I’m twisting a paperclip into a sharp, useless hook while the air conditioner in Conference Room 47 hums a low, mocking B-flat. Opposite me, a project manager named Brenda is clicking a retractable pen in a rhythm that suggests she’s either Morse-coding a distress signal or counting down to a nervous breakdown. The project we just finished-if you can call a burning wreckage ‘finished’-has been a spectacular failure. We missed 17 deadlines, the client is threatening a lawsuit involving 7 different jurisdictions, and the core codebase looks like it was written by a caffeinated squirrel on a dare.

Brenda takes a deep breath, the kind people take before they say something that is technically a lie but socially a lubricant. ‘Look,’ she says, leaning in with a practiced, predatory empathy. ‘We shouldn’t dwell on the lack of a project brief or the fact that the server architecture was fundamentally flawed from Day 1. We need to look at this through the lens of a growth mindset. It’s all about our evolution as a team.’

I feel a vein in my temple throb. This is the third time this week a structural disaster has been rebranded as a ‘learning opportunity.’ Yesterday, I tried to return a defective espresso machine at a department store. I didn’t have the receipt. I knew I didn’t have the receipt. I’d lost it in a stack of 37 other discarded papers, yet I expected some level of human logic to prevail since the thing was literally leaking black sludge onto my shoes. The clerk didn’t get angry. He didn’t even get defensive. He just looked at me and said, ‘Maybe this is a chance for you to grow into a more organized consumer.’

Mindset Gaslighting and Invisible Foundations

Eli E.S., a meme anthropologist I follow who spends 77 hours a week cataloging the digital fossils of our collective burnout, calls this ‘Mindset Gaslighting.’ He argues that by shifting the focus from the failure of the system to the internal psychological state of the employee, leadership can bypass the messy work of fixing their own incompetence. If a bridge collapses because the architect forgot how gravity works, you don’t tell the survivors to have a growth mindset about their fear of heights. You fix the damn bridge. Or, better yet, you hire an architect who understands that 107% of bridges require stable foundations.

But in the digital workspace, foundations are invisible, and therefore optional. We operate in a perpetual state of ‘failing forward,’ which is usually just code for ‘stumbling blindly because no one bothered to turn on the lights.’ When I pointed out that our 57-slide deck for the product launch contained zero information about the actual product, I was told I was being ‘fixed’ in my thinking. I was told that my insistence on clarity was a ‘defense mechanism’ against the beauty of the unknown.

I’m sorry, but the unknown isn’t beautiful when it has a $777-per-hour billable rate attached to it. The unknown is just a lack of planning. When you’re dealing with a system that prioritizes actual fulfillment and the delivery of specific, tangible items-much like the inventory management and commitment to service at

Heroes Store

-you realize that ‘growth’ doesn’t mean ‘tolerating a leaky bucket.’ Real growth involves identifying the hole, finding the right material to plug it, and ensuring it doesn’t happen again. It is a technical process, not just an emotional one.

Eli E.S. recently shared a meme that depicted the ‘This is Fine’ dog sitting in the burning room, but instead of the usual caption, it said: ‘I am currently maximizing my resilience through a non-traditional environmental challenge.’ That is where we are. We have replaced accountability with a series of therapeutic buzzwords. If a manager fails to provide a brief, it’s a ‘creative vacuum’ for you to fill. If the software is buggy, it’s a ‘collaborative debugging journey.’ It’s a linguistic shell game where the prize under every cup is more work for the people at the bottom.

This trend creates a culture of silence. If calling out a problem is seen as a symptom of a ‘fixed mindset,’ then the only way to prove you’re a ‘high-potential’ employee is to pretend the fire doesn’t burn. We end up with 27-year-old directors who have never been told ‘no’ because every ‘no’ was reframed as a ‘not yet.’ The result is a total erosion of standards. I see it in the way we handle data, the way we treat our time, and even the way we interact with our customers.

Let’s go back to the receipt for a moment. My frustration at the store wasn’t just about the $207 I’d lost; it was about the breakdown of a predictable system. A receipt is a contract. It’s an acknowledgement of a reality. Corporate ‘growth’ talk is the ultimate way of losing the receipt. It allows the institution to claim that no transaction of failure ever actually took place. If everything is a lesson, then nothing is a mistake. And if nothing is a mistake, no one ever has to apologize or change their behavior.

I’ve watched Eli E.S. document this across different industries. He showed me a thread where a hospital administrator tried to use growth mindset language to explain away a 17% increase in clerical errors caused by a new, confusing software rollout. He told the nurses that their frustration was a ‘limiting belief.’ Imagine telling someone who is literally trying to save lives that their desire for a functional computer system is just a lack of personal development. It’s ghoulish. It’s a way of turning structural problems into personal flaws.

We need to start demanding the right to be ‘fixed’ about certain things. I am fixed in my belief that project launches require briefs. I am fixed in my belief that 207 pages of documentation are better than zero pages of documentation. I am fixed in the idea that if I pay for a service, I shouldn’t be told to ‘grow’ when the service fails to deliver. There is a profound dignity in being right about a problem. There is an even deeper necessity in being allowed to voice that problem without being pathologized.

The obsession with ‘pivoting’-another sibling of the growth mindset-is equally exhausting. We pivot 7 times in a single quarter because we didn’t have the discipline to follow a strategy for 17 days. Each pivot is heralded as a sign of agility. In reality, it’s usually just a sign of a leadership team that gets distracted by every shiny object on LinkedIn. Each time we pivot, we leave behind a wake of half-finished ideas and burnt-out humans who are told that their exhaustion is just ‘growing pains.’

Real growth is slow. It’s boring. It involves repetition, discipline, and a very ‘fixed’ commitment to excellence. It looks like a craftsman spending 107 hours mastering a single joint, not a startup founder changing their entire business model because they read a tweet while on the toilet. We have confused ‘growth’ with ‘movement.’ They are not the same thing. A hamster on a wheel is moving, but it’s not going anywhere. It’s just burning calories in a frantic, circular panic.

As I sat there in the meeting with Brenda, watching her click that pen for the 1007th time, I realized that I didn’t want to grow. Not in the way she meant. I didn’t want to become more resilient to her lack of planning. I didn’t want to expand my capacity for tolerating incompetence. I wanted to be in a room where a mistake was called a mistake, where a disaster was called a disaster, and where the solution involved a calendar and a budget rather than a motivational quote from a TED Talk.

We are reaching a breaking point with this rhetoric. People are tired of being told their valid criticisms are just psychological hurdles. They are tired of the ‘yes, and’ culture that prevents anyone from saying ‘no, this is wrong.’ If we want actual growth-the kind that produces better products, better services, and healthier human beings-we have to stop using psychology as a shield for poor management. We have to start honoring the ‘fixed’ reality that some things are simply broken and need to be fixed with tools, not just a shift in perspective.

I eventually left the department store without my refund, the sludge-dripping machine still in my hand. I felt like I’d failed some kind of secret test of character. But when I got to my car, I looked at the machine and realized it wasn’t my character that was broken; it was the heating element. And no amount of positive thinking was going to make my coffee hot. Sometimes, the most ‘growth-oriented’ thing you can do is acknowledge that the situation is a total mess and walk away toward something that actually works.