When I started the job, a certain male co-worker caught my eye. We flirted a bit, but nothing serious. We would talk about sci-fi shows and books and generally had really nice interactions. He is 41 and divorced, with several bitter relationships behind him. He’s also a vegan and a self-professed feminist with high social ideals.

A few weeks ago we had a work party at a bar to celebrate a milestone in our year-long project. A few of us stayed late and were having a good time. When I went out for a cigarette, he followed me and kissed me. We spent the rest of the evening making out. It was followed by texts and Skype chats, and an invitation to the symphony. We went, had a great time, and went out for drinks. The subject of us working together came up, since we work in a small office where things could get awkward quickly. I said that we could take it at whatever pace he was comfortable with and see where it could go. So he invited me back to his apartment and sexy time ensued. I was happy and excited, thinking that maybe things were going to move forward in the one part of my life that had been empty for so long.

And then I heard nothing. When I texted him, I got a polite response that his day went well and that I left some jewelry at his place. Nothing more. Then I emailed him to ask if he wanted to get together over the weekend and heard nothing. I saw that he was active on the online dating site that we both have profiles on, but he didn’t answer for days. On a Friday afternoon, he sent me an email saying that he wanted to be good friends. That we could really be great friends, but that was what he was comfortable with. He said he was too busy to tell me in person, but he could drop my jewelry off and spend a few minutes with me before he went to dinner on Sunday. He said he was sorry I would be disappointed. It ended with an exclamation point about how excited he was about it being warm and being able to be outside. There was no real explanation, no apology, no discussion of how this would affect our work. Attempting to keep my dignity, I responded with “Message received. Please leave my jewelry on top of the fridge at work — no one will notice.” There has been little communication since, though when he did leave the jewelry for me, he was a bit chatty in the email, asking how I was. I didn’t respond.

I’m definitely hurt, but I’m angry and most of all confused. How do you go through a year of flirting to change your mind like that? How can he be so cavalier knowing that I’ll be uncomfortable in our workplace? He knew how long it had been for me and he escalated things anyway. The way he went about things and handled this was stupid and cruel. And we have to email each other 10 times a day for work purposes. How do I interact with him after he treated me with so little respect?

A close friend in my office knows what happened, and encourages me to just leave it alone and let it blow over. Part of me thinks that’s the way to get through this with my dignity intact. Part of me wants to send an email that isn’t explosive, but that at least calls him out on his bad behavior. Maybe I should talk to another co-worker for advice. I don’t know what to do, and it’s so much harder to shake off the hurt and anger when we have such close contact all the time. It’s also hard to shake off the feeling that there is something inherently wrong with me that made him change his mind so quickly. My self-esteem, which had been growing, is now at a rock-bottom low. I don’t think I function in the world very well, because I do expect to be treated with respect and kindness by those around me, and I do expect people who profess certain values to live by them.

What was he thinking? Why would he do this to me and to our workplace? Am I the immature one for expecting people to be careful? Is it right to do something or to leave it alone? I’m confused and uncomfortable, Cary, and I would really appreciate your advice.

Confused and Dismayed

Dear Confused and Dismayed,

This guy had several bitter relationships behind him. Guys with several bitter relationships behind them are doing something wrong. Look at the pattern.

Here’s what you need to do. You need to adopt some protections for the future so that you do not get involved with another man like this.

Maybe you lack the ability to spot such men. Learn to recognize them. Here are some clues:

Real men who will treat you well may occasionally eat halibut. They might hold the door open for you even if you can get through under your own power anyway. They do it because they’ve seen what happened with Stalin. If that doesn’t make perfect sense that’s OK. It’s meant to be sort of oblique. A man who’s OK and not going to screw you over might even be rude to you but he’ll apologize when it’s pointed out to him. He won’t pretend his rudeness was an instance of high social ideals in action.

He’ll just apologize.

Without beating up on men, because after all I am one, can I just say that if you have been socialized as a man you have learned some pretty rotten stuff? This learning is called “being realistic about the world out there.”

For instance, if I were drinking with a group of young men (which of course I mean I’m 23 years sober but if) and if I mentioned that I had had a one-night stand with a woman at work and had decided I didn’t think it was going to work out long-term, and I was wondering what to do about it, there would not be an immediate outpouring of, “Let’s talk about this together, guys, and put ourselves in her shoes and imagine how she’s feeling and debate the ways you can smooth things over with her and make her feel better about what happened.”

The consensus would be: “Cut her loose, dude. End of story.”

If I were to pursue the issue and say, “Well, guys, what about her feelings, and the awkwardness of it, and the fact I sort of led her on to believe it was going to be more than what it turned out to be?” the consensus would still be, “Shit happens. Cut her loose, dude. End of story.”

