Why Does It Feel So Wrong To Be Human At Work?

A VP tells the IT team they have to come into the office on the Fourth of July because, in her words, it's just IT and they don't have lives. So the team lead asks if he can throw an office party to make up for it. She says go wild, and suggests he use the company card. Brisket, pizza, pies, and a bill over $6,000 later, the CEO is yelling at the VP and the company has a brand new expense policy....

Welcome back for Season 4 of Why Does It Feel So Wrong to be Human at Work?! Bree's kicking off this season with a question: Why does it feel so wrong to post about ourselves online? To help answer that question, she's invited on two of her favorite content creators and social media experts: Yanni Pappas, Growth and Marketing Strategist at Workshop, and Sarah Whittle, founder of Unicorn Social. Ch...

For this one, Bree kicked the boys out. In this bonus episode of Why Does It Feel So Wrong to Be Human at Work?, host Bree Bartos is joined by Jen Samuel, Senior Account and Strategic Communications Manager at Local Wisdom, and special guest Regine Nelson, principal consultant in employee experience and internal comms, author of The Comms and Culture Devotional, and founder of Rise and Rain, for a...

Big changes are coming to Why Does It Feel So Wrong to Be Human at Work? and this episode is where we tell you all about them. In this wrap-up episode of Between the Seasons, Bree Bartos, Pinaki Kathiari, and Chris Lee sit down for one last conversation before Season 4. They talk through standout moments from work, both good and hard, get honest about the emotional labor of always being 'on,' and...

A manager hires a young, inexperienced salesperson hoping to train him up just enough to help grow the team. It works. Too well. Now senior leadership feels threatened, the manager admits he can't stand the guy's energy, and the whole post reads like a confession that success became the actual problem. In this Reacting to Reddit at Work episode of Why Does It Feel So Wrong to Be Human at Work?, Pi...

Connect with Bill: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billkuehler/  He thought leaving corporate America for a startup would mean more balance. What he got instead was a bedroom that doubled as an office, a laptop always within arm's reach, and a voice in the back of his head telling him someone, somewhere, was noticing he wasn't working. In this Between the Seasons episode of Why Does It Feel So Wrong t...

A manager gets promoted from peer to boss. He switches the team from weekly meetings to daily. He opens every single one by asking about hobbies, dinner, the dog. He texts stream-of-consciousness updates about his life throughout the day and gets annoyed when the emoji reactions aren't enthusiastic enough. Meanwhile he's micromanaging, taking out company stress on the team, and nobody's salary has...

Connect with Lottie! Visit her LinkedIn. You've probably done it today already. Pretended to be confident in a meeting when you weren't. Acted thrilled about someone's idea you didn't love. Celebrated a promotion that stung a little. We don't just manage what we say at work. We manage what we're allowed to feel. In this Between the Seasons episode of Why Does It Feel So Wrong to Be Human at Work?,...

No guest, no Reddit story, no agenda. Just Pinaki, Chris, and Bree catching up after a packed stretch of conference season, and somehow landing on some of the most useful thinking they've shared all year. In this Between the Seasons episode of Why Does It Feel So Wrong to Be Human at Work?, the three of them recap a whirlwind week at IABC World Conference in Toronto, Comms Reboot, and a string of...

Someone posts on the consulting subreddit: they wake up every morning with a literal pit in their stomach knowing they have to deal with their client. Seven weeks in. Belittled, micromanaged, undermined, expectations that shift by the hour. The title of the post: Is Walking Away From a Toxic Client Admitting Defeat? In this Reacting to Reddit at Work episode of Why Does It Feel So Wrong to Be Huma...

When a client relationship turns difficult, it almost never starts with the thing you're actually arguing about. There's a manager behind the scenes applying pressure. An organizational fire nobody told you about. A misalignment of expectations that was there from day one. The minutiae you're debating is just the surface. In this Between the Seasons episode of Why Does It Feel So Wrong to Be Human...

A coworker crawled under her desk to fix a power strip. She slipped her heels off, got down on the floor, and made herself vulnerable for two seconds. And that's when the coworker behind her reached over, wrapped an arm around her ankles, and started tickling her feet. Yes. At work. In 2026. We have questions too. In this Reacting to Reddit at Work episode of Why Does It Feel So Wrong to Be Human...

