Why We Started Writing About Work (And Why the Data Says We’re Not Alone)
On burnout, disengagement, moving countries, and why so much of pop culture is secretly about bad bosses
There’s a version of this essay that opens with a tidy statistic and moves on. But the numbers here are worth sitting with for a second, because they explain a lot about why this page exists, and so does my own experience of the last few years.
I’ve spent a good chunk of that time moving countries, applying to jobs across industries, cities, and roles that had almost nothing in common with each other except that I was the one applying to all of them. Different application systems, different expectations, different definitions of what a “good candidate” even looks like depending on where in the world you’re standing. There’s no single playbook for that. I’ve had to learn as I went, upskill constantly, and figure out what actually transfers between industries and what doesn’t. This page is partly an attempt to write down what I’m learning in real time, in case it helps someone else doing the same thing.
That personal chaos, it turns out, sits inside a much bigger, well-documented one. Globally, only 20% of employees were engaged at work in 2025 (Gallup, 2026). That’s not a dip, it’s part of a longer decline: global engagement fell from a peak of 23% in 2022 to 20% in 2025, marking the first time Gallup has recorded two straight years of decline (Gallup, 2026). Stress hasn’t let up either. Separate research puts daily workplace stress at 43%, and in the US specifically, half of workers report moderate to severe burnout, depression, or anxiety, with nearly half saying they’ve left a job for mental health reasons (Cake.com, 2026).
The part that surprised me most, though, wasn’t the individual contributor data. It was the managers. Manager engagement fell from 30% to 27% globally, with the steepest drops among managers under 35 and female managers, who saw engagement plummet by five and seven points respectively (Gallup, 2026). Meanwhile, individual contributor engagement held roughly steady. The people responsible for holding teams together are, by the data, struggling more than anyone underneath them.
None of that shows up as a spreadsheet in most people’s actual experience of work. It shows up as dread on Sunday night. It shows up as the specific, hollow feeling of sitting in a meeting that could have been an email, run by someone who is also clearly exhausted. It shows up, increasingly, as a joke you send a coworker instead of a complaint you file with HR. Or, in my case, it’s shown up as refreshing a job portal in a country I’ve only just moved to, trying to translate a resume built for one industry into language that makes sense for a completely different one.
That coping-through-humor part is not a coincidence, either. Researchers who study workplace humor describe it as a genuine coping mechanism, a way employees use comedy to make sense of power, absurdity, and dysfunction at work without directly confronting it (Mak, n.d.). One analysis of workplace satire put it plainly: fictional portrayals of bad leadership let audiences feel something about real dysfunction from a safe distance, turning an uncomfortable dynamic into something that can be laughed at instead of just endured (Sadaric & Knoop, 2024). It’s part of why a Bill Lumbergh or a Miranda Priestly lands so hard. We’re not just watching a character. We’re watching something true get exaggerated just enough to be bearable.
That’s the gap Work & Such is trying to sit in. Not another list of productivity hacks aimed at an engagement number that keeps dropping regardless. Something closer to what work actually feels like, part global research, part what I’m personally learning by doing this the hard way, across borders, industries, and job titles that don’t always translate. Advice worth taking, insight worth reading, and the acknowledgment that a lot of us are figuring this out in real time, whether that’s through data, through TV, or through trial and error.
So that’s the honest answer to “why does this page exist.” Because the data says most people are disengaged, stressed, and under-supported at work. Because I’m living a smaller, more personal version of that same uncertainty right now. And because the culture around us has been quietly processing all of it for years, one terrible boss at a time. This is my attempt to write about it directly, and share what I’m learning along the way.
References
Cake.com. (2026, February 27). Workplace statistics to elevate your employee engagement in 2025. https://cake.com/blog/workplace-statistics/
Gallup. (2026). State of the global workplace: 2026 report. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/697904/state-of-the-global-workplace-global-data.aspx
Mak, B. C. (n.d.). Humor in the workplace: A regulating and coping mechanism in socialization. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254085004_Humor_in_the_workplace_A_regulating_and_coping_mechanism_in_socialization
Sadaric, A., & Knoop, C.-I. (2024, December 1). Satire with a purpose: Analyzing the “Dead Comedians Society” critique of the modern workplace. Medium. https://medium.com/@antonio.sadaric1/satire-with-a-purpose-analyzing-the-dead-comedians-society-critique-of-the-modern-workplace-57421713d5a0