When you’re here, you’re family.

That was Olive Garden’s slogan until 2012, when they decided that was too catchy and paid someone a lot of money to come up with this entry for the Advertising Hall of Fame.

Go Olive Garden.

America, we are getting dumber by the minute.

But the Garden had a point, one that corporations still cling to, and that’s the exploitation of familial nostalgia and trauma to convince us that we’re not a company, we’re a family.

Like the Bradys.

Or the Mansons.

The idea is to blur ever further that distinction between your working life and your home life in an effort to ensure fealty and stewardship of organizations where you can die at your desk and not be discovered for days.

In this age where loneliness is endemic and elder neglect is one of our national pastimes, dying at work feels like a family value.

If you’re the one trying to convince your employees you’re a family, knock it off. You’re manipulating people’s emotions to help your bottom line, and that’s gross.

And if you’re sitting at your cubicle sipping at your Stanley thinking about how much your co-workers are your family? For your own sake, go touch some grass. Find something outside of your job that gives you meaning.

Even if that something involves breadsticks.