When rent swallows your raise before it arrives, there's a word for the dread: treadmill worry. It's real, and you're still building firmer ground.

The thought behind it

The work here is precision: calling the thing what it is instead of what it has been politely mistaken for. In The Long Game the reward is real but late, and the only skill on offer is staying. Everything hinges on “14”, which is the part a politer version of this sentence would have left out.