Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc.

THE LURE OF a promotion and a fancy new title ain’t as appealing as it used to be for Canadian employees. At least, that’s the findings of a new survey of working adults put out by the app Hint (an astrology-based app, so make of this what you will).

According to its survey, nearly six in 10 Canadians said they would turn down a promotion if it meant they would need to spend more time at work or be available and reachable outside of normal hours, even if the job paid more. Forty-one per cent of employees told the survey they had avoided applying for a promotion simply because they were worried about increased hours and an expectation that they be reachable even after the office closes.

While the source of this survey might raise an eyebrow, the findings shouldn’t: it tracks closely with a waning enthusiasm for the traditional climb up the career ladder, with workers increasingly viewing promotion with skepticism and weighing salary increases more critically against things like work-life balance and expectations of availability. That number goes up when looking at workers under 34, where 68 per cent (more than two thirds!) said they would reject a promotion that included a sacrifice of work-life balance.

“The career ladder is becoming less one-dimensional,” said Hint’s public relations manager Leigh Roberts, speaking to The Globe and Mail about the survey. “Workers increasingly see several possible versions of career success; it’s not just your position, it’s, ‘Am I earning more money?’ ‘Do I have more expertise?’ ‘Have I learned more?’ ‘Do I have more autonomy?’ rather than just more people to manage.”

A simpler way of putting it though might just be that all promotions are not created equally, and nobody wants to be a manager anymore. The survey found that 59 per cent of workers would be fine with promotions that don’t put them on the people management track. “If something happens past working hours, the silent expectation is that you’re going to manage that,” said Nancy D’Onofrio of Randstad Canada. “The higher you climb the ranks in your organization, the more that expectation is there.”

But even leaving aside the manager question, it does seem that workers in Canada are viewing promotion as a more holistic decision to be made rather than something to be reflexively pursued.

“The central divide is no longer simply between ambitious and unambitious workers,” the Hint app concluded. “It is between promotions that expand a career and promotions that quietly expand the working day. For many respondents, a higher position remains attractive only when it does not require work to become a permanent presence in the rest of their lives.” 

DIGITAL CULTURE

Are you a ‘meat proxy’? The rise of copy-pasting AI responses without thinking

If you send unreviewed AI outputs to your coworkers, this new insult may apply to you

MANY READERS WILL remember the arrival of the term ‘clanker’ onto the scene last year, a term that referred broadly to LLMs and other chatbot-esque features of digital life. You might also remember ‘workslop’ showing up to refer to work product that was mindlessly taken out of an LLM without much revision.

Now into this arena enters a new term, meant to denigrate those coworkers who just can’t stop copy-pasting whatever their AI agent of choice is spitting out to them, and then calling it work.

Meet the meat proxies. The term blew up this month in tech and white-collar circles to describe a certain type of coworker. As the San Francisco Field Guide defined it, a meat proxy is simply “a person who forwards AI-generated text, code or other output without reading, understanding or validating it,” acting “only as a relay between the AI system and the intended recipient.”

One difference between the term meat proxy and clanker or workslop is it is not part of the AI versus anti-AI camps, at least not the same way the term clanker seemed to be. Rather, the term seems to be coming from within the AI user camp, aimed at people who are using AI rather…uncritically.

“Please don’t do this,” wrote Niklas Gruhn, credited as the inventor of the term, referring to the times he had received verbatim output from someone. “I mean, I’ve done this. But I’ve been on the receiving end too many times now. This is not adding value. I can talk to Claude myself. It’s going to be faster. I don’t need a meat proxy in between.”

The point Gruhn is trying to make isn’t to debate AI use, but to point out that now that it’s easy to access it, that some human cognition should be kept in the loop. Some even went so far as to call being a meat proxy the “biggest career risk” of 2026.

“Meat proxies don’t use their own judgement. They defer all decisions and taste to the AI,” tweeted developer Cory House. “Sure, use AI. But don’t overdo it. Be human.” 

HEALTH & WELLNESS

Ye olde burn out

You may think of workplace burnout as a modern-day affliction. Turns out the concept is centuries old

A FEW YEARS back, the term ‘burnout’ started to appear everywhere. Your cousin was burnt out; your coworkers were burnt out; you were probably burnt out. Over the last 10 to 15 years, burnout has become an unmissable part of the professional lexicon, and only seems to be growing in how and when it is used. (“If burnout had a publicist, this would be its breakout season,” wrote Psychology Today earlier this year.)

While there is something particularly modern being invoked by the concept burnout, with its attachments to the long hours and psychologically taxing world of white-collar knowledge work in the 21st century, its roots go way back — back further than the digital era, back before it was classified as a health issue in 1990 and back further even than its inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1937, according to some research from Western University post-doc researcher Nathan TeBokkel.

“The term is even older than that,” TeBokkel wrote. “More than 200 years ago, agriculturalists and workers used the phrase burnt out to describe fertilizer kilns, fuel, matches, fires and the consequences of excessive work.”

Tracking the use of the term back to the 1700s, TeBokkel’s research into the term (he’s an English and geography post-doc) argues that the origins of what we today call “burnout” came into the English lexicon as a term to describe the way a worker’s energy being used up.

“In ‘burnout,’ the metaphorical concept within the term is something like ‘workers are fuel,’” he wrote in The Conversation, an academic blog. “This metaphor suggests that what’s true about fuel is true about workers. Both can be extracted, bought and sold, and used to power machinery. Using more of them produces more power or commodities.”

What’s old has become new again. “This structure hasn’t changed since the 18th century,” TeBokkel wrote. “Burnout is built into capitalism, not a problem capitalism is motivated to solve.”

During the Victorian period, when many workers were migrating into the cities for hourly labour jobs, the term persisted, known then by the phrase “overworked,” according to Oxford researcher Sally Shuttleworth. “Victorian overwork was a new development in their era of empire and industrialization,” she wrote, adding that Victorian-era folks were “acutely aware of the new health problems” that stemmed from overworking. “Too long and too diligently have they stuck to their professional pursuits,” one Scottish writer wrote in 1870, describing the way he saw men “succumbed in the feverish, and we might also say, insane, battle of life.”

You could publish this in 2026, and nobody would bat an eye.

Luckily for us, the Victorians also had some cures for burnout (though we’re not sure your boss or your PTO schedule will be able to accommodate it): “A minimum of three full winters spent in the resort,” ideally in the warm, sunny climate of southern France, spent in a state of “legitimate idleness,” leading a “quiet, contemplative life,” and lounging “like an invalid lizard on his wall.”

Ah, to be a lizard on a wall…

RECRUITMENT

In search of imperfection

The perfect résumé does exist, and it’s boring the hell out of everyone

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