If your weekend ends with dread, your job is charging rent in your head.

Sunday Night Dread: The weight that arrives when the weekend ends. Not anxiety about the work itself. Dread about walking back into a place where people perform value instead of creating it. Where you're tired of the game and tired of accepting this is just the way it is.

Frank's laptop bag is packed.

He didn't pack it. Not consciously. His hands did it while his brain was elsewhere. Sunday evening, same spot by the door, same ritual he doesn't remember starting.

He's gotten efficient at preparing for the place he doesn't want to go.

One more email check. Nothing urgent. His shoulders stay tight anyway.

Tomorrow is meetings. People talking over each other. Contributing something, anything, to prove their value. Energy spent assigning blame. Deflecting blame. Establishing dominance. Pretending to do something useful instead of just doing it.

The dread used to feel sharp. Now it just sits there. A low hum he stopped naming years ago. Not painful enough to address. Not light enough to ignore.

He goes to bed.

Monday morning: unremarkable drive, same coffee, same inbox. At 9:59 he's in the conference room.

Someone is explaining why their department can't move forward without another stakeholder sync. Someone else is nodding but already composing their rebuttal. Frank watches the clock.

And then he sees it.

Not the work. The performance. Nobody here is trying to solve problems. They're trying to prove they still deserve to be here.

When you see it, you can't unsee it.

The exhaustion isn't from working too hard. It's from the game. From accepting that this is "just the way it is."

Frank doesn't say anything. Not today. But he stops calling it "just a job."

He names it now: a culture that mistakes theater for value. And he's been paying the cover charge every Sunday night for years.