My dayjob performance had been suffering for months. The psychology of the workplace is ... subtle. There's a phenomenon where some people are vastly more productive than others and everyone knows it, but no one is cruel enough to make it common knowledge. This is awkward for people who simultaneously benefit from the culture of common-knowledge-prevention allowing them to collect the status and money rents of being a $150K/year software engineer without actually performing at that level, who also read enough Ayn Rand as a teenager to be ideologically opposed to subsisting on unjustly-acquired rents rather than value creation. I didn't think the company would fire me, but I was worried that they should.

My goodness is there anything about this person's outlook that isn't profoundly sad.