@thesotiris 24 January 2026 more from that month

The Brothel of Corporate Life: Modern work culture and prostitution

What is less undignified? Selling your body or your soul? I recently saw this post from Hogeon, a screenshot of a LinkedIn profile of someone’s radical “career” change: from Goldman-Sachs exec to OnlyFans virtual prostitute. Whether real or not, it got me thinking. https://substack.com/@hogeon/note/c-169603219

While many would scorn her for selling out her dignity for money, I can’t help but wonder… What’s more undignified, being a well-paid prostitute of the body, or an underpaid, overworked prostitute of the spirit? Because that’s what it means to be a corporate stooge, a day-in-day-out performer of bullshit, meaningless tasks, wearing a big fake smile while being passive-aggressively belittled by your toxically positive coworkers and supervisors, all playing the ping-pong game of responsibility. Because this is all the corporate world is: successful deflection of responsibility. And if you think about it, all white-collar jobs and services are just that: the buying and selling of bullshit to mitigate and spread risk, and to avoid self-accountability; and thus rest in our deluded fantasies. How dignified is it to willingly enter a shitty corporate environment, practically living in the office, spending more time with shitty coworkers who hate you than with the people who love you the most… wearing a mask that isn’t fooling anyone, and pretending to be someone else while kidding yourself it’s “professionalism”? You are no better than a stripper or a whore pretending to like their customer when they, in fact, feel revolted. Being an OnlyFans “content” creator may well be more dignified than selling out to soul-crushing, identity-smashing, undignified corporatism. Sure, we all pretend so we can get by and make a living, to lie to the people who want to be lied to and don’t deserve the truth. We are all whores — we all sell our dignity for money, to varying degrees. At some point, we will all sell out for likability and survivability. At least OnlyFans spares you the indignity of quarterly assessments, bullshit suicide-contemplating meetings, eggshell-walking on HR thin ice, needy corporate ass kissing, the timesheet humiliation ritual, and white-collar passive aggression masked with fake, toxic, office “positivity”. At least, when being a literal prostitute, you have way more time to yourself to be as dignified as you like. How dignified is it to tolerate being talked down to all the time, to be treated with deliberately cruel, mundane, and truly pointless office tasks that offer no value to anyone? How respectful is it to take daily humiliation day in day out with zero job satisfaction or identity nurturing, and thus no purpose or meaning from the thing you spend most of your life on? And you tolerate all that with a forced smile that takes so much energy, as if the edges of your mouth were pulled by the gravitational force of a black hole. Is being a performative clown all day more dignified than whoring yourself for just a couple of hours each day? At least the OnlyFans prostitute is treated with respect and worship by his/her audience, which is more than I can say for any office worker whose supervisors and colleagues hide behind cringe-worthy masks of veneer, which don’t really hide their true hatred for you and for themselves. Nobody respects you in the corporate world; they just pretend they do as long as you are useful to them. The second you quit or retire, they will erase all memory of you. In the end, nothing matters in this meaningless world. Five seconds after you’re dead, nobody’s going to remember you for ‘not’ selling out to the twisted, frustrated needs of thirsty porn consumers. Nobody is going to honour your memory for choosing a life of corporate bullshit, belittling, pretentiousness, and all the two-facedness, all the fakeness you had to put yourself under just to make a measly month-to-month salary. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/deducing-the-absurdity-of-reality If the whore pretends to like her customers, then the corporate slave pretends to like his co-workers and boss. If the whore sells out her intimacy for money, then the corporate slave sells his dignity and integrity for money and the fake, pretentious “dignity” of the white collar; nobody cares. The only difference is that the whore does her undignified activities for 1-2 hours a day, while the corporate slave does it for a minimum of nine hours on a weekday, not to mention unpaid overtime, monumentally wasteful commute time, sadistic office outings, and the stress of Sunday afternoon and evening that are worse than Monday morning. So, why do some become proper prostitutes and others don’t? Perception. We suffer more depth and breadth of indignity with corporatism, this slow death of constant identity-killing prostitution of the corporate lifestyle. We all presume to agree with each other that the corporate lifestyle is supposedly dignified and empowering, just like we pretend that the emperor wears clothes, or that any politician cares for us. Deep down, though, we know we are whores just like OnlyFans meat merchants; just worse paid. We hate them because we deep down wish we had the balls to do what they do. The fact that we hate them shows that we envy them. And the fact that we envy them shows that we recognise their life as not less dignified than ours; just better paid and with much more self-ownership. And self-ownership is foundational to self-esteem. So, who’s the whore now? **Takeaway** When every face-implant, duck-faced bimbo on LinkedIn is a self-announced C-level “thought leader”, you understand that corporate success (or any kind of social reaction in a world as fake and as undignified as that) means absolutely nothing. Promotions and opportunities are nothing but nepotism and likability. If anything, the better you are at producing and the smarter you are, the less likely you are to be promoted, since you’re perfect for doing the work. If you’re good at what you’re doing, then you’ll keep doing it until you die; no one will want to promote you and lose your productivity. Promotions are for the yesmen, the pleasant clowns, the desperately dependable you can trust because they sell out to you easily, the likeable fools whose obedience makes them easily controllable and perfect for leadership, and whose mediocre production skills won’t be missed when promoted. If anything, succeeding in a hell probably means you’re not exactly an angel. And this world is hellishly ugly. I expect demons to find it aesthetic. I’m not promoting prostitution. Prostitution is bad, whether traditional bodily prostitution or the mental, spiritual indignity of corporate life. I’m not saying “become an OnlyFans prostitute”; I am saying “you are no better”. Perhaps, with this perspective in mind, we can begin to demand higher standards for ourselves.