Lots of the details hit for me (the lifelong habits from marching band, moments alone of feeling a little actually-crazy, being terrible at remembering names well past the point where you feel like you should have gotten good at that, the conference room lights shutting off and awkwardly standing to make them come back on, trying not to look as idle and bored as you are).
It's mostly about big-corp life, though—my time with startups and little agencies and such didn't much resemble this, day to day, but still had some of that "why the fuck are people paying me to do this?" factor, like having finished projects cancelled without ever being released due to corporate politics or because it turns out a client was only paying us build a product as a BATNA for some acquisition negotiation and they weren't really planning on using it except as a bargaining chip, or having clients (or your own startup leaders...) assign you projects that you're 100% certain are a bad idea that's never going anywhere (and sure enough, you get it done, and it flops, for exactly the reasons you could have told them it would on day 1).
Like, 80+% of the work I've ever been paid to do has been kinda pointless except to drive the gears on some abstract large-scale money-making machine that randomly sometimes produces returns but mostly just makes everyone do a bunch of work that at least someone involved already knows isn't valuable, at least not for any straightforward reasons, but everyone has to do anyway to keep the gears turning.
Feeling lost in a large org, the awkwardness of being new at a large office and of kinda clinging to the very-few people whose names you can remember, being told you're doing well and being paid great while kinda feeling like you're just coasting along and money's showing up in your account for no good reason and because that's just how your stumbling-through-life path has worked out, for whatever reason, but why should that continue for another day and OMG what will I do if people figure out they could just not do a bunch of this stuff and nothing bad would happen and they'd save money and I'd be out of a job and what else do I even know how to do and is this current too-easy gig making me soft and messing me up for future employment (but they're all kinda like that...)—very relatable.
Working at Microsoft, my final task was to write a monitoring and keepalive subsystem for an API that aggregated monitoring dashboards.
This is absolutely how that feels. With the exception of my boss reneging on promised expenses and the magical realism elements: I came in, did scrum, said everything was fine, then fucked around on factorio because I could be interrupted at any time, with a 5 minute SLA target, but often days passed between these events. Don’t worry, I had tons of recommendation panels to advise on steering committees to sit silently on. It’s… it’s this, you have nothing to do and all the time to do it in, paid (in my case) primarily to not work somewhere else.
I never even learned the names of the products the dashboards monitored.
I think that's more metaphorical—unpleasant but easy, unclear what benefit it's providing, somehow leaves you out-of-sorts the whole week so the days slip away even though, when you look at it, there's not good reason for that (making you feel even worse). And getting punched is bad, but is it that bad? Just one punch a day, and in the stomach? It's degrading, but what isn't, and it's not like they're making you feel bad about it, it's just how things are. And the pay is so good. Subjectively you're miserable but objectively you shouldn't be, which makes you more miserable.
Meanwhile you feel like an imposter, but everything else the others are doing also looks kinda-fake but you're never quite sure if it is and everyone else is just playing along, or if you're the odd man out and just don't get why all that stuff is useful because you're too dumb, and are just lucky nobody's yet noticed that you're not doing anything useful.
Right -- I mean the misery at work is what I cannot relate to.
Furthermore, if the best way to support my family and to live my non-professional life is to take a punch in the stomach each morning, I think I'd find a way to deal with it?
Yeah, the counter-point to this is something like Yates' Revolutionary Road—you're not as special as you think, you definitely don't have the ambition to back up the way you think your life should look and probably not enough to make anything of it even if you were dropped into that situation for free, most of your misery is because you think you should have something else, and hey, look around—of course you don't like your job, that's the deal, and the more "nice life" you want the less you'll like it, and that accidental-success you're seeing there without even trying is something you should be leaning into rather than being repulsed by.
In short, being a little clever just means you can live normal life on easy mode and you shouldn't feel bad about that, and wanting something more meaningful or glamorous or romantic without actively putting in the work to make that happen and accepting the sacrifices that come with it is just you making yourself miserable for no good reason.
(And of course if you're in the throes of that sort of a mood, being familiar with the above perspective just makes it worse, even as it offers a way out to acceptance of a life as an ordinary schlub who doesn't have things too hard, LOL)
[EDIT] I'm nearing the end and I think, to this piece's credit, some of this criticism of the perspective character's ("your") mindset is present as both text and subtext, plus a good deal of the darker thoughts and moments we're clearly to take as the output of a mind that's unwell and trying to square external reality, perceived un-reality of their situation, a certain awareness of their own privilege, plus the inescapable fact that they simply are not doing OK and are aware that they aren't and also aware that they should be and everyone else seems to be—rather than taking them as something the author intends for us to take as big-T or objectively True just because the perspective character is presenting these thoughts to us.
I'm sure it's not universal, but I bet a lot of HN readers have at least had one job in the past where they were 1. paid very well, but 2. their day-to-day of work felt metaphorically like a daily punch in the stomach. I certainly have, and it took me 4 years (the full stock vesting period, LOL) to break away from it.
Lots of people (including me) have gotten burnt out from a job that should be a dream job, yet somehow manages to inflict so much mental pain that you have trouble getting up from bed.
I don’t resonate with the “my job is bullshit” parts of the story, but I feel like the story does an excellent job of describing how burnout feels. Each day is physically painful and it starts taking an increasing toll both physically and mentally to show up to work.
It's mostly about big-corp life, though—my time with startups and little agencies and such didn't much resemble this, day to day, but still had some of that "why the fuck are people paying me to do this?" factor, like having finished projects cancelled without ever being released due to corporate politics or because it turns out a client was only paying us build a product as a BATNA for some acquisition negotiation and they weren't really planning on using it except as a bargaining chip, or having clients (or your own startup leaders...) assign you projects that you're 100% certain are a bad idea that's never going anywhere (and sure enough, you get it done, and it flops, for exactly the reasons you could have told them it would on day 1).
Like, 80+% of the work I've ever been paid to do has been kinda pointless except to drive the gears on some abstract large-scale money-making machine that randomly sometimes produces returns but mostly just makes everyone do a bunch of work that at least someone involved already knows isn't valuable, at least not for any straightforward reasons, but everyone has to do anyway to keep the gears turning.
Feeling lost in a large org, the awkwardness of being new at a large office and of kinda clinging to the very-few people whose names you can remember, being told you're doing well and being paid great while kinda feeling like you're just coasting along and money's showing up in your account for no good reason and because that's just how your stumbling-through-life path has worked out, for whatever reason, but why should that continue for another day and OMG what will I do if people figure out they could just not do a bunch of this stuff and nothing bad would happen and they'd save money and I'd be out of a job and what else do I even know how to do and is this current too-easy gig making me soft and messing me up for future employment (but they're all kinda like that...)—very relatable.