Why decent people (or so it seems) become unbearable. A personal account

Over the last month I noticed an unpleasant thing about myself. I had become toxic.

I started joining the office gossip, though I had always thought it was counterproductive. I caught myself envying other people’s success. Instead of looking for opportunities I started looking for mistakes. I praised less and criticized more. Not to humiliate anyone. To show my expertise and how hard I was to replace.

I do not like it. I do not want to be that. And instead of scolding myself, I decided to take the process apart as an engineering problem. What changed in the system, that the output was this “toxic” result?

The hypothesis I arrived at: I stopped affecting the result directly

Before, I ran huge turnover and a large team. There was a direct, often fairly fast, link between a decision and a result.

You turn the wheel and the car turns. You feel that you are driving the situation. You are the cause of what happens.

Now my work is processes, data, and method. I build models and look for patterns. I am good at it. Before, this was only part of my work. Now it is all I do.

I write documents, I calculate, I build forecasts. Who will put them in? When? Will they be remade? I do not know.

The wheel in my hands is no longer connected to the wheels. I do something, and the car goes somewhere on its own.

Toxicity here is not a bad character. It is a side effect of losing influence.

When the brain stops seeing a direct link between “I did it” and “the world changed”, it looks for substitutes. Finding other people’s mistakes, criticism, trying to stand out on someone else’s miss: a cheap way to get back the illusion of influence.

What the science says

I decided to check whether psychology confirms this. It does. There is self-determination theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan (a psychological theory of motivation, developing since 1985). It sounds complicated. The point is simple. For a person to be all right at work, they need three things:

Mastery: I know how to do this.

Belonging: I am one of the team.

Autonomy: I am the cause of my own actions.

Autonomy here is not “I do what I want”. It is the feeling that the result depends on you.

When you write a document that goes into a drawer, or you give advice that is ignored, the need for autonomy is blocked. For the psyche this is not merely “sad”. It is a system error.

To confirm it, a group of researchers led by Maarten Van den Broeck did a large piece of work, a meta-analysis of 99 studies (a scientific paper covering thousands of employees). The task was simple: understand what makes people behave destructively at work.

The conclusion was unambiguous. The main cause of hidden aggression, sabotage, and office intrigue is not pay and not character. It is the absence of a feeling of influence. As soon as a person is deprived of the chance to see the result of their actions, they start, without quite meaning to, to “take it out” on the environment.

It works as a chain reaction. The environment does not let you affect the outcome. Interest in the work falls. Tension rises. Tension looks for a way out.

If you cannot kick the system (it is too big), you “kick” a colleague, with a cutting comment or a nitpick. It is an attempt to get control back. “I cannot affect the company’s profit, but I can affect this person’s mood. There. I affect the world again.”

The second factor: boredom from meaninglessness

The same meta-analysis by Van den Broeck found a closed loop: boredom (from the absence of a result) produces anger, and anger increases the boredom.

This is not the boredom of having nothing to do. You can work with your head down and stay concentrated. It is the boredom of an engine roaring in neutral. The wheels are not turning. The energy goes nowhere. The organism looks for entertainment in the only place available: office intrigue.

What to do

So the diagnosis is clear. Toxicity is the organism shouting that its levers have been taken away. Scolding yourself is useless. The conditions have to change.

1. Bring back a short link between action and result

You need the feeling of “I pressed the button and the light came on”.

If at the main job the result is delayed or blurred, find a place where you own the result. A personal project, sport, writing your own book, fixing the house in the country. Any work where the result depends only on you, 100%. It calms you down and lowers the urge to criticize other people.

2. Vary the tasks

If the work uses only one skill (only analyzing numbers, for example), the brain starts to rebel. Analysis is a good dish. Eat nothing else for a month and you will feel ill.

The move: add something alive to the work. Run a negotiation, sell something, set a process up with your own hands, speak in public. The brain needs the switch.

3. Stop blaming yourself

The most important one. The first reaction, when you see that you have started behaving badly, is shame. Shame pushes you either to deny the problem (“they are the fools”) or to gnaw at yourself. Neither helps.

The move: admit the fact. “I am behaving like this because I do not have enough influence on the result.” That does not make me a bad person. It makes me a person who landed in a bad situation.

4. Change the environment (if nothing else helps)

There are situations where the autonomy you want is physically impossible. Either the processes are built so that the employee’s role is minimized for the sake of stability. Or the company has roles with high autonomy, and all those chairs are taken.

How to tell it is time: you honestly tried points 1, 2, and 3, and the feeling of powerlessness does not pass. You have hit a structural ceiling. The competence to influence is there, and there is no slot to use it. The cost of adapting is higher than the return: psychosomatic symptoms, apathy.

The move: admit that this moment does not fit. If my main need is to affect the result directly, and there are no free roles with that function, then we are out of phase. Changing the environment, in that case, is a search for a place where the responsibility you are ready to take is a responsibility they are ready to give you.

The point

If you notice that you are becoming unbearable to the people around you, do not rush to a psychologist, and do not quit into nowhere.

Look at your work. It may be that you have lost the direct link between your effort and the result.

I wish everyone luck in looking for answers. I am off to test this guess in practice.