Hero culture is a scam built on a beautiful lie: Caring means suffering. We celebrate people who work impossible hours, and call that ownership, leadership, and dedication.
The system is rigged from the start. You either deliver miracles or you’re making excuses. There’s no room for pointing out that something is broken. Speak up, and you’re labeled difficult. Setting boundaries means you don’t care enough.
Those with the courage to question the dysfunction quickly learn that silence pays better than honesty and stop sharing concerns to avoid a “negative attitude” label. They bite their tongue when they see disasters coming. Valid concerns are minimized as personal gripes.
We celebrate firefighters as heroes and hand out achievement awards for what should be failure metrics. Every “above and beyond” celebration glorifies our inability to plan properly.
Those working themselves to the ground aren’t heroes; they’re victims of a broken system, and they’re headed straight for burnout as you applaud.
Instead of optimizing for sending people home on time, we optimize around breaking them. Even today, we are still building teams around celebrating casualties of a fucked up culture.
[Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash]