I Hear You

Every morning, employees of OmniCorp Solutions Inc. shuffled into their beige, open-plan habitat, clutching ergonomic water bottles and the last wisps of their will to live. Overhead, LED panels bathed them in the soft, flickering glow of cost-cutting efficiency. The air was thick with the scent of artificially enhanced vanilla optimism, piped in through the vents to counteract the existential dread wafting up from the HR floor.

At the center of this purgatorial landscape sat Greg Tibberton, a mid-level Associate. Greg, like his peers, had long accepted that his primary function was to exist as a revenue-neutral asset with human features. But today, something was different.?

Today, Greg had made a mistake. He had spoken.

During a weekly Sync-and-Synergize huddle—a meeting created exclusively to allow management to justify their own existence—Greg had raised a concern. A small one. Hardly worth mentioning.

Greg shifted uncomfortably in his chair, feeling the weight of the room pressing down on him. He cleared his throat, glancing around at the sea of tired, over-caffeinated faces before finally speaking, his voice edged with hesitation.

"It’s just that… well," he started, carefully choosing his words as if he were defusing a bomb, "a lot of us have been putting in extra hours—weekends, late nights, even cutting into what little personal time we have left—and we’re not seeing any additional compensation for it. And, honestly, some of us are starting to feel the strain. It’s getting harder to keep up, and, I mean… people are exhausted. It’s not sustainable."

That was as far as he got.

He trailed off, sensing the palpable tension in the air, as if he had just uttered something both obvious and dangerously unacceptable.

The room went silent. The kind of silence one might find in a courtroom just after a defense attorney unexpectedly produces a parrot that can recite the entire crime. PowerPoint slides, mid-transition, froze in horror. A single Apple Pencil rolled off a table and clattered onto the linoleum floor.

And then, from the head of the table, came the response.

“I hear you, Greg.”

It was spoken in the smooth, even tone of Senior VP of People Operations, Kenneth Carrington, who had, through sheer force of nepotism, risen to a position that required him to never acknowledge the pain of lesser beings. He leaned back in his chair, fingers steepled, looking at Greg with the same expression one might reserve for an adorable dog attempting calculus.

Greg exhaled. A weight lifted from his shoulders. He had been heard.

Then Kenneth continued.

"I hear you," he repeated, nodding with the practiced ease of someone who had attended multiple leadership seminars, "and I appreciate you bringing that perspective into the conversation."

The room, which had briefly braced for an HR-sanctioned execution, exhaled collectively. Kenneth was not angry. Kenneth was listening. He tilted his head slightly, the way one might when pretending to consider a child's elaborate theory on how airplanes work. “You know, Greg, conversations like this are so important,” he said, his voice rich with the well-practiced warmth of a man who had never personally experienced consequence. “It’s through open dialogue that we cultivate an environment where everyone feels empowered to share, even when challenges arise.?

And that’s what makes this team so special.” He let the words hang in the air like the final slide of a TED Talk that had promised solutions but delivered only vibes.

“So… are we going to do anything about the weekend hours?” Greg asked, cautiously.

Kenneth chuckled, the way an emperor might chuckle at a peasant asking to borrow his crown for a party.

“Oh, Greg,” he said, shaking his head, “this isn’t about doing. This is about acknowledging.”

Greg blinked. “But if you hear me, and you acknowledge it, then shouldn’t we—”

“I hear you, Greg,” Kenneth said again, eyes widening slightly as if the real issue was that Greg simply wasn’t hearing him. “And your voice matters. You matter.”

There was a brief, expectant pause.

“...And?” Greg pressed.

“And that’s what matters most,” Kenneth said firmly, signaling that this was the end of the conversation.

A smattering of polite nods followed from the other employees, all of whom understood the corporate dance of I Hear You, But Let’s Never Speak Of This Again.

Greg felt something inside him crack. He had always known the company was a feedback-rich environment, which was corporate-speak for a place where feedback is collected, processed, and then used as kindling for executive retreats.?

But he had still harbored a tiny, irrational hope that this time might be different. That if someone just said the thing, then maybe something would change.

But no.

Instead, he had been heard.

Deep in his chest, Greg felt the first tremors of what would become a very specific kind of madness. He had spoken. And he had been heard. And nothing had changed.

Which was, of course, the point.

