Why does work make other people feel like obstacles?

Because you have been placed in a structure where their gain is plausibly your loss, and you are not imagining it.

This is the least discussed of Marx's four separations and the one that does the most quiet damage. Fixed promotion slots, ranked reviews, a bonus pool that does not grow — none of it requires anyone to behave badly. It just makes a colleague's good year into information about your own. You end up managing relationships you would otherwise simply have.

The effect runs deeper than competition. Work becomes the place you perform a version of yourself calibrated to be legible to people who are also performing. Warmth becomes strategy without ever quite becoming insincere, which is worse than insincerity because you cannot locate the moment it happened.

Marx thought this was the point at which an economic arrangement reaches into something that should have been outside it. You are not just selling your hours; you are having your relationships shaped by the terms of the sale.

What makes it hard to argue with is that the individuals are usually fine. Nobody in the room is the problem. That is exactly what a structural explanation predicts, and it is why blaming your manager tends to feel both satisfying and slightly off-target.