I’m 21 and corporate life already feels like high school with a paycheck
I’m 21, and after experiencing two corporate workplaces, I’ve already seen enough corporate politics to wonder how adults managed to recreate high school, add spreadsheets and performance reviews, and call it a career.
I was never particularly bright academically. My final high-school exams came around during the COVID lockdown period, I couldn’t study properly, and I failed.
That pushed me in a different direction. One field I genuinely thought I could be good at was aviation, so in 2023, when I was 18, I joined SriLankan Airlines, the national carrier of Sri Lanka, as a Customer Service Representative.
My salary was LKR 40,000 before EPF and ETF deductions, around LKR 37,000 in hand. In dollar terms, that was roughly around $100 at the time.
At 18, I didn’t really care about the money. I was happy to be working in an industry I was interested in.
In the beginning, everything was fine.
The job was basically sitting at a desk, waiting for calls to enter the queue and answering them. An agent could receive around 50 calls a day, sometimes going up to 80.
The shift was around nine hours, and most of those nine hours were spent sitting there answering passengers.
Some passengers were perfectly nice.
Others were frustrated.
Some would just unload their anger on you because their flight was delayed, cancelled, changed, or because they were having a terrible day.
Eventually, the predictability started consuming me.
You know exactly what you’re going to do tomorrow.
Wake up.
Go to work.
Sit down.
Answer calls.
Deal with angry passengers.
Take your break.
Come back.
Answer more calls.
Go home.
Sleep.
Repeat.
And then I discovered something I genuinely didn’t expect from adult workplaces: corporate politics.
I had just come out of school, so I honestly thought this kind of behaviour was something you left behind when you became an adult.
Apparently not.
At one point, I was working night shifts, roughly 7 PM to 7 AM.
Some of the senior employees on the night shift weren’t particularly supportive and were often unavailable when we needed help.
I raised the issue with the operating manager because it was making the work difficult.
Once they found out I had complained, I felt like I became a target.
Suddenly, the workplace wasn’t just about doing your job anymore.
It became about who liked you.
Who didn’t.
Who said what about whom.
Who was friends with whom.
Who complained about whom.
It genuinely felt like school again, except everyone was older and getting paid.
After one year, I left.
And by that point, I was completely burnt out.
One year of work, internal conflict, politics and dealing with people had drained me so much that I became afraid of going into another corporate environment.
So I didn’t work for around a year and a half.
I tried studying. I tried finding a college.
Eventually, I returned to aviation through another program, completed it, and in 2026 I received another opportunity.
This time it was with a UK-based travel agency that outsourced work to Sri Lanka.
The salary was LKR 70,000, which was roughly around $200 at the exchange rate at the time.
By Sri Lankan standards, that wasn’t a terrible salary, especially for someone my age.
The company also provided one-way transportation.
And the actual job was much better suited to me.
I wasn’t answering calls all day.
I was working as a Schedule Change Assistant.
We dealt with airline schedule changes, contacted passengers by email, made arrangements and basically solved problems.
For the first few months, everything was good.
Then they realized I was actually pretty good at the job.
And that’s when the workload started increasing.
We worked nine-hour shifts, six days a week.
Even the supposed day off could sometimes turn into a working day because of the workload.
Eventually, my team leader started assigning me additional tasks.
One particular situation really bothered me.
He assigned me a task that originally belonged to another colleague.
I understood that there could have been a reason for doing that. Maybe that colleague had a particularly heavy workload or there was some other operational reason.
But I was already carrying a lot of work myself.
So I questioned it.
Not aggressively.
I simply asked why that particular task was being assigned to me.
And I had a reason for asking.
There had previously been a situation where this same colleague hadn’t completed something that was originally my responsibility.
Instead of completing it, the task eventually came back to me.
So when the situation was reversed, I thought it was reasonable to ask why the workload was being distributed this way.
I wasn’t refusing to do the task.
I wasn’t saying, “I’m not doing this.”
I was asking for an explanation.
Instead of explaining the decision, my team leader responded:
“Why are you whining like a bitch?”
That genuinely pissed me off.
Not because I couldn’t handle the additional work.
Because I expected a professional answer to a professional question.
If there was a legitimate operational reason for giving me the task, fine. Tell me.
If the other colleague was overloaded, tell me.
If there was an urgent deadline, tell me.
I’m an employee. I’m perfectly capable of understanding these things.
But apparently asking why something is being assigned to you makes you a “whiner.”
That was one of the moments where I started thinking seriously about leaving.
And there were other things I had already noticed.
One of the assistant team leaders would talk about people behind their backs and create stories that eventually turned into workplace politics.
People would form little groups.
People would get cornered socially.
Information would travel around the office.
Again, it reminded me of school.
