The laminated wood of the tiny chair pressed into the backs of my thighs. It was one of 9 chairs in the room, all designed for people with much shorter femurs. The fluorescent lights hummed a specific, anxious note, the kind that seems engineered to expose flaws. And then came the phrase, delivered with a practiced, gentle sympathy that made it so much worse: “He’s just falling a little behind where we’d expect him to be.”

Behind. The word landed like a stone. Behind whom? Behind what? Behind an invisible line drawn in the sand by someone who decided that all 79 kids in this grade should be able to decode the same CVC words by the 139th day of school. My son, who could build intricate narratives about warring factions of sentient garden gnomes and explain the basics of photosynthesis he’d picked up from a documentary, was ‘behind’ because the specific sequence of squiggles on a page hadn’t clicked for him yet. The school saw a data point lagging on a chart; I saw a storyteller who simply hadn’t felt the need to become a codebreaker.

The Industrial-Age Assembly Line

We have to be honest with ourselves about where this anxiety comes from. It isn’t an ancient, biological imperative. It’s a modern invention, a byproduct of the industrial-age thinking that infected our education system. We decided, for

The phone doesn’t ring, it vibrates. A deep, angry buzz against the cheap wood of the coffee table. It’s a specific vibration, one I assigned to exactly one person so I’d know. So I could prepare. Liam’s name glows on the screen, a friendly font belying the potential emotional invoice attached to answering. I know what this is. This is the post-mortem of his weekly performance review. This is the 47-minute monologue about his manager, Brenda, who uses the word “synergy” as a weapon. And I just don’t have it in me.

My own day has been scraped clean of emotional resources. I spent 7 hours on a series of conference calls where everyone agreed to circle back on action items that will never be actioned. My own Brenda, a man named Mark, explained the importance of “proactive transparency” for 27 minutes. The psychic weight of feigning engagement has left me hollowed out. Answering Liam’s call right now would be like trying to pay a $777 dinner bill with a pocketful of lint. I’d be committing fraud.

So I watch the screen go dark. The guilt is immediate and acidic. It’s the special kind of guilt reserved for failing in your duties as a Good Friend. We have this unspoken contract, don’t we? You listen to my soul-crushing job story, I listen to yours. We exchange these burdens like currency, maintaining a delicate, unwritten balance sheet. I help you move a couch, you buy the