Work. The Longest Con You’ll Ever Fall For?

Preface

There are scripts we follow without question, and there are lessons we learn when the script kills the spirit.

Work. The Longest Con You’ll Ever Fall For? is an excavation of the everyday illusions sold as security. It traces the quiet extraction of time, energy, and joy, revealing the machinery beneath the fluorescent lights.

This is not a lament. It is a reckoning. A call to recognise the invisible cost of compliance and the radical act of reclaiming agency.

Read it as both mirror and map: a reflection of the system you inhabit, and a guide for stepping outside it.

A Reason to Rise Shining

I used to think hating your job was just part of life. Like taxes, or traffic, or pretending to laugh at your boss’s jokes. Monday morning groans, the countdown to the weekend, the existential dread of Sunday night. It was practically a social contract.

For years, I played along. Showed up, punched the clock, made just enough to stay exactly where I was. The ceiling was low, but at least it was familiar. And then, one day, reality tore through the illusion.

A man I worked with—twenty years at the company. The kind of guy who never called in sick, never took a long lunch, never asked for a raise. The ideal employee. The perfect cog.

Then one afternoon, he collapsed at his desk.

And do you know what happened?

Nothing.

No frantic scrambling. No gasps of horror. No one dropped to their knees crying. Because in the machine, people don’t die—they just stop working.

HR handled it with cold efficiency. A call. A cleanup. A quiet removal of personal effects. The desk sanitised, like he’d never been there.

By the next morning, his inbox had been reassigned. His work had been distributed. His name erased.

The system absorbed the loss like a snake swallowing a rat.

No tribute. No moment of silence. No final “thank you for your years of service.”

Because in the grand ledger of corporate profit, a dead man is just a line item adjustment.

He stopped earning, stopped producing, stopped feeding the beast—so he was discarded.

And that’s when it hit me:

This was my future.

If I stayed, this is how it ended. One day, I’d walk into the office and never walk out. And the next morning, some intern would be sitting in my chair, logging into my account, taking over my tasks. The email chains would continue. The spreadsheets would get updated. The forecast meetings would roll on.

And the people I’d spent my life working alongside?

They’d move on in the time it took to refill their coffee.

And yet, we’re told to be grateful. For the opportunity. For the steady paycheck. For the security.

Security. What a joke.

There’s nothing secure about a system that can replace you before the seat you died in has cooled.

I tried to forget. Tried to tell myself it was just the way things were. But suddenly, nothing felt normal.

Because once you see the trap, you can’t unsee it.

The people ahead of me—ten, twenty years my senior—they weren’t free. Still working. Still grinding. Still chasing a retirement that might never come.

Their bodies were failing, their energy depleted, their best years gone—and what were they left with? Anxious calculations. Will the pension hold? Will the savings last? Will they live long enough to see the vacation they spent four decades waiting for?

These weren’t cautionary tales. These were living ghosts.

So I started asking myself: Where does this end?

But the better question was—how do I get out?

I wasn’t naive. I wasn’t some trust fund kid with the luxury of quitting to “find myself.” I didn’t have a million-dollar idea. I wasn’t about to start a YouTube channel and pretend that was a retirement plan.

I needed something real. A different way.

Then I met people who had already left. Not because they were special. Not because they were lucky. Because they woke up.

They weren’t clocking in. They weren’t trapped in meetings that could have been emails. They weren’t selling their time in neat little 8-hour increments.

And what struck me wasn’t just that they were financially free. It was that they were happy.

Not the kind of hollow happiness you post online to convince yourself your life isn’t miserable. Not the forced grin you put on in the office when your boss walks by.

No, this was something else. Something real.

These people—some older than me, some younger—had energy. They had time. They had ease. They weren’t rushing. They weren’t checking their phones every five minutes, pretending to be “busy” for appearances. They weren’t calculating how many days of leave they could afford to take.

They weren’t strategising over office politics. There were no politics. No fake smiles, no corporate jargon, no “team-building” that meant nothing.

Just people.

People with human hearts, with time to breathe, to laugh, to enjoy their mornings. People who had built something for themselves, instead of feeding a system that would discard them the second they became unprofitable.

And for the first time in my life, I asked myself: Why not me?

So I started searching. Quietly, cautiously. Not for a job—for something else entirely.

I met people who weren’t employees but owners. People who weren’t drowning in debt but building real wealth.

I heard about Shuang Hor.

And at first, I laughed. Dismissed it. Sounded like a fantasy—freedom, health, wealth, all in one? Get real.

But then I looked closer.

And do you know what I found?

Not schemes. Not scams. But something terrifyingly simple: A different way.

A system that didn’t demand your life in exchange for survival. A model that rewarded effort, not tenure.

And most importantly—a way out.

I resisted. Of course I did. Conditioned to believe that real success had to be hard, had to be painful, had to come with stress and suffering.

But then I thought about that man at his desk.

Twenty years of perfect attendance.

And in the end, hAuthor’s Note:
A meditation on the invisible cost of modern employment—and the quiet power of reclaiming autonomy, time, and well-being.e didn’t even earn a pause.

So I did the only thing that made sense.

I left.

I left because life isn’t a performance review. Because a pension isn’t a reward if you don’t live long enough to enjoy it. Because the people who tell you to “pay your dues” are the same ones who’ll replace you without a second thought.

I left because I decided to own my life instead of renting it out.

And the only regret I have—is that I didn’t do it sooner.





Author’s Note:

A meditation on the invisible cost of modern employment—and the quiet power of reclaiming autonomy, time, and well-being.



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