Except this time everyone had salaries and responsibilities.
So I decided to resign.
Interestingly, my manager, HR and even the director didn’t want me to leave.
They asked me to reconsider and come back.
Initially, I considered it.
But then I thought about why I was leaving in the first place.
I didn’t want to stay until I eventually got into a confrontation with someone and damaged my own reputation.
So I submitted my immediate resignation, explaining that I felt there was unfairness in how certain things were being handled and that when I questioned it, I was responded to in a vulgar and disrespectful manner.
And that’s when I started seriously questioning corporate life altogether.
I don’t expect a workplace to be perfect.
I don’t expect everyone to like me.
I don’t expect my employer to treat me like family.
Actually, I don’t WANT my employer to treat me like family.
A company isn’t your family.
Your colleagues aren’t automatically your friends.
Your manager isn’t your parent.
And your company doesn’t owe you lifelong loyalty.
You’re exchanging your time and skills for money.
Do your job.
Get paid.
Go home.
Live your actual life.
What I find strange about corporate culture is how emotionally invested people sometimes become in the company.
People fight over positions.
They gossip.
They create enemies.
They compete for recognition.
They become loyal to management.
They defend decisions as if they personally own the company.
And sometimes they destroy relationships with other employees over things that ultimately don’t matter.
You’re all working for somebody else’s company.
You’re not inheriting the building.
You’re not getting a statue outside headquarters.
And the company will continue operating after every single one of you leaves.
Yet people will spend years making enemies because they want to prove that they’re loyal to the organization.
I think that’s where corporate culture becomes particularly strange.
The moment you start treating your workplace as your emotional world, things can get complicated very quickly.
For me, a workplace should be transactional.
Not in a cold or cruel way.
Just realistically.
I’m there to work.
You’re paying me for my time and skills.
I’ll do my job properly.
I’ll be respectful.
You should be respectful to me.
And when the working day ends, I should be able to go home and live my actual life.
I don’t need workplace enemies.
I don’t need workplace best friends.
I don’t need office politics.
I certainly don’t need to sacrifice my peace of mind to prove that I’m loyal to a company.
And I’m not saying this because I think I’m above corporate work.
I’m saying it because I’ve realized that I personally don’t fit well into that environment.
I’m someone who actually enjoys being around people.
I’m comfortable communicating with people, and I tend to get comfortable with people fairly quickly.
But I’ve also noticed that this can sometimes work against me professionally.
When you become too comfortable with people, boundaries can disappear.
People start speaking to you in ways they wouldn’t normally speak to someone they don’t know.
People can become comfortable giving you additional work.
And sometimes being cooperative gets interpreted as being available for everything.
That’s something I’m learning to recognize.
So now I’m considering going into entrepreneurship.
My father is an entrepreneur and works on the industrial side of business.
He deals with industrial products and trading, and I’ve started considering whether I should put my energy into the family business and eventually build something of my own.
I don’t have a huge amount of savings from my previous jobs.
I had planned to stay at my latest company for at least a year, save money and take advantage of the salary increment that would eventually come.
But life doesn’t exactly follow the spreadsheet.
Sometimes it just throws the whole spreadsheet into the ocean.
I’m under no illusion that entrepreneurship is easier.
It’s probably harder.
When you’re running your own business, you’re the CEO, manager, HR, accountant, salesperson, problem solver and sometimes the person doing jobs nobody else wants to do.
But at least you’re building something that belongs to you.
If you work harder, become more creative, understand your customers and understand the market, there isn’t necessarily a fixed ceiling on what you can build.
And that’s something that appeals to me.
I’m only 21.
I’ve already failed school, worked at an airline, burned myself out, spent more than a year away from employment, returned to aviation, entered another corporate environment, dealt with workplace politics again, and eventually walked away from it.
Maybe I’m too young to judge corporate life.
Maybe I’ve just had bad experiences.
Maybe there are genuinely great companies out there with healthy cultures and good managers.
I’m sure there are.
But my experience so far has taught me one thing:
Corporate life can be incredibly childish.
People spend their days working for a company that doesn’t belong to them while creating enemies with people who are ultimately in the exact same position as them.
All for a paycheck.
And maybe that’s the part I don’t understand anymore.
I’m 21.
I’ve seen enough workplace bullshit to know that I don’t want to spend the next 40 years participating in it.
Maybe entrepreneurship will be harder.
Maybe I’ll fail at that too.
But at least if I fail, I’ll know exactly what I’m failing at.
And if I succeed, I’ll be building something that is actually mine.
That’s where I’m at right now.
So I’m curious: for those of you who have spent years in corporate life, did you eventually find a workplace where the culture was genuinely healthy, or did you also reach a point where you decided that corporate life simply wasn’t for you?