If I were to say that I think she and I should have some conversations about how things are going to proceed henceforth, there would be some good-natured ridicule and they would move down to the end of the bar.

Guys are taught to let it go and move on. In a fundamental way, this leads logically to the eventual dehumanization of the other. That is, if you are taught to make unilateral decisions in a relationship, then what you are really doing is invalidating the relationship and in the course of it invalidating the other.

The logic of it looks like this: If one is in a relationship then each person has a say. Ethically speaking, if one is in a relationship, one cannot make decisions about the relationship without the involvement of the other. Yet we guys are taught to do precisely that: to be independent, to make up our own minds, to keep our own counsel, to stand on our own two feet, to lay down the law. That’s what he’s doing. He’s doing what men have been taught to do for centuries. He’s made this decision about the relationship all on his own, without any involvement by you. He probably thinks he’s handling it pretty well. Amazing, isn’t it?

If one person has no say in matters concerning them both, then that is a kind of objectification, isn’t it? To treat someone as having no say, no opinion worth hearing, no desires worth considering, is to consider that person less than human, is it not?

So this is why you’re upset. You have been dehumanized.

Of course, this kind of dehumanization goes on all the time. It is so common that we scarcely pause to consider it. We men are taught to do this. We are taught to dehumanize the other. We don’t call it that. We call it being realistic and grown-up.

He’s the product of bad conditioning. He may also have a mild personality disorder. That doesn’t mean you have to be nice to this guy or like him or feel sorry for him. It just means that his behavior is not inexplicable. It’s a perfect emblem of how we live today. It is a perfect emblem of the society we accept as normal.

That’s why many of us feel half crazy most days.

Don’t trouble yourself too much. You’re fine. You just thought you were dealing with somebody like yourself. You’re not.

You must learn to recognize guys like this and stay away from them. If you can’t recognize guys like this, ask your women friends. If you don’t have any women friends, make some.

I have great relationships with my co-workers. We have become quite close in a short time and work well together. Most everyone who has ever spoken to me about my boss has only negative things to say. And, this only fires me up more. Next thing you know, I am shit-talking the hell out of this guy. It feels good in the moment, but I know it’s a bad idea. And, not because I could lose my job. Sure, it could happen. But my biggest issue is how I feel afterward. How I’d feel if you could hear me.

I know people talk — I certainly do. And I believe my shit-talking is known by more people in the company than I realize. And, I do believe that my boss has heard something. But here’s my question: Is there anything besides ceasing the bad-mouthing that I can do to move past this? I feel like I want to come clean. Go to him, tell him I think he’s terrible, and why. Then tell him I am sorry for shit talking behind his back. Then I want to tell everyone I work with that I’ve come clean, deep breath, it’s over. I know I can’t really go to him. He’d go ape-shit, fire me, etc. What can I do to feel better?

To end the worry that he’ll find out more. He’s fine as a human being, just a terrible boss. I don’t want to be doing this to him and myself. Help.

Can’t Handle the Boss

Dear Can’t Handle,

I fear some people will say this is the worst advice I have ever given, that it is neither practical nor ethical.

It’s true I’m no expert on workplace behavior, and perhaps I have some revenge fantasies. But I suggest you abandon all your high-minded beliefs about teamwork and the good of the company and seek this man’s downfall.

I say this because I stand with many other millions of people outraged by the ugliness and pettiness of workplace culture and by the slow deadening of the spirit that occurs there, by the alienating and meaningless tasks performed there, by the often harmful products created there, and by the autocratic and fearful behavior that its hierarchical structure enables.

Finally at the age of 45 or so I lucked out and came to work at Salon and somehow have managed to hold on to my job here, but the fact remains that for millions of us, having a job is a form of torture. Yet we pretend that we like it, that it matters to us, that we care! We have to pretend because we know of no other way to get money except to have a job! Should we become thieves? Sometimes it seems preferable! But we have honor! So we work! And we are not skilled in business so we do not create businesses, though perhaps more of us should.

What’s worse is that the educated and thoughtful among us naively bring to the workplace a set of ethics learned in the ideological training grounds of university and family.

It would be better if we had been trained on the battlefield, and knew to treat an enemy like an enemy. We are taught by family and school to work together harmoniously. But how do you have “teamwork” with a sociopath? This boss threatens you and makes you unhappy. He torments you like a bully. This man is just out for himself. He cares nothing about you.

He will destroy you if given the chance. You need to protect yourself.

So undermine him. Undermine him any way you can. You say he withholds information. You can do so as well. Stop with the trash talk. Instead, speak of him with condescension, as one speaks of the incompetent.

