The air in the small conference room has a particular, recycled quality, tasting faintly of ozone and the scorched coffee from the machine down the hall. My manager, a man who normally possesses the charisma of a well-adjusted golden retriever, is currently wearing a mask of practiced indifference. He is looking at a tablet, but he isn’t really reading. He’s performing. He uses the phrase ‘opportunity for growth’ for the 25th time this morning, and each syllable feels like a tiny, blunt-edged stone being dropped into a bucket of cold water. We both know that the numbers on the screen were decided 5 weeks ago in a calibration meeting I wasn’t invited to, by people who haven’t seen me work in 5 months. Yet, here we are, participating in this secular liturgy of the corporate state.

The Tyranny of Irrelevant Metrics

David N.S., a museum education coordinator I know who spends his days translating the complexities of the Victorian era for 65 screaming middle schoolers, recently sat through his own version of this. David is a man who can quell a riot with a single raised eyebrow and an anecdote about coal mines. He is, by every metric that matters to the children and the artifacts, a master of his craft. But his review focused almost exclusively on a single missed deadline for a digital filing form back in February-nearly 15 months ago in the current fiscal cycle. The form was irrelevant. The work was transcendent. But the form was what the software could measure, so the form was what David was judged on. He was given a 3.5 out of 5 for ‘administrative diligence,’ a score that effectively neutralized his ‘exceeds expectations’ in every other category.

Theater of the Absurd

Why are we being judged on goals set 11 months ago? In the modern economy, 11 months is an eternity. A project that was a priority in January is often a ghost by July. Yet, the bureaucratic inertia of the annual cycle demands that we pretend these goals still matter. It’s a theater of the absurd. We spend 55 minutes discussing why a specific KPI wasn’t met, conveniently ignoring the fact that the entire department shifted focus 25 days after that KPI was written. The manager knows it’s irrelevant. The employee knows it’s irrelevant. But the HR software requires a value in the box, and so we provide one. We lie to the machine so the machine will leave us alone for another 365 days.

There is a darker undercurrent to this, of course. Performance reviews are rarely about performance; they are about protection and pennies. They provide the necessary paper trail to justify the compensation decisions that the finance department finalized back in October. If there is only enough money in the pool for a 2.5 percent raise across the board, the reviews will magically reflect a workforce that is exactly 2.5 percent better than they were last year. It is a retroactive justification for a decision made by an algorithm. And if the company needs to trim the herd, the review becomes a weapon-a collection of ‘perceptions of engagement’ and ‘areas for improvement’ that can be weaponized at a moment’s notice to show that an employee was ‘warned.’

The Engine vs. The Piston

I think about David N.S. again. He told me that after his review, he went back to the museum floor and stood in front of an old steam engine. He realized that the engine didn’t need a performance review to function; it needed oil, coal, and a hand that understood its rhythms. If the engine failed, you didn’t sit it down and talk about its ‘growth mindset.’ You fixed the part that was broken. But in the corporate world, we have abandoned the idea of fixing the system in favor of blaming the parts. We ignore the fact that the ‘engine’-the company culture, the lack of resources, the poor leadership-is what’s actually stalling. Instead, we tell the piston it isn’t ‘leaning in’ enough.

Watched, But Not Seen

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being watched but not seen. That is the essence of the annual review. You are watched for 15 minutes of every hour, your keystrokes logged or your presence noted, but the actual substance of your contribution remains invisible. My manager finally closes his tablet. He looks relieved, like he’s just finished a particularly unpleasant chore, which he has. He asks if I have any questions. I think about the 2 am smoke detector. I think about the 55 different ways I could tell him that this process makes me want to walk out the door and never look back. I think about the fact that I have a mortgage and a car payment that ends in a 5.

“No,” I say, forcing a smile that doesn’t reach my eyes. “I think the goals are clear.”

We shake hands. It’s a dry, meaningless gesture. As I walk back to my desk, I realize that I’ve already checked out. Not from my work-I still care about the projects and the people-but from the ‘career.’ The review didn’t inspire me to work harder; it inspired me to protect myself. It turned a collaborator into a counter-party. It’s a failure of leadership on a grand scale, a substitution of a difficult, ongoing human conversation with a single, dreaded event. If you only talk to your partner about the state of your marriage once a year, you won’t have a marriage for very long. Yet, we expect this to work for our professional lives.

By making the process painful and humiliating, the organization reinforces the hierarchy. It reminds you that no matter how much value you bring, you are still a number in a spreadsheet, subject to the whims of ‘calibration.’ It breaks the spirit just enough to keep it compliant. We are told to be ‘authentic’ and ‘vulnerable,’ but the review process punishes anything that isn’t a polished, corporate-approved version of success. We are all David N.S., standing in front of our own museum exhibits, wondering why the person with the clipboard is so obsessed with the font on the scavenger hunt when the children are finally, for the first time in their lives, actually learning something about the world.

Breaking the Cycle

I’ll go home tonight and I’ll probably check that smoke detector one more time, just to be sure. I’ll look at the 5 little lights on the panel and I’ll wonder if they’re judging me too. We live in a world of constant, low-grade evaluation, a never-ending cycle of feedback that provides no nourishment. But maybe, just maybe, the first step to breaking the ritual is to stop believing in it. To see the performance review for what it is: a poorly written play where the actors are tired and the audience has already left the building.

Once you realize it’s all theater, the script stops being a cage. You can start looking for the exits, or better yet, looking for a space with enough glass to let the light in, where the only score that matters is the one you give yourself when the sun finally goes down.