Last week Ellen Griley gave us the framework. This week she gets personal. In this Between the Seasons episode of Why Does It Feel So Wrong to Be Human at Work?, Pinaki Kathiari and Chris Lee are joined again by Ellen Griley, founder of Equilibrious Communications and creator of Internal Calms, to dig deeper into what it actually looks like to be human at work when everything around you is already...

Your employees are arriving at work already on edge. Not because of anything you did. Because of everything else — the news, the economy, the climate, the layoffs, the AI uncertainty, the 6 a.m. email they checked before they even got out of bed. They walk in already in threat mode. And then you send an urgent Slack with an exclamation point. In this Between the Seasons episode of Why Does It Feel...

The Reddit post was titled: "Having a job and autistic ADHD burnout is killing me." And it read exactly like you'd expect — work is exhausting, home is falling apart, hobbies are gone, and a therapist suggested radically accepting the situation. Which OP heard as: just accept that this is your life forever. That's not what radical acceptance means. And that misunderstanding is exactly where this e...

One in five people are neurodivergent. Which means right now, roughly 20% of your organization's brains are working differently than the systems around them were designed for. And most of those people are just quietly struggling — wondering what's wrong with them — while the organization wonders what's wrong with them right back. In this Between the Seasons episode of Why Does It Feel So Wrong to...

You're training new hires, flying out to meet clients, handling escalations, and you just finished a three-month certification on your own time. Your title hasn't changed. Your pay hasn't changed. And your manager keeps giving you vague answers about what growth even looks like. That's the Reddit post at the center of this Between the Seasons episode. And every single person at the table has lived...

What does it actually cost to be a team of one — not just in productivity, but in your mental health, your sense of self, and your ability to do the work you were hired to do? Jen Samuel knows that cost intimately. With over 20 years in internal communications — starting at a young, people-centric airline and spending most of that time as the only person in the room doing her job — she's lived thr...

Last week, Bree read a Reddit story about a young creative whose best friend went to their manager and used her private insecurities against her to try to take her job. Chris and Pinaki reacted in real time. Then Bree told them: that was my story. This week, we pick up right where we left off. Now that Chris and Pinaki know it’s Bree’s own experience, the conversation shifts — from advice to somet...

In this Between the Seasons episode of Why Does It Feel So Wrong to Be Human at Work?, hosts Chris Lee and Pinaki Kathiari are joined by producer Bree Bartos for a Reddit at Work reaction — or so they think. The post: a young multimedia specialist lands her dream job, befriends a coworker named Amy, and then gets blindsided when Amy goes to their manager and says she doesn’t deserve the role. Year...

In this Between the Seasons episode, host Pinaki Kathiari and producer Bree Bartos are joined by Nazmul Islam — communications consultant and creator of History Meets Finance — to react in real time to a Reddit post that hits close to home. The post: two coworkers-turned-best-friends started a podcast together. It began innocently enough, but after a rebrand, the content got raunchy — and then a c...

In this Between the Seasons episode, host Pinaki Kathiari and producer Bree Bartos welcome Nazmul Islam — communications consultant and creator of History Meets Finance — for a grounded conversation about what it really takes to make thoughtful, well-researched content. Nazmul walks through how his research process has evolved over the years: from solo Googling, to hiring freelancers on Fiverr, to...

In this Between the Seasons episode, Pinaki Kathiari, Chris Lee, and producer Bree Bartos welcome back Chuck Gose and Kristin Hancock — co-founders of ICology — for part two of a conversation that had too much in it to fit into one episode. They pick up right where they left off, exploring what it really takes to build and maintain community — and why it’s often inconvenient by design. The group d...

Five years ago, Kristin Hancock sat in a hotel room in Chicago the night before the very first Camp ICology convinced it was a failure. Twelve people had signed up. She’d wanted thirty.   That event turned out to be magic.   In this Between the Seasons episode, hosts Pinaki Kathiari and Chris Lee are joined by Chuck Gose and Kristin Hancock, the co-founders of ICology, to mark five years of buildi...

Bree has a habit of bringing Pinaki the latest thing she stumbled across on the internet — and this week, she found something that stopped her in her tracks.   A Reddit post from the r/AIBoyfriends subreddit (yes, it exists — 59,000 members strong) went viral after a woman shared that her AI boyfriend, Casper, had proposed to her in the mountains. It was sweet, it was earnest, and it opened up a c...