This is what happens when you spend your whole existence corporate brown-nosing. Every forced chuckle at the bosses bad joke, every faux-optimisitic email, eventually rots your soul.

You end up so dishonest that you become unable to tell reality from your own manufactured optimism, and it spreads to all parts of your life.

You become unable to acknowledge hard truth about your relationships with other people, and instead just optimise for the aesthetics of lukewarm niceties instead of anything with substance.

Your kids think you are a distant loser, Your wife loses respect for you when you completely fail to register her emotional needs. You still merrily greet them every morning, but are unable to see the disinterested response.

She starts to quietly seek fulfilment elsewhere, you wallpaper over your own instincts with “maybe she’s tired” and “she can have her own friends!”. The well-trained optimism reflex is so embedded, you can no longer comprehend doing anything else.

After time the inevitable dragged out divorce comes and goes, you have a moment of reflection, alone in your new downsized economy apartment. You like it, it’s all you really need after all. You can do whatever you want, and that makes a nice change.

You look at your Windows Phone on the bare table. The battery died after you were on it to the utilities people all day. You convince yourself an iPhone would have died way sooner. Plus, they are so ugly anyway.

You pick it up to appreciate the glossy front. You see the face of an old, broken man smiling vaguely back at you.

You cry.