I actually wrote this in my cube on a particularly bad day:
Sitting here in the cubicle, trying to find a reason to care enough about this job to stay the last obligatory hour. These keystrokes are stricken with a malaise that has crept in from many encounters with red flags of various stripes. They became an amorphous, solid banner months ago, and now I sit waiting for my escape pod to slice through the curtain and take me to some better place.
I still enjoy the nature of this profession, the creative problem solving, the opportunity to work with smart people, the order of magnitude difference that one small decision can make. But this place reeks of apathy. It's a scent without aroma, as though distinctiveness itself would be cause for offense. The ideal is to have no ideals. To stoically accept the status quo. To feed managerial egos tender hours that would be more rightly spent with loved ones.
This is my prison, my years of penance determined by the magnitude of my debt. Most of my purchases were bought to increase the quality of my free time, but now I schedule my free time to be more productive, as more work is required to keep pace with the world. But the world is mad. Everyone is running in place, feigning motions of progress without moving one step in the right direction. There's always a glimmering something just beyond our reach. A promotion, a house, a fancy new car. It's usually enough to distract us from the subtle, sublime beauty that abounds in the moment, but we just might be better off if we took a step backward to appreciate it all.
Questions like "What are the biggest risks in your project right now? Who would you fire right now if you could? Who would you hire?" are things a team lead should be able to handle in real life, not just on an anonymous blog.