious anyway

These words are part of Crash Rhino’s Rhino Revelation series. They are completely free of charge, however, we would love to be paid for our craft by other means.

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