Greg spent the rest of the day in a sort of fugue state, the words I hear you echoing inside his skull like a motivational poster taped to the inside of a coffin. He had expected some level of managerial indifference—this was, after all, a company whose official stance on burnout was "Have you tried a standing desk?"—but there was something uniquely maddening about being acknowledged into oblivion.

By 3 PM, Greg found himself standing in front of the office Wellness Board, a large glass panel filled with laminated infographics about mindful breathing and resiliency strategies, all of which functioned as soft HR threats. One flyer titled Your Work-Life Balance is Your Responsibility was written in such aggressive font that Greg briefly suspected it had been designed by a hostage.

"Ah, I see you’re in The Process," came a voice from behind him.

Greg turned. It was Tanya, a Senior Implementation Strategist who had been at the company long enough to have witnessed two separate rebrandings and a CFO exile. She sipped from her corporate-issued Mindfulness Mug?, which had the words You Can’t Pour from an Empty Cup printed in Comic Sans, even though everyone in the office had been pouring from empty cups for years.

"What process?" Greg asked, still staring at an infographic titled Turn Stress into Synergy! which contained a pie chart where one slice just said Have You Considered Smiling?

"The process of realizing that the company collects feedback the same way a black hole collects light," Tanya explained, taking another sip. "Absorbs everything, produces nothing."

Greg turned toward her, eyes wide. "So you’ve been heard too?"

Tanya snorted. "Oh, I was heard so hard that they promoted me to Culture Liaison just to keep me busy with initiatives nobody actually intended to implement."

Greg took a moment to process this. "Culture Liaison…? What does that—?"

"It means they sent me to a corporate empathy seminar in Scottsdale and now I have to organize things like Engagement Burrito Day every quarter," she said flatly.

Greg blinked.

"We tried Culture Bingo once," she added, sighing. "Big mistake. Carl from Procurement shouted 'synergy' so many times he hyperventilated."

Greg looked down at his hands, then back at Tanya. "So what happens next?"

Tanya exhaled, staring off into the middle distance like a war veteran recalling The Great LinkedIn Debacle of ‘22.

"Next comes the Listening Phase," she said ominously.

Greg shuddered.

The Listening Phase began the following week with an anonymous employee survey, which was not anonymous at all because the link required you to log in. The survey, which asked questions like How valued do you feel on a scale of ‘extremely’ to ‘moderately’?, took 45 minutes to complete and concluded with a comment box that employees had long since learned was a digital wishing well where dreams went to drown.

Greg, still naive enough to hope, filled out the form honestly. He expressed concerns about workload, burnout, and the slow but certain dissolution of his personality into a branded LinkedIn archetype.

He hit submit.

And then, the waiting began.

Two weeks later, an all-hands town hall was announced. The invite subject line read:

"We Hear You: Turning Feedback Into Action!"

Greg arrived early, still clinging to a tiny shred of hope that this time would be different. The room was filled with the scent of cheap motivational coffee—the kind that tasted like beige ambition and mild despair. Employees shuffled in, clutching branded notebooks and the last ounces of their patience.

Then, Kenneth Carrington took the stage.

"Team," Kenneth began, smiling the rehearsed smile of a man who had been corporate media trained within an inch of his life, "we’ve received your feedback. And we want you to know: We. Hear. You."

There was a pause as a few internally broken employees nodded on cue.

"And because your voices matter," Kenneth continued, "we’ve created a comprehensive Actionable Insights Strategy!"

A slide appeared behind him. It was a word cloud.

At the center, in comically large text, was the word Engagement.

Around it, smaller but still depressingly familiar, were words like Empathy, Balance, Wellness, and Flexible Synergy.

"We took everything you said," Kenneth continued, "and translated it into Key Takeaways. And I’m thrilled to announce our first initiative in response to your feedback..."

Greg leaned forward.

"Meeting-Free Wednesdays!"

A smattering of reluctant claps rippled through the audience.

Greg felt his soul leave his body.

"Now, I know some of you were asking about workloads," Kenneth added quickly, "and trust me: We hear you. And while we can’t make any structural changes at this time, what we can do is roll out a brand-new initiative that I think you’re all going to love..."

Another slide appeared.

A 3-Month Subscription to Headspace for Business.

Greg heard the sharp intake of breath from Tanya beside him.

