Work, Abuse, and Unwinnable Games

... and those who lose, but cannot stop playing.

Those of us who have played a lot of video games are all familiar with That One Boss, the pixelated adversary who ruined us several times in quick succession, leading us to spend our off hours trying to find ways to defeat him. I’m talking about “Nintendo hard”, I’m talking about unfair hitboxes and unforgiving mechanics, the fights that made a two-hour game take twenty. Still, most video games—especially modern ones designed to be played on consoles rather than in arcades, where it is better that the player achieve victory before losing interest—are designed so that, if one is observant and keeps playing, the odds of defeating That One Boss and being able to explore the rest of the game are high. Life, on the other hand, is not that way. Sometimes, That One Boss is unbeatable and the only non-losing play is to move on.

I have a friend who is extremely unsuccessful with women. He’s probably on the spectrum—he’s more socially awkward than I am—and he’s not very attractive, though he isn’t so bad-off that he couldn’t work his way up to average if he bulked up, and he makes enough money that he could probably settle down and start a family if he wanted to do so. His problem, although he has mellowed with age and is no longer socially obnoxious, is that he’s only interested in the same type of woman who rejected him in high school: the bubbly blonde (ex-)cheerleader. She, for him, is That One Boss. He keeps playing, and he will never win.

I suspect there is a story of abuse here, not by the women rejecting him, but involving his father and possibly his brother, who were both neurotypical but emotionally abusive, though socially adept enough to attract women. I am going to hazard the guess that it is not healthy for a teenage boy to hear his father brag about past sexual conquests in front of his mother. Decades later, I believe this man is still trying to prove that he can “get” women like his obnoxious father and brother; he is obsessed with women who rejected him years ago, which is disturbing to say the least, but I do not think it is about the women themselves. He is trapped in a game he has never won and, because he has never won, he is obsessed with it and cannot let it go.

I suspect this is also what’s going on when people fall serially into abusive relationships—that they are trying to beat an unwinnable game, to defeat That One Boss. They believe that, this time, they can tame the monster. Abusers are addictive; they have a way of making themselves seem like the only colorful figures in a flat drab world, the only people who see the truth in a mendacious world that hides its impulses toward dominance and submission, and they often lead their targets to feel as if nothing else so far in their lives has mattered, or ever will. Thus, people—stereotypically, a woman, but you see this in men as well—hop from one abusive relationship to another, addicted by these calculated streams of rewards and punishments, and convinced they can bring out the good person (as if one ever existed) within the evil one forever. It never works. Abusers—psychopaths and narcissists—are not the only awful people in the world, but they’re the most adept at turning their awfulness into a sick game that their targets often cannot help but play, but winning is impossible and the costs of losing are often severe.

Work, under capitalism, is an abusive relationship for most people. This is a controversial claim, but hear me out. A romantic partner who threatens to starve one’s children unless his demands are met is one we would tell a friend to run like hell away from, but we do not say this about employers because, after all, they’re still going to need a job, and almost every employer (some more subtly than others) does this. If a jealous ex-boyfriend calls a woman’s future romantic partners and maligns her, this is felony stalking; on the other hand, an ex-boss who throws around bad references, though despised by us workers, is usually considered by his peers to be doing a service. Very few have the social connections or economic freedom (that is, independent wealth) to ever find their way to a job that is not abusive. Most people are stuck with what they get.

It is abuse; it is humiliating; we are just so used to it, most of us don’t see it that way. Six minutes late for a daily status meeting? Well, this has been noted, and it probably means nothing, but it might mean you don’t get a cost-of-living adjustment this year, and if a desirable project becomes available, it’ll probably be given to someone else. But hey! If you’re on time for the next hundred daily status meetings, and if we like what you have to say in them, we’ll probably forget all about this and you’ll be back where you started.

It is, quite frankly, completely insane that we allow this system to be imposed upon us. It isn’t productive—the work could still get done without all the emotional abuse and weird added social labor—and its costs (stress-related deaths, suicides, family and marital failures) outweigh its benefits. People in the future will be astonished, if they read of our current era, that we tolerated this system for so long.

The truth is that global corporate capitalism could be ended in a few weeks if workers had a coherent collective will. There are hundreds of us—globally, thousands—for every one of them. It would obviously be best for everyone for the bourgeoisie to vacate power peacefully, but even the worst-case estimates of a successful violent revolution against capitalism result in fewer deaths than the number of people capitalism kills in two or three years, to say nothing of the possible death tolls in the climate emergency that the capitalist caused. The moral case for removing capitalism from the human world, no matter the cost, could not be clearer. Individually, it makes sense so long as people accurately understand their odds; the five years of chaos that a revolution against capitalism might bring are still miniscule compared to fifty years of miserable labor followed by old-age poverty. Many people, though, fail to see it this way because they have been promised—or believe they have been promised—individual success. The boss said he “sees something in” me. I might get a meeting with the CEO! Must… keep playing… today… might… be… the day… I… win.

