Your boss profits from your excuses (here's the proof) | gilbert ramirezg"><br>gilbert ramirez

© 2026

Originally written for video

Visual cues appear in (parentheses) throughout the essay.

It’s 9:36 PM on a Sunday, and your boss’s name glows on your phone’s screen. It’s not an emergency; it never is… It’s the kind of “quick question” that could have waited until Monday morning, the kind you’ll answer in four minutes because you always do.

You’ve been doing the job one rung above you for two years now, and your paycheck and title are still the same. If you’re lucky, you got a 2% “performance raise”, while inflation outpaced it.

Don’t worry, you’ve complained dozens of times by now, and your manager assured you they’ve been actively hiring since spring. It’s true, you checked the job description, and it asks for that degree you don’t have for the job you’re already doing.

A familiar anger boils up, and the thought of leaving reemerges just as your thumb hovers over the reply button. You’ve got your familiar answer ready.<br>The market is brutal. You’ve read the Reddit threads, four hundred applications, no callbacks, eleven months out of work. Nobody’s hiring.

You’ve never applied. Not once. Not one resume submission, nor a LinkedIn reach-out to that one old friend you feel embarrassed about asking for a referral, but the actual fear is that it’s the “safe bet” you want to keep available.

You don’t want to find out it was never safe.

So you never spent one afternoon finding out. For two years, you’ve treated these doomer threads as your own dataset.

I know that avoidance better than I’d like. I’ll come back to mine.

It’s a trick of the mind. None of this feels like a belief, it feels like realism. “The market is bad” doesn’t come out of you sounding frightened, it sounds informed. Sober. Responsible.

Every excuse you give for why you’re still at the job is wearing a costume of good judgment, which is why you never tested it.

That’s the trap. Not the boss, not the market. The costume.

That costume has a maker.

You were convinced it was you.

The word doing the damage

These stories we tell ourselves are hard to shake because they don’t arrive as opinions. They arrive as weather reports.

“I’m not a morning person.” “I’m bad at math.” “I don’t have a personality for that.”

We say them the way we say it’s an overcast day, describing a matter-of-fact condition. And nobody runs a personal test against the weather. The app says 73 degrees Fahrenheit; I guess it must be.

The work version is worse, because the work version is partly true. Retaliation is real; say no to that one meeting to prep for the next meeting, and your manager will make you pay for it.

Hiring freezes are real. Degree filters on job boards are real doors in real industries. If I told you none of that was true, you’d close the tab, and you’d be right to.

So let me be exact about where the lie is hiding, because it isn’t the risk; it’s the next word.

The market is tough; therefore, checking is pointless. He might retaliate; therefore, I can’t say no. The job description requires a degree; therefore, I’m not qualified.

Therefore. That’s the whole con. It strode along behind the risk assessment with the same badge, and you waved it through.

The retaliation is real. The bad market is real. The degree filter is real. The lie is the word “therefore.”

It’s a fear problem wearing a strategy problem’s clothes.

Which means the question was never whether your situation was hard. It’s hard. The question is, who talked you into thinking there are no more moves left on the board, because you didn’t arrive there on your own.

Edna, always a bridesmaid

In the early 1920s, a company was sitting on a product nobody wanted: a surgical antiseptic that was pitched as a floor cleaner and a gonorrhea cure.<br>Can’t imagine why they couldn’t sell that.

So they went looking for a disease, a problem to fix. They found an obscure medical word, halitosis, and built a campaign around a woman named Edna, edging past the age when marriage was beyond expected of her (30 BTW), adored by everyone, chosen by no one. Her friends didn’t tell her; nobody had the nerve to say it was her bad breath. Listerine’s revenue climbed from the low hundreds of thousands into the millions in a handful of years.

They didn’t invent mouthwash; antiseptics could be made with just salt and water.<br>No, they invented bad breath as a thing you could have and the fear that it could be holding you back.

That’s the playbook, and it hasn’t changed in a century. Advertising doesn’t sell you a cure. It sells you the lack.

The deficiency is the product; the bottle on the shelf is the receipt.

Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, and never shy about the family business, put it about as plainly as it can be put: don’t sell the object, sell the identity it attaches to.

He’s the reason why a generation of women decided cigarettes were torches of freedom. They literally rode on the first-wave...