Everything Has Been Shutting Down — From Government To Ambition
The crisis in DC is the warning shot. The same structural emptiness is everywhere else.
They didn’t join for the money.
Every friend I’ve had who worked in the federal government knew exactly what they were signing up for — slow processes, bad software, and meetings that make death look merciful.
They joined anyway. Because they gave a damn.
They wanted to make a difference, even if it meant fighting the machine from the inside. But somewhere between “making change” and “change request form 2.6,” they hit the wall.
And one by one, they left.
Not because they stopped caring — but because caring inside a dead system is a slow kind of suicide.
The Real Problem Isn’t the People. It’s the Structure.
Every broken organization, public or private, follows the same pattern.
They start alive — a few people, a mission, a goal that matters. Everyone knows what’s happening because everyone’s in the room.
Then someone decides to “scale.”
Suddenly there’s a manager to manage the doers, a director to manage the managers, a VP to manage the directors, and an executive team to manage by PowerPoint.
The org chart starts to look like a Jenga tower built by Satan.
Every new layer adds process, policies, and reporting requirements — until no one’s doing the thing that made the organization worth building in the first place.
A million people to document.
No one left to do.
The Great Promotion Trap
This is the part nobody says out loud.
The system doesn’t just bury talent — it harvests it.
You’re good at your job? You deliver results?
Congratulations — you’ve just earned the privilege of never doing it again.
Now you manage others who aren’t as good as you were, while you spend your days in meetings pretending that status reports are “strategy.”
It’s perverse.
We take builders and turn them into babysitters.
We take makers and turn them into managers.
And the better you are at producing value, the faster you get promoted away from it.
By the time someone hits “senior leadership,” they’ve gone full Stockholm Syndrome — defending the very system that stole their purpose. Because now they benefit from the layers. They are the layers.
It’s why real innovation dies — not because we ran out of good ideas, but because we promoted all the people who had them.
The Consultant Industrial Complex
Once the machine starts to seize, leadership calls in the high priests — consultants.
They descend from the clouds, armed with jargon, frameworks, and an army of 27-year-olds with color-coded decks.
They charge seven figures to tell executives what they already wanted to hear: “stay the course, restructure slightly, and implement a dashboard.”
If it fails, well, leadership can’t be blamed — they followed expert advice!
And if it works, they’ll take the credit.
Consultants exist to give failing systems plausible deniability.
They’re the indulgence sellers of the modern workplace: absolution by invoice.
The Cult of Safety and the Death of Doing
Failure isn’t an option in a bureaucracy — which means innovation isn’t either.
Nobody gets fired for doing nothing, only for doing something that doesn’t work.
So everyone stops doing.
The posters still say “Think Different” and “Innovate Boldly,” but the actual rule is simple: don’t make anyone uncomfortable above your pay grade.
The end result is a culture of cosmetic action — slide decks, committees, pilots that never scale, and leaders bragging about “efficiency” while the real work quietly suffocates.
The Splenda of Culture
People get restless, so HR steps in.
They start culture initiatives. Town halls. DEI panels. “Fun Fridays.”
They start using words like “belonging,” “authenticity,” and “alignment.”
Early-stage companies had beer because they liked each other.
Big companies have beer because they don’t.
It’s all Splenda culture — sweet, fake, and leaves a weird aftertaste of despair.
The Apple TV show Severance hit so hard because it wasn’t fantasy. It was prophecy.
Capitalism Actually Saw This Coming
Capitalism’s original promise wasn’t greed. It was evolution.
When companies got too big, too slow, too dumb — the market corrected.
That’s what “creative destruction” was for. Monopolies rot from the inside until someone hungrier eats their lunch.
Government doesn’t have that luxury. It can’t go bankrupt. It just calcifies — forever.
But now, private industry is catching up. Big Tech, healthcare, higher ed, even nonprofits — all metastasized into bureaucratic fortresses of mediocrity.
Everywhere you look: bloat, fear, compliance, and PowerPoint.
How to Actually Fix It
We don’t need a reorg. We need a revolution.
Pay doers more than managers.
If you want results, reward output — not oversight.Slash the layers.
Nobody needs four levels of approval for a sentence.Form cross-functional pods.
Eight to ten people, one shared goal, total autonomy. Small teams win wars.Reward risk, not perfection.
If failure is punished, success never happens.Build Red Teams.
Make internal dissent a formal job, not a firing offense.Shrink the rulebook.
Replace “We’ll need to run that up the chain” with “Try it.”
The solution isn’t more structure. It’s more trust.
We don’t need bigger organizations. We need tighter teams.
The AI Frontier: Doers Rise Again
AI is about to vaporize the middle.
Not just middle managers — middle bullshit.
A team of eight high-functioning people with the right mix of human creativity and AI leverage can now do what used to take a company of a hundred.
The future organization looks less like a pyramid and more like a pickup team — multi-talented, autonomous, fast.
The manager of the future isn’t a micromanager; they’re a coach.
The org chart of the future isn’t vertical; it’s circular.
And the people who still do will finally have the leverage they deserve.
AI won’t just automate work.
It’ll automate bureaucracy.
Back to My Friends
Every time another friend leaves federal service, I feel it in my gut.
Not because they’re quitting — because the system quit first.
They knew going in that it would be hard to make change. But under the new regime, even trying became impossible.
These are the people who were supposed to help fix government — the doers, the believers, the ones willing to stay and fight.
They didn’t leave because they stopped caring.
They left because caring had nowhere left to go.
The country is worse for it. So is every company that bleeds out its best people in the same way.
If America ever wants to fix anything — government, business, culture — it has to start here.
Because the next revolution won’t come from a C-suite or a Senate hearing.
It’ll come from small teams, big missions, and people who refuse to stop doing.
—David
I feel you on this one SO much. I used to work for a startup, a few years ago we were acquired by a large company. The bureaucracy is really astounding and dealing with it can be very discouraging.
Great observations, but sadly I don’t think any meaningful changes will ever be implemented.