The fluorescent light is humming, a low-frequency buzz that vibrates inside my molars, while the CEO keeps clapping. It is a rhythmic, hollow sound, like two pieces of dry driftwood hitting each other in an empty hall. He is standing at the front of the ‘All-Hands’ meeting, his face flushed with the kind of performative excitement that only people who don’t have to work weekends can afford. Behind him, a slide shows a stock photo of a mountain climber, and in bold, sans-serif font, the word ‘GRIT’ sits like an accusation. He calls it ‘amazing dedication.’ I call it a failure of leadership so profound it should be punishable by a mandatory 4-year sabbatical.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the word grit lately. It’s become the corporate catch-all for ‘please don’t notice that we are understaffed by 44 percent.’ As a librarian in a state correctional facility, my perspective on grit is perhaps a bit skewed compared to the average middle manager. In here, Thomas F.-that’s me-sees grit in the eyes of men who have survived 14 years of a system designed to erase them. That is grit. That is a personal survival mechanism. But when my corporate friends talk about it, they’re usually describing a scenario where they had to skip their daughter’s birthday because a project manager forgot to check a calendar. That’s not grit; that’s being a victim of someone else’s incompetence. Last week, I was so distracted by this paradox that I gave wrong directions to a tourist outside the main gate. I told them to head south for 4 miles to find the highway when they actually needed to go north. I realized it about 4 minutes after they drove off. I felt like a fraud, a man supposed to guide people through the stacks of knowledge but unable to point a car in the right direction. But maybe that’s the point. We are all so busy being ‘resilient’ that we’ve lost our sense of basic navigation.

Systemic Burden vs. Individual Failure

When we glorifying grit, we are effectively shifting the burden of systemic failure onto the individual’s nervous system. It’s a clever trick, really. If you burn out, it’s not because the workload was impossible; it’s because your ‘resilience’ wasn’t high enough. You didn’t meditate enough. You didn’t drink enough green juice. You didn’t have enough grit. It’s a way of pathologizing the employee instead of fixing the environment. I see this in the library all the time. The inmates are told to be ‘gritty’ about their rehabilitation, yet the vocational programs are cut by 34 percent and the books are 24 years out of date. We ask people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps while we are busy cutting the straps off the boots. It’s a cynical game of musical chairs where the music is played by a management team that owns all the chairs.

The Vest and The Voucher: Ownership vs. Exploitation

I remember a project back in my brief stint in the private sector, before I retreated to the relative sanity of the prison stacks. We were building a platform for a client who had a budget of exactly $10004 and a timeline that defied the laws of physics. My manager, a man who wore vests even in 84-degree heat, told us we needed to ‘dig deep.’ He spoke about grit as if it were a physical substance we could extract from our bone marrow. We worked 74-hour weeks. We lived on cold pizza and spite. When the project launched, 14 days late and riddled with 444 bugs, he got a bonus. We got a ‘shout-out’ in the company newsletter and a 4-dollar voucher for the coffee machine that was currently broken. That was the moment I realized that ‘ownership’ is just a way to get you to work for free, and ‘grit’ is just a way to get you to do it without complaining.

The Bridge Analogy: Engineering vs. Willpower

There is something deeply dishonest about using psychological traits to justify operational deficits. If a bridge collapses because it was built with 4 tons of steel instead of 14, we don’t blame the bridge for not having enough ‘resilience.’ We blame the engineers. We blame the budget. We blame the people who signed off on the blueprints. But in the modern workplace, we expect the human bridge to just ‘hold on’ through sheer force of will. It’s a toxic expectation. It creates a culture where being tired is a status symbol and asking for help is a confession of weakness. I’ve watched 4 of my best colleagues leave the profession because they were tired of being told that their exhaustion was a personal failing. They weren’t weak; they were just tired of being used as a buffer for bad planning.