Typing the words ‘Just looping in Sarah for visibility’ feels like dropping a lead weight into a stagnant pond. I can almost hear the digital splash as the notification ripples out, hitting the phones of 14 other people who have already muted the thread. My fingers hover over the keyboard, a slight tremor of guilt passing through my wrist. I know what I am doing. I am sentencing Sarah to a minimum of 34 minutes of digital archaeology, forcing her to dig through 44 previous replies to find the one kernel of information that actually matters. I am a participant in a ritual of inefficiency that hasn’t changed since the days of dial-up modems and Netscape Navigator.

The blue light from the overhead projector is vibrating against my retinas at exactly 10:15 in the morning. I can feel the phantom vibration of my phone in my pocket, a lingering ghost of the 5:05 call that ripped me out of a dream about a very specific type of cedar tree. ‘Bernice?’ the voice had rasped, sounding like gravel being turned in a cement mixer. ‘Bernice, did you leave the stove on?’ I am not Bernice. I have never been Bernice. But that man’s panic, his absolute certainty that I held the key to his domestic safety, feels remarkably similar to the energy in this conference room. We are all looking for a Bernice, and our CEO thinks he found her in a software suite called Project Fusion. It cost the company $1,555,555, and it is currently asking me to authenticate my identity for the 15th time this morning.

Nothing feels quite as definitive as the sound of a heavy glass jar hitting the bottom of a plastic wastebasket. It’s a dull thud, the acoustic signature of $163 worth of ‘proprietary peptide blends’ being resigned to the landfill. I stood there, the cold tile of the bathroom floor pressing against my heels, staring at the remaining 13 bottles that promised to erase a decade of survivalist living. As a wilderness survival instructor, my face is essentially a topographic map of every high-altitude trek and 103-degree desert crossing I’ve ever led. I have deep-set lines around my eyes that aren’t just ‘character’; they are deep canyons carved by the relentless UV radiation of the Sierras.

For years, I believed the marketing. I believed that if I just found the right combination of botanical extracts and hyaluronic acid, I could reverse the damage. I was wrong. I was so profoundly wrong that it reminds me of the time I realized I’d been pronouncing ‘epitome’ as ‘epi-tome’ for 23 years. I thought it was a word that meant a very large book, a tome of epic proportions. I said it in front of a group of 43 seasoned hikers, and the silence that followed was more educational than any textbook. We do that, don’t we? We cling to

The Rattle of Collective Confusion

Slamming the lid of my laptop feels like an exorcism, but the ghost of the last forty-four minutes is still rattling around the room. I can hear it in the silence that follows-a low-frequency hum of collective confusion disguised as professional consensus. We just finished the ‘weekly sync,’ a term that has become increasingly ironic as the weeks progress. My keyboard is still slightly sticky because I spent the first fourteen minutes of the call picking coffee grounds out of the switches with a toothpick. It was a meticulous, frustrating task, much like trying to extract a concrete commitment from a group of twenty-four people who are all deathly afraid of being the one left holding the metaphorical bag.

Nodding is a rhythmic lie we tell each other to end meetings faster. When the project lead says, ‘Great, so the action item is to circle back and synergize on the deliverables,’ and we all nod, we aren’t agreeing to work. We are agreeing to a truce. We are agreeing that for the next twenty-four hours, no one will be forced to define what a ‘deliverable’ actually is or who is responsible for ‘synergizing’ it.

Can you feel the specific, grinding pressure behind your ears when you have to nod at a PowerPoint slide that claims a new CRM integration is ‘world-changing’? It is a physiological response, a silent protest from the nervous system against the requirement of artificial joy. We are living in an era where it is no longer enough to simply do the work. You must also perform a ritual of emotional submission. You must be ‘stoked’ about the quarterly roadmap. You must be ‘passionate’ about optimizing the click-through rates of banner ads that 95% of the population actively avoids. It’s a strange, heavy mask to wear for 45 hours a week, and the weight of it is starting to crack the floorboards of our collective sanity.

This demand for passion

The seam at the shoulder is digging into my deltoid like a dull wire cutter. I’m standing in a 4×4 cubicle at a big-box retailer, and I’m currently losing a fight with a cotton-blend button-down. It’s supposed to be a size 2XL, but the designer clearly thought that ‘extra large’ simply meant ‘extra long,’ as if my body would magically transform into a vertical rectangle once I crossed the threshold of a size 18. I’m breathing shallowly because if I take a full lungful of air, the middle button is going to launch across the room and potentially blind a passerby.

This isn’t just a minor inconvenience. It is a calculated failure of engineering that we have been conditioned to accept as a personal flaw.

But the bread wasn’t my fault, and neither is the fact that these trousers are gapping 8 inches at the back of my waist while simultaneously cutting off the circulation in my thighs. I’ve spent the last 28 years navigating the world as someone who doesn’t fit the ‘standard’