The ladder does not love you. It does not hate you either. It uses you until it no longer needs you, then quietly removes you from the machinery. That sounds brutal until you realise it may be the greatest gift a career can give you: the chance to discover who you were before success became an identity.
We were promised freedom from hierarchy. Naturally, we responded by building millions of tiny kingdoms, crowning ourselves authorities and constructing elaborate status systems around people we had never met. The internet liberated humanity from gatekeepers, apparently so that everyone could become one. Progress, it seems, is mostly hierarchy with better bandwidth.
Humanity has apparently perfected the art of building ladders and then pretending not to notice the furnace underneath them. Revolutionaries become bureaucrats, activists become liabilities, executives become restructuring exercises, and yesterday’s heroes receive the modern equivalent of a guillotine: an HR email politely informing them that their services are no longer required.
There is, apparently, a magical point in every corporate career when appearing beside important people becomes equivalent to being important. Attend enough panels, join enough committees, smile beside enough executives and, eventually, the mascot discovers his true destiny: not merely carrying the king's banner, but explaining to the king where he went wrong.
Congratulations. You've been promoted from solving problems to attending panels about solving problems. Your photo is in the newsletter, your title now contains "Culture" or "Transformation," and nobody can explain what you actually produce. Welcome to the corporate aristocracy, where visibility is measurable, accountability is optional, and PowerPoint counts as economic output.
Every revolution, corporate transformation and fashionable crusade begins exactly the same way: someone asks for volunteers. Miraculously, the busiest and most competent people are nowhere to be found. Fortunately, an endless supply of enthusiastic amateurs is always available to save civilization from itself. Management couldn't ask for better.