u/Odd_Needleworker3756

It really fucking sucks man. I have always performed well at my job and have gotten positive feedback many times not just from my leaders but also from other people in the company I work with regularly. I’ve gotten outstanding scores on my performance reviews that have come with a higher bonus and salary increase, so it doesn’t get more tangible than that.

Yet every single time I get any kind of feedback or constructive critique from my bosses, I instantly start to spiral and think that I’m about to get fired despite there being zero indication that I will. The rational part of my brain knows that it’s perfectly normal for leaders to provide critique to the people that report to them and it’s normal to have back-and-forth discussions and debates on the best way to approach an initiative or project.

But without fail, even if I’ve gotten praise like the week before, the minute I get any kind of critique or make some kind of mistake I start to panic and think that I’m gonna get fired or put on a PIP or something. It’s caused untold amounts of stress and anxiety.

I recently spent 2 days in Dubai as a bit of an extended layover while traveling from Canada to Taiwan. I have a couple of family members there I haven’t seen in a while and thought it’d be a good opportunity to catch up. I’ve seen the very polarizing opinions on Dubai of course so I was curious to experience it for myself.

I’ll admit - the view of the city skyline is pretty incredible. It has a really cool scifi vibe to it with all these giant skyscrapers in the middle of the desert. In general, it’s a very clean, safe city as well with pretty much all the amenities you’d expect. The food was generally quite good.

But outside of that though…idk, it just felt really soulless to me. There’s of course the whole indentured labour issue, which is pretty much enough for me to dislike it given that a lot of the labour there is actually from my home country. Aside from that though it’s pretty much a city of surfaces. You have all these huge buildings and glitzy shopping malls and such but there just isn’t anything underneath to give it a personality.

Even a city like Singapore, which is clean, safe and well-organized to the point where I’ve seen people call it sterile, still has some unique flair to it with the way they’ve integrated greenery and foliage into their urban architecture, along with the cool mix of the Indo-Malay-Chinese culture across the city.

Dubai I just found that there’s no charm, no history, no real culture anywhere within it. It feels like an expensive theme park for rich people, influencers and travelers looking to buy things in a slightly fancier shopping mall. It has none of the liveliness and warmth of other middle eastern countries I’ve visited like Jordan, Oman or Syria, and it doesn’t really have an urban identity like other cool mega cities like Tokyo, NYC or Bangkok.

Just completely underwhelming.