When young, people are told they will be brought into the executive suite—and, if they invest their salaries well, move effortlessly into the owning class—if they simply “perform” at work, and it never occurs to them to ask to have terms defined. They overestimate their ability to spot lies, and they massively overestimate their own likeability, so they assume their bosses will ensure nothing bad ever happens to them. When it does, they are shocked.

Let’s compare the rigged game of work to a slot machine. Both exist to make losing players feel as if they are winning, but using completely opposite mechanics. The slot machine exploit’s the human mind’s tendencies both to lump similar experiences together, and to move on quickly after a loss—it doesn’t feel good, but you can always play again. Over time, players forget their numerous small losses but remember their wins; it feels as if they’re making money, but they’re losing. This is why so many long-playing slot-machine losers insist on having “a system” or a sixth sense of when a machine (which, in fact, disburses results according to computerized random numbers generated hundreds of times per second) is about to pay off big. The small losses get coalesced into one ordinary experience, but the big wins are not only remembered but strongly felt.

Work, on the other hand, as the opposite design. The good days bring slow incremental progress—one’s familiarity and social credit go up a little bit, so the promotion or plum project that was once 1,095 days away is now 1,094 days away. The high-impact events, on the other hand, are losses. People get humiliated in meetings, relationships are destroyed over nothing, and workers get laid off or fired. A month of unemployment damages one’s savings more than a gainfully employed month improves them. Most project reassignments and reorganizations are not in the worker’s favor, because they result in power accruing to the people who initiate them and, on average, this means workers lose; they are not “resistant to change” because they are industrially incompetent but because they know, from experience, that most change is going to be bad. When good things happen, the bosses are rewarded; when bad things happen, it all falls on the worker.

From a game design perspective, this seems like a disaster. How many patrons would there be for a slot machine that paid out most of the time, but only in small amounts, infrequently (but, over time, reliably) dishing out major losses? Very few, I would guess. Arguably, this is what gambling actually looks like for professional players in skill games—frequent small wins, a risk of large losses. If they are disciplined, they can turn a profit, but the temptation toward indiscipline is quite strong: a top-notch pot-limit poker player might earn (with some day-to-day variation) $2,000 in a twelve-hour night, but a lucky idiot can make $750,000 on a gutshot straight he should have never played. And this is a problem that even some of the smartest gamblers cannot escape: skilled, by-the-book play bores them, so they take risks they shouldn’t. Slot machines and infrequent, luck-based upside, even if you have an IQ over 150, are fun, because the lights go off and positive attention comes your way whenever you win. Work isn’t, for most people, very fun at all.

I suspect the psychological principles behind the designs are also opposite to each other. In the case of a slot machine, the goal is to make a free person—of course, the player is usually a member of the proletariat, thus not actually free, but he is free in this sense because he can leave the casino at any time—behave like a captive. Yes, I am a slave. Yes, my life is ruled by money. But if the right symbols roll up, I am the fuck out of here. Custodians at casinos hate cleaning up the slots rooms, because so many patrons soil themselves while playing; the temptation of financial freedom is that strong. Slaves are never free, but they are least free when chasing what they believe is their one chance at freedom. The sheer obvious randomness of the process—slot machines require no skill or effort from the player—is an added bonus, because it means anyone can win. The player, who is free in the sense that he could lose money at any other casino, or simply choose to stop playing and not lose any more money, feels and turns captive. The next pull is the one, I can feel it.

A casino that inverted this principle—occasional large losses, frequent small wins—would struggle. As I mentioned, this is what skilled play in games like poker tends to look like, and most people cannot tolerate the tedium and lose their discipline. So, why is office work able to invert the slot machine principle and find success? The obvious answer is that office work is not supposed to be casino gambling. It’s respectable. It’s productive. You get good-boy points if you do it well. Putting up with this abusive relationship with capitalism is not merely expected of us it is celebrated. The small-loss/big-win profile of the slots player makes him feel lucky. The small-win/big-loss profile of work makes workers, if they haven’t had a big loss for a while, feel competent. If winning a work day means not getting fired, then even the most incompetent and unlucky players still have win rates over 99 percent.

Casinos can make their jackpot wins large because those happen so rarely; in between, frequent small wins exist to keep people playing so they do not lose interest, but the most important design principle is that the losses not take up much time, since it is the forgetting of these small losses that keeps people playing. The workplace, on the other hand, uses high-magnitude punishments to cause fear, but prefers that they not happen so often they become emotionally disruptive. The daily “standup” (status) meeting might turn into a humiliating three-hour tirade against one’s performance, but it probably won’t. Performance reviews are supposed to be scary, but most people are going to get “Meets Expectations” and have nothing to worry about. The hammer has far more value when it is raised than after it has been swung. If most workdays are uninspiring tiny wins, then office workers will too feel as if they “have a system” and can avoid major losses, since those only happen to people who deserve them. Since management wants these long-term losers to win (or, at least, feel they are winning) often, but since the magnitude of the win is held to be less important, there is no incentive when serious windfalls occur for management to share them with workers. It is better to hide that money under the board and let it dribble out over time; if the company later decides it no longer needs or wants the person who actually earned it, this delayed approach saves money.