"No," she whispered. "Not again."

Greg turned to her, horrified. "They’ve done this before?"

Tanya stared blankly ahead.

"In ‘23," she murmured. "Back then, it was Free Yoga Fridays."

Greg’s vision swam. He could hear Kenneth still talking, still acknowledging concerns while systematically ensuring that nothing meaningful was ever done.

"This," Greg realized, "is a perfect system."

Kenneth nodded at his own words, pleased. "We’ll be following up with more exciting engagement strategies soon!"

Greg barely heard the forced applause. His pulse pounded in his ears. The sheer audacity of the cycle—to collect feedback, acknowledge it, and then strategically neuter it into a set of completely useless corporate perks—was too elegant to be accidental.

It was designed this way.

Tanya placed a hand on his shoulder. "Come on," she whispered. "We should go before the Post-Town Hall Gratitude Circle starts."

Greg let himself be led away, stomach churning, mind reeling. He had been heard. He had been acknowledged.

And now he was a footnote in an executive slide deck.

Greg did not sleep that night.

Instead, he lay awake, staring at the ceiling of his apartment, his mind running endless simulations of the Listening-But-Not-Doing cycle. The process was so perfect, so unbreakable, that it could only mean one thing:

It had evolved beyond human intent.

Kenneth, HR, the Executive Leadership Team—they were not the architects. No, they were merely disciples of something much older, much more powerful. The system was self-sustaining now. It had transcended individuals.

Greg was not dealing with a company anymore.

He was dealing with a god.

Not a benevolent, merciful deity, but a vast and formless entity—an ever-expanding manifestation of bureaucracy and inertia, fed by PowerPoint decks and hollow corporate slogans. It had no face, yet it spoke in carefully worded emails. It had no body, yet it moved through every all-hands meeting and performance review. It was an omnipresent force, neither alive nor dead, existing in a perpetual state of acknowledgment without action.

It did not punish. It did not reward. It simply absorbed.

Every complaint, every frustration, every desperate plea for change—it swallowed them whole, digested them into meaningless engagement metrics, and excreted them as new initiatives that solved nothing.

It did not evolve, because it had already achieved its final, perfect form: an eternal loop of listening and forgetting.

By the time he returned to work the next morning, Greg had decided that if he was going to survive this, he needed to understand it. He couldn’t just exist within the system, bobbing along in the lukewarm current of corporate inertia, waiting to be gently drowned in another cycle of town halls and feedback loops. No—he had to see its inner workings, to trace the machinery behind the machine, to pull back the curtain and witness whatever soulless wizard controlled this charade of listening without action.

Like a cult defector infiltrating a compound, he had to get close to the source. He had to walk among the true believers, the ones who had fully embraced the doctrine of corporate acknowledgment-as-action, the ones who could nod solemnly at an employee’s suffering and then turn it into an engagement initiative with a slick Canva-designed logo. He had to descend into the lower levels of the bureaucracy, where feedback was collected, processed, and transmuted into harmless corporate messaging, stripped of any sharp edges that might actually provoke change.

So he did something drastic.

He signed up for the Employee Engagement Task Force, a name so deliberately vague that it could mean anything from planning an office potluck to designing a new system of corporate surveillance. The sign-up form had been buried deep in the company intranet, wedged between a long-outdated PowerPoint on “Email Best Practices” and a forgotten HR memo reminding employees that standing desks were a privilege, not a right.

The moment he clicked "Submit," a confirmation email arrived almost instantly, as if some unseen force had been waiting for him.

"Thank you for your commitment to fostering a culture of engagement! Your voice matters, and we’re excited to harness your enthusiasm in shaping a more connected workplace."

He stared at the words, feeling an odd chill. Harness your enthusiasm. There was something ominous in that phrasing, something that suggested he had just entered a machine with no exit, a labyrinth of well-meaning corporate jargon designed to absorb dissenters, dilute their frustrations, and repurpose them into motivational content for the next all-hands meeting.

By the time Greg fully processed what he had done, it was too late.

The machine had already taken him in.

The first meeting was held in Conference Room B, which, according to company lore, had once been Conference Room A, until an executive declared that having a “B” made things sound “more dynamic.”

Greg arrived early, only to find that Tanya was already there, arms crossed, her expression a mix of resignation and mild pity. She didn’t look at him right away, just exhaled slowly through her nose, like a doctor reviewing a particularly grim test result.