Don’t confront him directly. Just let him fail.

Experience your workplace as it actually is — an amoral, anarchic battlefield in which the powerful prey on the weak, where phrases like “the good of the company” and “the importance of treating others fairly” are merely tools of indoctrination and pacification.

Don’t protect him. Let him fail. If his failure requires some help, do not hesitate.

Walk with your head held high, knowing that what you are doing is right.

If you get fired, big deal. You’re not happy at this company anyway. You can always get another terrible job.

I’m lucky enough to work from home because I spend my conference-call time hugging my dogs and walking them during lunch. To try to put some structure to my day I sometimes go into the office. It doesn’t matter if I go or not because my boss and team sit in another location in another state. I usually leave the office early because everyone is on their own conference call and the voices make me crazy. I can’t hear myself think. So I go home.

When I travel to meet with my boss and team it’s great. It’s like a party where you get to see all your best friends. I’m on task, productive, excited about work. Then I go home and totally crash for a couple of days. It’s exhausting.

I’m writing because I want to change but I don’t know how. I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD but don’t take medication. I really don’t want to. I’m healthy and I have as busy (or non-busy) a life as any other working mother with kids. This is a great job, with great money and benefits. I know I can do great things. I’ve produced some big wins in the past and my bosses like me. I want to stay with this company for a long time — as long as I can. I don’t expect to be thrilled and excited every day. It’s just work. How can I do better for my employer and feel pride in myself? To illustrate my point, writing this letter was much more fun than listening to this call I’m on right now.

Sign me,

Blah blah blah

Dear Blah Blah Blah,

There will always be pockets of luxury and stillness in the midst of frantic capitalism. In a system so given to pulses of mad devotion and weeping disillusion it stands to reason that there would be these little overlooked places where big sums of money quietly flow to supposedly important employees hugging their dogs and luxuriating in Pinterest.

I don’t imagine many top management types read this column. I sort of hope not. Let’s hope they don’t find out where you are, lest they sic their snarling dogs of arithmetic on the payroll.

Your situation is a rare cultural oddity peculiar to late capitalism, and particularly rare in a period of global recession. Don’t get too down on yourself. See it for the magic that it is. Be creative. Start giving some of the extra money away. Find interesting projects on the Web and donate. Walk down the street and give money to people who seem to need it. And enjoy yourself. These frothy peaks and valleys are in some ways as random as ocean waves. You catch one and see where it goes. But they don’t last.

It’s too bad that fear seems to prevent many people from enjoying such little organizational eddies of good fortune. We worry. We try to be good, as if teacher were looking over us, checking our work.

But the teacher has left the building!

This is a gift. It won’t last forever. Some day an equity firm is going to come in and find all these airy spaces and plug them up for greater efficiency, and then, after a brief, bright inflation of value, the thing will turn gray, asphyxiate and die. They’ll have their money. You’ll be out of a job. You’ll see the wreckage from the freeway on your way out of town. They’ll leave the corpse for others. Scavengers will take what they can. Carrion will lie in the sun.

So have a good time while you can.

Nonetheless, some anxiety must attend your peculiar luck: Have they forgotten you?

But ADHD? I dunno. Did the person who diagnosed you take into consideration your strange work environment and, in general, do those who routinely diagnose ADHD and prescribe drugs for it ever meditate on just how awfully strange our sensorium has become, and how rare it would be that we would perfectly adapt to this mad influx of swirling inputs? ADHD may be in fact just one generation’s trial adaptation — one that requires adjusting, of course, to get the kinks out, but which might be just what’s needed?

I know I’m probably talking through my hat, but still: Let’s not be so fast to pathologize and medicate every human variation.

Maybe you, like most of us, are just not prepared, i.e., have not been taught what to do with all this nebulous, unstructured time. You’ve fallen into a warp, a luminous gap in the penal colony death march so many of the rest of us are in. (Wait: I’m having a flashback: The junior high boys are in the hot May sun on a steaming field, doing punitive wind sprints, and we see the girls in their strange blue bloomers doing some kind of dance step and we just can’t quite keep our minds on the wind sprints and the coach’s whistle and his bulging biceps. They, too, seemed to have fallen by chance into some luminous gap in the rigors of the penal colony.)

Your letter and your mention of Pinterest evoke a world like the exquisite courts of Heian Japan. You might as well enjoy it.

And to make things right, as I say, start walking down the street and handing out money to people who don’t have any. It will be fun and interesting and will make you feel good and even might do some good.

“Pinterest as Free Market Research.”

Ontology is overrated, says Clay Shirky.