The cursor blinks. It’s the only thing moving. My own breathing seems to have stopped somewhere in my chest, a caught thing. On the screen, under the heading ‘Opportunities for Growth,’ sit 43 bullets of anonymous feedback from my colleagues. A 363-degree review, they called it. A full circle of helpful insights. Number 13 says, ‘Needs to be more vocal and drive conversations in project meetings.’ Number 23 says, ‘Tends to dominate conversations, should create more space for others to contribute.’ My manager, in their summary, has synthesized this with the wisdom of a corporate Solomon: ‘There’s a clear theme here about finding the right balance in your meeting contributions.’

There is no theme here. There is a contradiction. A null set. It’s the Schrödinger’s cat of professional development: I am simultaneously too quiet and too loud, and by observing me, my colleagues have collapsed the waveform into a useless puddle of anxiety. This isn’t a gift. It’s a weapon wrapped in the pastel paper of HR-approved vulnerability. We’ve adopted the language of therapy-vulnerability, growth, holding space-and stripped it of its most vital component: safety. A therapist’s office is a sealed environment built on trust and professional ethics. The modern open-plan office is a strategic battlefield where ‘radical candor’ has become the preferred cover for passive aggression.

The Integrity of Feedback

I once had a conversation with a woman named Pearl H., a carnival ride inspector. I met her at a dusty state fair while writing a piece on transient economies. Pearl’s job was feedback. She’d walk the midway at 3 a.m., the only sounds the hum of a generator and the clink of her tools. Her feedback wasn’t about someone’s ‘personal brand’ or ‘executive presence.’ She’d tap a structural bolt on the Zipper with a specialized hammer and listen to the resonance. A clean, high ring meant security. A dull thud meant a crack, a flaw, a potential catastrophe waiting for a 13-year-old to climb aboard. Her feedback was direct, unambiguous, and had life-or-death stakes. She didn’t post it on an anonymous portal. She’d wake the ride operator from his bunk, point to the failing piece of steel, and say, ‘This gets replaced. Now.’

There was no room for interpretation. No suggestion to ‘find the balance.’ Her feedback had integrity. It was based on physics, not feelings. What we do in our quarterly reviews is the opposite. It’s a performance of feedback, a ritual designed to make managers feel like they’re managing, to make HR feel like they’re developing talent, and to make employees feel scrutinized into conformity.

The Performance of Feedback

I’m not entirely innocent in this. I remember a time, about 13 years ago, when I was a new manager, high on some book about direct communication. I gave a designer on my team some feedback on a presentation he’d built. I told him his slides ‘lacked intellectual rigor’ and that the font choice was ‘fundamentally unserious.’ I thought I was being a truth-teller, a bold leader forging a high-performance culture. I saw his face tighten, a mask of professionalism sliding into place. What I didn’t know was that he’d been up for 43 hours straight because of a family emergency and had poured everything he had left into that work. My ‘feedback’ wasn’t a gift; it was a boot on the neck of an exhausted man. I didn’t offer help or ask questions. I just delivered my payload of candor and walked away, proud. It took me years to realize that feedback without context and relationship is just cruelty.

Just because something can be measured doesn’t mean it’s meaningful. An anonymous survey is a collection of data points, yes. But they are points of perception, colored by mood, professional jealousy, the recency effect of a single bad meeting, or whether the person had their morning coffee. To present this chaotic spray of subjectivity to someone as a road map for their professional life is absurd. We’re asking people to navigate by a star chart drawn by 23 different people, half of whom think the North Star is a myth.

The Psychic Drag

This obsession with constant, formalized feedback creates a psychic drag on an organization. It’s a low-grade hum of anxiety. Everyone is constantly bracing for the next survey, the next review, the next casual ‘can I give you some feedback?’ that prefaces an attack. It pulls focus from the actual work. Instead of solving the client’s problem, you’re spending cycles wondering if you’re speaking too much or not enough. It’s exhausting. The mental energy wasted on navigating these corporate rituals is immense. At the end of a day spent deciphering cryptic feedback and managing perceptions, the last thing anyone wants is more complexity. You just want to go home, turn on the TV, and have something simply work. You want an experience that isn’t a puzzle to be solved, something straightforward and reliable like a good Meilleure IPTV service that delivers what it promises without demanding you calibrate your expectations. It’s a desire for a low-friction existence, a stark contrast to the high-friction world of weaponized feedback we’ve built for ourselves at work.

Anonymity: Shield, Not Weapon

There is, I must admit, a place for anonymity. I once worked at a company where a senior executive was a brilliant bully. For years, his behavior was an open secret. He belittled people in meetings, took credit for others’ work, and created a culture of fear in his department. Dozens of people had complained to HR, but he was a rainmaker, and their complaints vanished into the ether. It wasn’t until the company implemented a new, truly anonymous upward feedback system that the pattern became undeniable. It wasn’t just one or two disgruntled employees; it was 83 percent of his direct reports describing the same toxic behaviors. He was gone within three months. The anonymity wasn’t for delivering vague notes on communication style; it was a shield that allowed people to report serious, fireable offenses without risking their careers. That’s the only place it belongs: protecting the vulnerable from the powerful, not for potshots between peers.

The Splinter Deeper Still

We need to stop using the word feedback for what it has become. What Pearl H. does is feedback. It’s diagnostic, expert, and aimed at a system, not a soul. What we’re doing is a mass, crowdsourced performance review that helps no one and harms many. Just this morning, I was trying to get a tiny splinter out of my finger. I kept poking at it with tweezers, pushing it deeper, making the area more inflamed. That’s our feedback culture. It’s a well-intentioned attempt to remove an irritant that, through clumsy and inexpert application, only succeeds in making the whole area red, swollen, and painful.

Maybe the goal isn’t more feedback. Maybe it’s less. Maybe it’s better conversations. Maybe it’s managers who actually manage, who observe their people, who talk to them like human beings with context and lives. Maybe it’s trusting people to do their jobs. The alternative is this endless cycle, this blinking cursor on a screen full of contradictions, leaving you with nothing but the low, dull thud of a system that is fundamentally, structurally unsound.