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

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...

What happens when something you used to love suddenly feels exhausting? In this Between the Seasons episode of Why Does It Feel So Wrong to Be Human at Work? , hosts Pinaki Kathiari and Chris Lee are joined by Rich Dome, Senior Director of Partnerships at Local Wisdom, as Bree brings a Reddit story to the table about networking burnout. The post comes from a seasoned sales professional who once th...

Conferences are not just about the sessions. The real magic often happens in hallway conversations, over coffee, or at the table where someone is sitting alone. In this Between the Seasons episode of Why Does It Feel So Wrong to Be Human at Work? , hosts Pinaki Kathiari and Chris Lee are joined by Rich Dome, Senior Director of Partnerships at Local Wisdom, to talk about how to approach conferences...

In this Between the Seasons episode, hosts Pinaki Kathiari and Chris Lee welcome Amanda Todd, Senior Director of Strategic Communications at Temporal Technologies, for a practical and honest conversation about measuring what actually matters in internal communications. The episode kicks off with a Reddit post asking a familiar question: why is it so hard to define meaningful KPIs for internal comm...

In this Between the Seasons episode, Pinaki Kathiari and Chris Lee sit down with Amanda Todd, Senior Director of Communications at Temporal Technologies, to unpack why clarity is one of the most critical outcomes of effective internal communication. Amanda shares her “squiggly” path into internal comms, her belief in honesty as a core communications skill, and how working in complex, fast-growing...

In this Between the Seasons episode of Why Does It Feel So Wrong to Be Human at Work? , hosts Pinaki Kathiari and Chris Lee are joined by Executive Producer Bree Bartos to try a new format: reading and reacting to real Reddit posts about work. The episode centers on a Reddit story from an IT professional who was laid off and then asked to train their replacement. As the conversation unfolds, Pinak...

This Between the Seasons episode marks the start of a new chapter for Why Does It Feel So Wrong to Be Human at Work? Hosts Pinaki Kathiari and Chris Lee introduce Bree Bartos , the new Executive Producer and Editor of Human at Work and Marketing Manager at Local Wisdom. Before diving into Bree’s story, Pinaki and Chris share what listeners can expect from these new, weekly Between the Seasons epis...