Minusmachen [making a loss] is a wholesome reality check on the dark side of the tech industry and broken male souls.
Today: The growing addiction problems of tech executives.
(#1) ‘Swallowing’ – At first glance, this might be associated with the title of a Spotify summer party playlist of a random asshole or a cheaply edited amateur porn compilation, but it is actually the sad reality for many high-ranking executives in the tech industry.
Gazing into the abyss
Let’s take any tech company and imagine a tech bro. After many years of humiliation and modern slavery, he was finally promoted. I know him. And you know someone like that too, or maybe you are that person yourself.
Anyway. Our tech bro is standing in front of my office in the Ronaldo free kick pose, trying in vain to impress my assistant with his cheekiness, while I can see from her face that she would like nothing better than to stab him. And who can blame her? I, too, would like to stab our tech bro in a dimly lit alley at night.
At the last Christmas party, at the height of pseudo-decadence, he caught a couple of interns on his office couch taking MDMA. So he sat down with them, heavily intoxicated from seven glasses of cheap booze and cola, ignoring the fact that his sudden presence had caused awkward embarrassment and vicarious shame. But our tech bro felt very underground.
While cheap AI generated auto-tune music thundered through the office corridors and swallowed the snippets of conversation from his amused colleagues, our tech bro crumbled the amphetamine into his mix, downed it in one gulp and then threw both arms into the air. Later, he passed out in his office chair with his mouth open and his hands in his trouser pockets.
(It’s not unlikely that he’ll end up in a wheelchair one fine day because someone in a cheap titty bar smashed a bar stool over his pale body.)
And when I think about our tech bro more deeply, I can’t remember ever seeing him really sober or at least mentally present.
Where losses where made
And that brings us to the topic at hand. In July 2023, APN published its ‘Mental Health in Tech Report’. More than 500 US tech executives were surveyed. The WTF score is grim, and the shareholders of pharmaceutical companies are joyfully slipping in their ejaculates in my top 3:
- Almost 40% feel anxiety and panic when they go to work.
- Almost 50% consume substances/pills daily or almost daily, including antidepressants, amphetamines, opiates, nicotine, marijuana, ketamine, hallucinogens, steroids, painkillers and sleeping pills. In total, as many as 80% consume such substances.
- Almost 50% drink alcohol daily, one in three before and during working hours.
“Our report indicates tech leaders (management level or above) are increasingly depressed and anxious about their future and turning to dangerous coping mechanisms as an escape.”
– APN CEO Noah Nordheimer
And according to the UKG study ‘Mental Health at Work: Managers and Money’, for 3 out of 4 employees, their own manager has a greater influence on their mental health than therapeutic or medical professionals. (Oh, and at least as much influence as their own relationship.) It’s hard to imagine that tech employees should cope differently than their managers on the whole. Sick people leading sick people. Top notch.
Bonus fuck-up: Looking at the trend of how Germans cope with their mental health issues according to the ‘AXA Mental Health Report 2023’, you feel a bit like the drunk brain-dead guy who fell asleep in the foetal position in his own vomit at a Scooter concert.
My elevator pitch
- The probability that your mentally unstable or already mentally ill manager is hiding their own emotional abyss behind dead eyes, extraversion and other well-trained mimicry is much greater than zero.
- It is realistic that your boss is a junkie or an alcoholic.
- It is realistic that you too have some kind of addiction problem or are mentally unstable. But: You are not alone.
With this in mind: ‘Cheers’, ‘It’s all a question of mindset’ and ‘The market will sort it out’.
What MINUSMACHEN wants to promote:
Men in the tech industry – myself included – follow the money and, above all, the power. (Some also follow a company purpose, but well, that’s mostly just verbal smoke grenades.) With our dead eyes, we have created an economic ecosystem in which male rules apply and non-masculinity is systematically suppressed and/or psychologically punished.
It takes a critical look at this economic ecosystem and provides insights into the patriarchal architecture behind it.
It is a smoke grenade that draws attention to the cracks within this ecosystem – A world characterised by power games and abuse, humiliation, trauma, dehumanisation, crises, (addictive) illnesses and toxic behaviour.
It is your Fight Club against the world of tech bros and LinkedIn suckers.