Slot machines trick people who are free to leave the casino into behaving as if they were captive. Corporate work, with its opposite profile of tiny rewards and outlier punishments, achieves the opposite effect—it makes captive people, wage slaves, believe they are free. In fact, there is a certain freedom that a worker has, when conditions are good. Someone who is employed by Company X can usually get an identical job at Company Y; in fact, to compensate for the risk of having to prove oneself to a new set of people, a tiny raise might be thrown in, too. Bosses are well aware of workers having this option, but it doesn’t bother them, because they still political power on account of the advantage of first strike. The boss gets to decide, every day, if he wants to fire that worker and, if he does so, getting that equivalent job at Company Y turns from easy to almost impossible. Negative references do exist—although they arguably should be, they are not illegal—and bad smells travel. The permanent record is real, and bosses know it. The mobility and freedom workers think they have can be taken away at any time, so it is not real.

A casino wants high-impact wins to be visible and the more common losses to go unnoticed, because it wants people to think they can win without doing anything but putting money into a machine that occasionally emits lots of money. A workplace, on the other hand, wants the losses to brutal and visible. It wants workers to feel superior over the losing players—I didn’t get a raise, but at least I’m not that guy who’s been fired three times in 12 months, whose wife is probably fed up with his financial disability—so they feel protected by the company from the company, and therefore are grateful. If the worker feels like he is always winning—and, moreover, feels there are things he can do to ensure he wins—then he will not perceive the system as oppressive, even if it is being said to him in plain language that bad things do happen to “other people.”

In fact, processes that are plainly dysfunctional can often serve management’s interests. Stack ranking processes—the routine ranking and firing of a percentage of the workforce, even if many of those people have done nothing wrong—tend to have a lot of good workers get “killed by the dice” and, even though most executives will claim that no mistakes (except in hiring “those people”) were ever made and that only low performers got sacked, they will privately admit that it does happen. In fact, the risk of a good worker getting killed is part of the point. Ultimately, these “low performer initiatives” are not about low performers at all, and whether the people who lose their jobs are the actual low performers (since most middle managers are so strapped—the good ones are overburdened, and the bad ones are idiots—they don’t even know who the low performers are) is beside the point, because these processes exist to scare the performance middle classes, the people who will never get meaningful promotions and are beginning to realize it, but are still valuable enough to the organization that it would hurt if all of them started slacking at the same time. The people who get “lost” in these “performance management” processes, whether they were actual low performers or not, are just collateral damage.

The worker, therefore, has a daily experience that leads him to believe that his “system” is working. Only when they look at their lives in review, either toward the end or in a midlife reckoning, do they realized that their existences, as workers, have been drab and miserable—that they hated every morning commute where it took 45 minutes to go sixteen miles, that their emotional investment in an ersatz community that forgot them the moment they left for something else (or were banished/fired) was a waste, that they spent 90 percent of their money to chase more money that at some point, due to age and bad luck, never came. This is sometimes called “midlife crisis” but the literature on the topic is pretty clear that no such thing exists; people can have psychiatric, emotional, or motivational crises at any time, and there is nothing uniquely bad or unlucky about midlife—it just happens to be, since middle age arguably runs from 35 to 65, a long period of time. Still, what we see is that the moment of crisis tends to come earlier and earlier. Boomers got to age 60 and found that the money hadn’t bought happiness—but, still, didn’t give it up. Xers started hitting this wall at 50 due to increased corporate ageism. We Millennials started getting jaded in our late 30s and our 40s, and Zoomers—at least, the ones who get our attention on TikTok and Reddit—figured out, like Eleanor in The Good Place, where they were on the second or third job. This is progress, probably. It is acceleration, but it is hard to be sure what we are accelerating toward.

Alas, for now, capitalism continues. It is not enough for people to individually lose belief in the system. After all, almost no one fears an oligarch himself, but everyone fears the despot’s hired swords, so the oligarch loses power if the hired swords can be convinced to turn. There must be a collective and legible loss of faith; people not only need to lose belief in the system, but also feel confident that everyone else has lost belief, before progress can be made. That day may come soon, or it may take another hundred years. The reason it has not arrived already is that there are too many who dutifully keep playing the work game, waiting for their invitation into executive management and the upper class to come, as if such things were actually handed out based on character rather than circumstance. By the time they realize they have been played and that their big win will never arrive, they are old enough that the system feels it can safely discard them.

We may one day see it, though. Nothing in the laws of physics prevents people from realizing that they would be better if this abusive relationship with capitalism could end, and if it happened quickly, we could find ourselves in a much better world.