Welcome to the great corporate retreat, a tactical withdrawal from the lofty, LinkedIn-approved promises of 2020. Remember the black squares? The feverish hiring of 'Chief Diversity Officers' whose primary job was to look concerned in Zoom meetings and curate the company’s ‘Inclusive Brunch’ calendar? Well, the bill has come due, and unsurprisingly, the people who were ushered into the boardroom via a revolving door of performative guilt are now being ushered out through the service exit. Black female professionals, once the darlings of the ESG-industrial complex, are watching their career paths recede faster than a CEO’s hairline during a congressional hearing.

The data is as grim as a morgue on a rainy Tuesday. Over the last year, employment for this demographic has dropped with the kind of velocity usually reserved for crypto-scams. In response, these professionals are turning to one another for 'pep talks' and 'résumé advice.' It is a touching, if entirely futile, display of human solidarity in a landscape that values solidarity about as much as it values a dial-up modem. The 'pep talk' is the spiritual equivalent of a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound. You can polish a résumé until it glows with the inner light of a thousand 'synergistic' buzzwords, but if the gatekeeper is a bored AI algorithm or a terrified middle manager looking to preserve his own redundant position, the result is the same: a digital silence that echoes through the halls of your overpriced home office.

The Left, predictably, is clutching its collective pearls, offering 'conversations' and 'dialogue'—words they use when they have absolutely no intention of changing the material conditions of anyone’s life. To the professional activist class, this is just more 'content' for their next fund-raising gala. They thrive on the cycle of grievance; if the problem were actually solved, they’d have to get real jobs, and heaven knows they aren’t qualified for anything that doesn't involve a megaphone or a poorly-formatted infographic. They offer representation as a substitute for security, as if having a face that looks like yours on a 'Team' page makes the eviction notice any easier to read.

On the other side of the aisle, the Right is currently busy congratulating itself on the death of 'woke capital.' They smirk into their scotch and mutter about 'meritocracy,' a fairy tale they tell themselves so they don't have to admit that 'merit' in the corporate world usually translates to 'having the same golf handicap as the VP of Sales.' They view the purging of diverse talent as a return to 'rationality,' ignoring the fact that the entire corporate structure is a sprawling, irrational mess of nepotism, legacy hires, and bureaucratic bloat. To them, anyone who isn’t a carbon copy of a 1950s insurance adjuster is a 'DEI hire,' a label they use to dismiss actual competence whenever it threatens their comfortable stagnation.

Let us deconstruct the absurdity of the 'résumé advice' being swapped in these support groups. We live in an era where the job market is a Kafkaesque lottery. You are told to 'network,' which is just a polite way of saying 'harass strangers until they pity you.' You are told to 'optimize your keywords,' as if your entire human existence can be boiled down to a string of nouns that an illiterate bot finds pleasing. These women are being forced to play a game where the rules are written in disappearing ink and the referee has been bribed by the opposing team. The 'career path' they were promised was never a path at all; it was a treadmill designed to keep them running in place while the company extracted enough PR value to satisfy the latest social justice trend.

The corporate world doesn't have a soul; it has a quarterly report. When the economy shivers, the first things to be pruned are the initiatives that were only ever intended to be window dressing. The tragedy isn't just the loss of income; it's the shattering of the illusion that the professional world is anything other than a cold, transactional void. These women were told they had a seat at the table. They didn't realize the table was rented, the chairs were folding, and the hosts were already looking for an excuse to cancel the dinner party and keep the security deposit.

Now, we are left with the spectacle of mutual aid—women helping women navigate a burning building while the arsonists sit in their penthouses discussing 'headcount optimization.' It is a grim reminder that in the grand theater of late-stage capitalism, we are all just props. Some props are simply more fashionable in one season than the next. As the 'diversity' trend is replaced by the 'AI efficiency' trend, the cycle of discard continues. The only thing more pathetic than the companies that lied to these women are the politicians who will now use their unemployment as a talking point in a campaign that will change absolutely nothing. Humanity’s capacity for self-delusion remains our only infinite resource.