Culty tech companies thrive on the metaphorical Kool-Aid. They depend on members buying the hype, or at the least pretending like they are. That’s why public communications—Slack, let’s say, or all-hands meetings—are always uniformly positive. Everyone is SO EXCITED about how well things are going; everyone is reacting with way too many happy emojis. It’s enough to make someone who is unhappy, or even just questioning the status quo, feel like they’re absolutely insane. Everyone else is happy, after all—why aren’t you?

Justin Pot writes about his experience getting pushed out of a writing job at a software company – and within a few weeks realized he could fire his therapist. It turned out it was his job that was causing all the mental health issues.

He gives others some great tips on how to recognize, cope, and ultimately realize there is life outside of work – and maybe we should be enjoying it more.

There’s a lot of growing evidence that wrapping your self worth up in your work is toxic and psychologically dangerous.

It seems like this is yet another example of having to painfully re-learn things we figured out 50+ years ago:

1. Open office spaces are bad on just about every single work metric
2. Your job is not your life
3. It’s best to avoid religion and politics at work, group functions, or family events.

Also, to be aware of behaviors/characteristics of an organization acting like a cult:

1. Isolating members and penalizing them for leaving
2. Seeking inappropriate loyalty to their leaders
3. Dishonoring the family unit
4. Absolute authoritarianism without meaningful accountability.
5. No tolerance for questions or critical inquiry.
6. No meaningful financial disclosure regarding budget, expenses such as an independently audited financial statement.
7. Unreasonable fear about the outside world, such as impending catastrophe, evil conspiracies, and persecutions.
8. There is no legitimate reason to leave, former followers are always wrong in leaving, negative or even evil.
9. Followers feel they can never be “good enough”.
10. The group/leader is always right.
11. The group/leader is the exclusive means of knowing “truth” or receiving validation, no other process of discovery is really acceptable or credible.