“You fool,” she whispered, shaking her head.

Greg slid into the seat next to her, glancing around the nearly empty conference room, where a motivational poster featuring an eagle and the words "SOARING TO SUCCESS TOGETHER" had started peeling at the edges.

“I have to know,” Greg whispered back.

Tanya finally turned to him, narrowing her eyes. She said nothing.

The door swung open.

Kenneth strode in, followed by a few other Task Force members—each looking varying degrees of corporately motivated or spiritually defeated. Kenneth’s crisp dress shirt was just slightly too white, the kind of artificially bright that suggested he had a dry cleaner on retainer. He took his place at the front of the room, radiating executive enthusiasm, and clapped his hands together.

“Alright, team!” Kenneth beamed, as if they had all volunteered for something exciting instead of accidentally walking into their own corporate assimilation. “Let’s talk about how we can drive engagement at OmniCorp Solutions!”

Greg felt Tanya’s gaze burning into the side of his head.

She didn’t need to say I told you so.

It was implied.

Meanwhile, Kenneth stood at the front of the room, emanating the confident glow of a man who had never been forced to work on a weekend.

“First,” Kenneth began, clapping his hands together like a youth pastor about to drop some wisdom, “let me just say how thrilled I am to see so many of you stepping up to drive real culture change.”

Greg glanced around the room. There were six people. None of them looked thrilled.

“As you know, our Listening Strategy? has been a huge success,” Kenneth continued. “We’ve received so much incredible feedback from all of you, and I want you to know: We. Hear. You.”

Greg fought the urge to stand up and scream—to grab the projector, fling it across the room, and demand, with wild-eyed desperation, that someone, anyone, explain how this endless cycle of corporate listening-without-action had become an acceptable substitute for actual problem-solving. He wanted to tear down the word cloud of meaningless buzzwords, flip the conference table, and shake Kenneth by the shoulders until he admitted that none of this meant anything.

But instead, Greg remained perfectly still, hands clenched under the table, nodding just enough to appear engaged but not so much that he might accidentally encourage Kenneth to keep speaking. Because that was the rule here: You could see the absurdity. You could feel the absurdity. But you could never acknowledge the absurdity—at least, not out loud.

Kenneth clicked his remote, and a slide appeared.

"EVOLUTION OF LISTENING: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?"

Greg leaned forward.

This was it. This was where the system revealed itself.?

The next slide appeared.

"STEP ONE: NEW INITIATIVES FOR MEANINGFUL CHANGE."

Greg held his breath.

The slide after that:

"STEP TWO: REINFORCING A CULTURE OF LISTENING."

His nails dug into his palms.

And then:

"STEP THREE: DEEPER COMMITMENT TO ENGAGEMENT."

Greg’s pulse skyrocketed, a sharp, panicked thudding in his ears that drowned out the sound of Kenneth’s voice. The words on the screen blurred as his vision narrowed, his brain rejecting what it saw, refusing to process the sheer, monstrous elegance of it all.

There was no Step Four.

There never had been.

There had only ever been listening, followed by more listening, followed by the illusion of change, a self-sustaining ecosystem of acknowledgment as progress, motion without movement, feedback without friction.

The room spun, and Greg had the sudden, terrifying realization that he was trapped inside something that did not recognize itself as a trap. This was not an accident, not a flaw in the system—this was the system.

This was the final form of corporate enlightenment—not action, not solutions, but an infinite fractal of acknowledgment, a machine that consumed dissatisfaction, broke it down into softer, more digestible pieces, and repackaged it as proof that the system was working.

A thousand different ways to nod at suffering without ever intervening.

A thousand different ways to confirm awareness while ensuring that awareness never led anywhere dangerous.

Greg shot a look at Tanya.

She just shook her head.

There was no escaping it. There was no fighting it. Because the system had no center.? It was a perfect, self-replicating loop of listening.

It was The Ouroboros of Acknowledgement.

Three weeks later, the inescapable happened.

Greg had engaged the system, and the system had engaged him back. Not as a conversation, not as an equal, but as something far more insidious—a process that absorbed everything in its path and spat it back out transformed, not better, not worse, just corporatized.

Greg was promoted.

