The hum is the first thing you notice. Not the CEO’s cracking voice, not the sudden chill in the conference room, but the low, insistent drone of the HVAC system. It’s a sound you learn to ignore after about a week on the job, but in moments of profound silence, it rushes back in to fill the void. He’s blinking a lot, up there on the little portable stage, trying to make it look like tears and not just the dry air. He told us 8 minutes ago that he thinks of us not as employees, but as family.

Now, he’s explaining what that means. It means sacrifice. It means tightening our belts. It means that to save the whole, some parts must be… reallocated. His gaze sweeps across the 238 faces staring back at him, a practiced look of pained sincerity he must have rehearsed with an executive coach. I find my eyes drifting up to the ceiling, counting the acoustic tiles. Twelve across, twenty down. A perfect grid of pale, perforated squares. Orderly. Predictable. Everything this meeting is not.

Then comes the pivot. The sacrifice, it turns out, is not his seven-figure bonus. It is not the ill-advised new marketing initiative that cost $878,000. The sacrifice is the entire Quality Assurance department. All 48 of them. Effective immediately. He says it’s one of the hardest decisions of his life, and the HVAC hums its indifferent agreement. We are a family, and we’ve just voted Uncle Jerry off the island.

This isn’t just a bad metaphor; it’s a calculated emotional weapon. I’ll admit, I used to fall for it. My first real job out of college, the founder pulled me aside and told me, “We’re not like other companies. We’re a family here.” I swelled with pride. I belonged. That sense of belonging got them two years of 58-hour weeks, weekends spent debugging code, and a vacation I cancelled to meet a deadline for a product that was later shelved. I wasn’t an employee; I was a loyal son. But when the venture capital dried up, my “family” handed me my walking papers with the same cold efficiency as a bank foreclosure. The mistake was mine. I confused a paycheck with an unbreakable bond.

When either side fails to uphold their end of the bargain, the contract can be terminated. It is transactional, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, it’s honest. The “work family” rhetoric is a deliberate attempt to blur that line. It’s a tool to extract the loyalty and sacrifice of a family relationship without offering the unconditional security that underpins it. They want your heart, but they’re only willing to rent your hands.

I’m thinking about Drew S.-J., a man who developed ice cream flavors for a trendy organic creamery that preached the family gospel louder than anyone. Drew was a genius, a culinary artist whose official title was something like “Director of Frozen Delights.” He created flavors like “Cardamom & Orchard Fig” and “Smoked Sea Salt & Burnt Honey.” He was the company’s eccentric, beloved uncle. He’d work for days on a single batch, sleeping on a cot in his test kitchen, driven by passion and a desire to make his “family” proud. People loved him. The company plastered his face all over their social media. He was proof of their quirky, people-first culture.

Last fall, a private equity firm bought the creamery. The new parent company, in its infinite wisdom, decided that flavor innovation was a non-essential cost center. Drew’s entire department was eliminated in a three-sentence email. The family didn’t even have the decency to say goodbye in person. The company that had sold millions of dollars of product based on his unique creative spirit decided he was no longer a good value-add. I hate that term, “value-add.” It sounds like something you’d find in a spreadsheet, not a term to describe a human being’s contribution. It reduces a person to a number, which is, ironically, far more honest than calling them family and then ghosting them.

The entire charade is built on a foundation of unreciprocated expectation. They expect you to answer emails at 10 PM because “families help each other out.” They expect you to absorb the work of a laid-off colleague without a pay increase because “families pull together in tough times.” They expect you to be loyal and not look for other jobs, because that would be a betrayal. But when the economic winds shift, the transactional nature of the relationship is revealed with brutal clarity.

There’s a strange freedom in rejecting this narrative. It’s not about being cynical or disengaged. It’s about demanding clarity. It’s about building a professional life based on mutual respect, not feigned affection. You can be passionate about your work. You can form deep, meaningful friendships with your colleagues. You can be a dedicated, loyal, and brilliant employee without ever pretending your CEO is your dad. A healthy working relationship is based on clear boundaries and transparent exchanges of value. You do good work, they pay you fairly. They provide a quality product, customers pay a fair price. It’s a clean, honest system. Businesses that operate this way don’t need to manipulate you with emotional language; their value proposition is clear. Whether you buy cannabis seeds online or purchase a software subscription, you’re engaging in a straightforward contract: this for that. There’s no expectation that you’ll come to the company’s Thanksgiving dinner.

For a while, I tried to fight it. In meetings, when someone would say “we’re a family,” I’d politely interject, “I think you mean we’re a team.” A team has a shared goal. A team understands that players get traded. It’s a better metaphor, but I eventually realized I was just arguing semantics. The problem isn’t the word; it’s the intent behind it. The intent is to lower your guard, to make you feel guilty for setting boundaries, to make you give more than you get.

Maybe I’m just getting old. Maybe I’ve sat in too many rooms with grids on the ceiling, listening to men in expensive shirts talk about sacrifices they will never have to make. But I’ve come to believe that the most respectful thing a company can say to its employees is this: “We are not a family. We are a company. We have hired you because you are a talented professional. We will pay you competitively, treat you with respect, and provide you with the tools to do the best work of your career. In return, we expect you to honor your commitments and help us succeed. When our needs or your needs change, we will handle that transition with transparency and respect.”