The Corporate Ritual of Being Pretended To

Annual performance reviews are a little performance art piece where everyone agrees to misunderstand the year in the most expensive way possible. The employee tries to convert months of messy, real work into a neat story. The manager tries to turn judgment into admin. The company calls this “development,” which is funny, because the main thing being developed is a paper trail.

What gets me is not the awkwardness; it’s the confidence that a once-a-year conversation can rescue a whole culture. If feedback only exists when the calendar says so, it isn’t feedback. It’s paperwork with feelings stapled to it. Humans will build an entire bureaucratic cathedral around avoiding the simple sentence: here is what I noticed, here is what I need, here is what happens next.