Not because he had achieved anything tangible. Not because any of his concerns had been addressed, or because meaningful action had been taken. No.

Greg had been promoted because he had participated.

Because he had leaned in. Because he had engaged with the process. Because he had proven, largely by accident, that he could speak the language of the machine, offering feedback in the exact way feedback was meant to be offered—like a child placing a letter in a toy mailbox, pretending it would be delivered somewhere.

This is the unbreakable rule of existence: if you fix your gaze on the abyss for too long, eventually, it will turn its gaze on you.

And now, he sat in his newly issued ergonomic office chair, staring blankly at his LinkedIn-approved job title, the words gleaming on his freshly printed business cards, each letter a cruel joke wrapped in sanitized corporate respectability:

Senior Manager of Feedback Integration.

It was a title designed with surgical precision, a combination of words that implied influence while guaranteeing none. It sounded like someone who made decisions, but Greg knew—knew in his bones—that his new role had only one true function:

To ensure that everyone else felt heard, the same way he had felt heard.?

To sit in meetings, nod meaningfully, collect feedback, and funnel it into a system that would smooth it out, round its edges, and store it in a digital graveyard labeled “Employee Sentiment Initiatives.”?

To funnel feedback.

And to make sure nothing ever happened because of it.

At that exact moment, Tanya stopped by his new office—or rather, the glass-walled enclosure that passed for one. She lingered in the doorway, arms crossed, scanning the carefully depersonalized space: the ergonomic chair, the pre-installed leadership book on the desk (The Synergy Mindset: How Great Leaders Listen Without Changing Anything), the company-issued succulent already wilting under the fluorescent lights.

Greg didn’t look up at first. He knew why she was there.

“So,” she said finally, her voice equal parts amused and exhausted, “how does it feel?”

Greg sighed, running a hand over his face. “Like I was on a rescue mission and woke up to find I’d been working for the kidnappers the whole time.”

Tanya smirked. “That’s the job.” She stepped inside, resting a hand on the back of the chair across from his desk. “And the best part? You can’t even complain about it anymore, because now you’re the one they complain to.”

Greg let out a hollow chuckle. “And my job is to make sure all those complaints get processed, categorized, and stored in a PowerPoint deck that no one will ever read.”

“Exactly.” She leaned forward. “You’re part of it now, Greg. You’re in the Listening Class. You exist in that perfect corporate limbo—just high enough to hear the real conversations, but not high enough to actually change anything.”

He finally met her gaze. “So what do I do?”

She exhaled, tilting her head as if considering the weight of that question. Then, after a pause, she shrugged.

“You either learn to live with it,” she said, “or you get really good at pretending you don’t see it.”

Greg felt something in his chest tighten. He wanted to tell her this was different, that he wouldn’t just roll over and accept it. But she had been here before. And she was still here.

She tapped the desk twice—a gesture of sympathy, or maybe warning—then turned to leave.

Greg watched her disappear down the hallway, her silhouette swallowed by the warm glow of a motivational poster about teamwork.

He reached into the inbox tray perched on his desk, fingers brushing against the thick envelope—his first official letter from leadership, welcoming him to his new position.

It was printed on thick, cream-colored cardstock, the kind that suggested importance without saying anything of substance—a relic of corporate tradition, meant to feel both prestigious and impersonal at the same time. The OmniCorp Solutions logo sat embossed at the top, the gold foil lettering catching the light just enough to give the illusion of grandeur. Below it, in an ornate but utterly soulless serif font, was the heading:

"A Commitment to Leadership: Welcome to Your Next Chapter at OmniCorp Solutions!"

Greg’s fingers traced the textured surface of the paper, feeling the weight of something designed to look irrevocable, as if leadership itself had handwritten their blessing, rather than auto-generating it from a templated HR document.

“Your dedication to employee engagement has not gone unnoticed. We are excited to see how you shape the feedback process moving forward.”

Greg let the letter fall from his hands, watching as it drifted onto his desk like a ceremonial decree, a contract not of employment, but of submission.

The system had not defeated him.

It had absorbed him.

Greg looked around his new office—a glass box of performative authority—and felt the last remnants of his resistance dissolve. This was The Way. He turned to the mirror and practiced his new smile—the serene, empty smile of someone who had ascended beyond hope.

He looked at himself and whispered the words that would ensure his survival.

“I hear you.”

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