This is what happens when you spend your whole existence corporate brown nosing. Every forced chuckle at the bosses bad joke, every falsely optimistic outlook, 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 tedious niceties instead of anything with substance.

Your kids think you are a loser, Your wife loses respect for you. You still merrily greet them every morning, but are unable to see the disinterested response.

She seeks emotional fulfilment elsewhere, you are unable to see the signs, you wallpaper over your own instincts with “maybe she’s tired” and “she can have her own friends!”.

She divorces you after hoping for years you would get the hint and do it first.

You are alone in your new economy apartment after downsizing from the house sale. You like it, it’s all you need really after all!

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 pick it up.

You see the face of an old, broken man smiling vaguely back at you.

You cry.