Or: why a forty-eight-year-old senior consultant flinches in an empty meeting room — and why the concept of work will be rewritten in the coming years
A generation learned that work equals presence. The tightening of the subsidy tap and AI are now jointly making it visible that this lesson has expired — and the mis-trained managers are living through a double loss of status. The good news, once again, is that vectors can move.
Ha ezt a bekezdést gond nélkül elolvassa, Önnek nem ez a kiadás kell: az eredeti a tanul.io/latszat címen várja, rövidebb, és nem magyarázza el, mi az a Corvinus. Ha viszont egy szót sem ért belőle, ne aggódjon: jelen lenni így is tud, és ebben a cikkben éppen ez lesz a probléma.
P.S. If the paragraph above is opaque to you, don't worry: you are present, and this essay is about why that used to be enough.
Once upon a time there was a man — let us call him Csaba — who, at a quarter past two on a Wednesday afternoon, sat alone in a fourth-floor meeting room of a Budapest office building. The meeting had been scheduled for two. His calendar listed twelve invitees. His laptop was already glowing with the accumulated weight of its Microsoft Teams icons. And nobody, anywhere.
Csaba was forty-eight years old, had three children, and had spent eighteen years as a senior consultant at a firm whose actual product he could no longer have described in a full sentence at a dinner party — except with the phrase "strategic integration between partners", a phrase Csaba himself found suspicious every time it left his own mouth.
Eighteen minutes of silence. Then Csaba — without anyone having announced that the meeting was cancelled — closed the laptop. Not angrily. More like tiredly. And as he stared into his plastic coffee cup, something dark and ancient growled awake inside him. Not anger. Not fatigue. A quiet, embarrassingly familiar thought:
The cancelled meeting itself did not bother him. What bothered him was that, in the blink of an eye, the question surfaced which he had not dared to ask for eighteen years: what exactly am I doing here?
Pronounced CHAH-bah. A first name, not a surname, despite appearances. Where the first tale in this series reached for a János — the Hungarian everyman — this essay reaches for a Csaba: statistically the same man, five floors higher, with a company car allowance. The Guide notes that no Csaba has ever been born outside Hungary, which makes the name a passport.
Given: one human adult. Let us call him Csaba. Csaba graduated from Corvinus in the summer of 2008 and joined the consulting industry in the hope of solving meaningful problems — learning a great deal, building something. For the first two years, that is what happened. Then the consulting around him slowly transformed: fewer meaningful problems, more long workshops. Less implementation, more "kick-off". Less data analysis, more colourful slides.
Corvinus University of Budapest: the institution where Hungary's consultants, bankers and finance ministers are manufactured. Admission requires excellent grades; graduation requires a LinkedIn profile. The Guide notes that "graduated from Corvinus in 2008" is the Hungarian equivalent of boarding a ship in April 1912, first class.
And Csaba — like everyone surrounded by similar experiences — learned one astonishingly fundamental thing: that in this ecosystem, work does not necessarily mean what the children's books said. Work is not necessarily about creating something. Work, if the environment permits, slowly turns into something else entirely:
Appearing at the meeting. Appearing on Slack. Appearing in the report. Appearing at the office Christmas party. And "appearing", after a while, begins to live a life of its own — because where there is no feedback about actual impact, the only measurable thing is presence.
Nobody told Csaba this. Csaba learned it. In exactly the way an eighteen-month-old learns that crying summons the mother. If something happens, then something must be done about it. Conditioning is neither bad nor good. It merely is. And after eighteen years of work, the vectors in his head settle into precisely this arrangement: work = presence = identity = safety.
An indispensable sentence must be said here: these layers of appearance are not there solely by Csaba's fault or intention. Over the past decade and a half, a significant slice of Hungary's economy was built on subsidised, grant-based and connection-based structures which — with no meaningful oversight — permitted, and at times required, that the internal world of companies detach itself from real value creation. Many thousands of people built careers inside such a system, in good faith. Not everyone is a Csaba. But the structure was built in a way that produced Csabas, in quantity. This essay examines Csaba's psychology — not the structure's owners. But we do not leave the structure out, because the psychology cannot be understood without the backdrop.
The polite term above — "subsidised, grant-based and connection-based structures" — refers to the economic order of the era Hungarians call the NER (System of National Cooperation, the official name of the 2010–2026 political system; see the series' founding entry for the full context). Its relevant property for this essay: it was an economy in which proximity could substitute for output for a remarkably long time. The Guide wishes to note that this is not a uniquely Hungarian invention; Hungary merely ran the experiment with unusual thoroughness and EU co-financing.
In the mid-2020s, something changed around Csaba. Quietly at first. Then louder. Then thunderously.
The first shock: the subsidy tap narrows. The EU grant cycles rearrange themselves, parts of the domestic client base buckle, the economy begins to cool. Suddenly, positions begin to be "rationalised" which nobody had looked at the day before. Revenue falls; fixed costs remain. Executives start looking for places to shed people quietly. And the first person in the crosshairs is the one whose actual activity is hard to describe precisely.
In Hungary this first shock is a quiet one. Not big news. Not a big wave. But the meeting rooms begin to empty, and the middle managers listen more often than they speak.
The second shock: AI. A technology whose very nature is to pull appearances apart. With an AI, a "stakeholder analysis" takes ten minutes, not ten days. A summary takes three seconds to write. A two-day workshop compresses into a seven-minute digest. Where a three-person "controlling" team once stood, one person and one LLM pipeline now produce a more accurate result — faster.
And here comes the hard part. AI does not make it obvious that the work has disappeared. It makes it obvious how many temporal detours we had been taking to do it. Everything that used to take four weeks under the name "analysis" suddenly becomes measurable in the few hours it takes a careful AI prompt and one person who understands the domain. And every detour we used to cover with the words "process", "due diligence", "stakeholder alignment" — now becomes embarrassingly visible.
The emptiness of Csaba's meeting room is therefore no accident. The meeting room was always emptier than it looked. The two shocks simply yanked apart the curtain we had been draping over it for years.
Now for the dirty part. And I am not telling it to frighten anyone, but because what we do not name, we cannot work with.
Someone who goes through a traditional job loss — say, the factory closes when they are sixty, or the startup folds when they are thirty-five — loses one status. They lose salary, structure, professional identity. It hurts. But it is a single-layer pain.
The mis-trained manager loses status twice over.
He loses his future salary. That is the material shock. Frightening, but manageable — with retraining, savings, time.
And he loses the status of his past. Because it suddenly, painfully dawns on him that the fifteen or twenty years he had been keeping on the books as a career were, in part, not what they seemed. In part, they were a subsidy. A collective, silent arrangement. The upkeep of a system that preserved a middle class.
And this second loss is much harder. Because it does not only say: "your future is gone." It says: "your past was not necessarily what it seemed, either."
Psychology knows this terrain. Cognitive dissonance. Identity threat. Compound trauma. But in ordinary language it translates to a single word: dread. Csaba feels that it is not only the future missing from the coming months — retroactively, the past has buckled too. And no HR department's career handbook prepares you for that.
Several independent research traditions describe exactly this dynamic. This is not witty speculation — there is serious psychological and neuroscientific ground under it.
An environment that provides no real feedback on performance dismantles effort. When "work" detaches from "consequence", the brain eventually discontinues the effort. And when it suddenly turns out that performance is required after all — the brain does not know where to source the energy.
The more time we have invested in something, the harder it is to admit it did not achieve its purpose. The ego defends the spent years of the past, even when they are objectively a lost investment. This is not stupidity — it is consciousness's basic self-defence.
Loss of status activates the same networks in the brain as physical pain. A double status loss (material + identity) is, in practice, chronic pain. And chronic pain leads to cognitive narrowing — problem-solving capacity shrinks exactly when it is needed most.
If someone's childhood environment suggested that "life is a system in which it is smarter to plug into the right place than to look for meaningful work", they carry that forward as an internal working model. The NER years and the grant-fed economy did not create this pattern — they merely amplified and rewarded it.
The brain reads new situations through old models (see this site's other article on the subject). If for eighteen years the model was "work = presence + meeting + slide", then the new situation — in which work has become measurable, automatable and output-oriented all at once — is being read with the old map. Hence the feeling of helplessness: the capacity is not missing; the terrain is being read with the wrong map.
None of the above is solved by a LinkedIn post, a YouTube video, or a sixty-minute coaching session. Those vectors took years to settle — they will take years to resettle. This is not hopeless. It is merely not fast. And not solo.
So what can be done? Because something can. And no — this will not be a "five tips to survive until 2027" list. It will be three slow, hard, but walkable reframings.
The people now realising that part of their career was appearance-work were not stupid, and were not bad people. They spent twenty years inside a subsidised, quietly permissive structure. An entire generation of the middle class learned the same lesson. The realisation comes with shame — and shame cannot be healed by suppression. It has to be admitted: yes, I worked hard on something that, in retrospect, was worth less than I believed. That is pain. It hurts the head and the body alike. It is normal.
I am not saying presence is not work. Presence is a kind of work. But if the vectors in our head are arranged as work = presence, it is worth learning a new vector neighbourhood as well: work = visible output. That is: something a specific other person or a specific market situation asks of me, and whose existence or absence actually matters. This cannot be learned over a weekend. But with ten deliberate minutes a day — "what did I do today without which anyone would be worse off?" — it slowly rearranges.
This is not to be done alone. The coming decade in Hungary will be the decade of career coaches, psychologists, and a new kind of adult education. An entire professional infrastructure needs to be built to help Csaba cross from a presence-based identity to a reality-based one. This cannot and need not be done solo. And if that infrastructure does not exist yet — building it will be precisely one of the new, real jobs.
And there is good news here too. The human brain is more open to change than we think. The vectors sit close together, but nobody nailed them there. Just not hastily, not hysterically, not as punishment. Patiently, slowly, with much repetition. Just as János, in the other tale, can slowly learn that the plate is just a plate — Csaba too can slowly learn that the meeting room is just a meeting room, and that real work worthy of him exists, and is even, occasionally, a joy.
One Wednesday afternoon Csaba walks out onto Margaret Bridge. Not because he is avoiding work. But because, for the first time in eighteen years, he knows exactly what he wants to do at six in the evening: write one concrete proposal, for one concrete company, about one concrete problem, which one concrete person will actually receive and actually understand. In two hours. Not two days.
A bird flies over his head. Csaba feels no obligation whatsoever to do something about the bird. The bird is just a bird. Work is just work. And perhaps the next ten years in Hungary will be about re-learning what everyone once knew: that the difference between the two is not in the appearing. It is in whether something actually happened.