I am currently tracking the 17th pixel from the left of the presenter’s nose, watching it shimmer against the beige backdrop of a home office that has clearly seen better days. On the screen, 27 tiny rectangles contain the faces of 27 human beings, all of whom are performing the ritual of ‘active listening.’ One person is nodding rhythmically, a metronome of corporate compliance. Seven others are visibly typing, their eyes darting with that unmistakable staccato rhythm that says they are definitely not looking at the slide deck titled ‘Synergy and Strategic Alignment 2027.’ I am one of them. My fingers are moving, but I am not taking notes. I am writing a manifesto against the very air I am breathing in this digital room.

The Brutal Efficiency of a Wrong Number

This morning, the world decided to intrude on my psyche long before the sun had the decency to rise. At exactly 5:07 AM, my phone vibrated with the violent insistence of a debt collector. I answered, voice thick with the gravel of interrupted REM cycle, only to hear a woman ask if I was ‘Terry from the dry cleaners.’ I am not Terry. I have never been Terry. But that 47-second interaction, as brief and accidental as it was, contained more raw honesty and clear communication than the 67 minutes I have spent in this recurring Tuesday sync. She had a goal; she realized I was not the solution; she hung up. If only my department head possessed the same brutal efficiency. Instead, we are here, wading through the swamp of a decision that was actually made 17 days ago in a private Slack channel between three people who aren’t even on this call.

Loot Boxes and Diffusion of Blame

My friend Mason W., a researcher who specializes in dark patterns-those oily little design choices that trick you into subscribing to newsletters or clicking ‘Yes’ when you mean ‘God, No’-calls these meetings the ‘Loot Boxes of the Professional World.’ You invest a significant amount of currency (your life force), you endure a repetitive animation (the slide deck), and 97% of the time, the reward is a ‘common’ item you already own: another meeting. Mason W. argues that pointless meetings are not merely a failure of scheduling; they are a structural choice. They are a way to diffuse responsibility so thin that no single person can be blamed when a project inevitably hits a 17-week delay. If everyone was ‘consulted,’ then everyone is complicit in the failure.

The Anxiety of Absence

It’s a strange contradiction, really. I despise these gatherings with a fervor that borders on the pathological, yet when I am left out of one, I feel a twitch of vestigial anxiety. It’s the FOMO of the workplace-the fear of missing out on the very thing that makes me miserable. I criticize the bloat, yet I find myself checking the attendee list to see if my name is still there. Perhaps it’s a desire for relevance, or perhaps it’s just the Stockholm Syndrome of the 40-hour work week. We complain about the noise because we are terrified of the silence that comes when nobody needs our ‘input’ anymore.

The Container: Honoring the Internal Thought

This is the core of the leadership problem. Managers often hold meetings because they don’t know how to measure output, so they measure presence. If they can see your face in a grid, you are working. If you are silent and focused in a room of your own making, you are a ghost, and ghosts are hard to manage.

I think about the physical environments we choose to inhabit when we actually want to get something done. There is a reason why nobody tries to write a novel in the middle of a carnival. True work requires a container-a space that respects the boundary between the internal thought and the external demand. In the corporate world, we are rarely given those containers. We are expected to produce brilliance while being poked in the ribs every 17 minutes by a notification. It’s why people are increasingly looking toward intentional design, like the modularity of Sola Spaces, to reclaim their sense of place. There is a profound difference between a space built for a purpose and a space where purpose goes to be diluted by committee. One honors the inhabitant; the other merely houses the body.

I remember a project I worked on in 2017. We had 77 stakeholders. Every single decision, from the hex code of a button to the phrasing of a disclaimer, had to be ‘socialized.’ We spent 107 hours in conference rooms that smelled like stale coffee and damp wool. At the end of it, the product was a beige monstrosity that satisfied everyone’s ego and served no user’s needs. We had achieved consensus, but we had lost the soul of the work. Mason W. once told me that ‘consensus is often just the average of everyone’s least offensive ideas.’ It is the death of excellence by a thousand ‘just checking in’ pings.

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The 5:07 AM wrong-number caller had more respect for my time than this organization. She didn’t ask for a ‘quick huddle’ to discuss whether or not I was Terry. She didn’t invite me to a brainstorming session to explore the possibilities of my identity. She processed the data, admitted the error, and severed the connection.

The Value-Adder Epidemic

We are now 57 minutes into the call. The ‘Any Questions?’ phase has begun. This is the most dangerous part of the ritual. This is where the ‘Value-Adders’ emerge. There is always one person-let’s call him Kevin-who feels the need to ask a question that is actually a 7-minute monologue disguised as an inquiry. Kevin wants the presenter to know that Kevin is smart. Kevin wants the 27 people on the call to witness his ‘strategic thinking.’ Kevin is the reason we will go over time. He is the human embodiment of a dark pattern, a pop-up ad that you can’t close. I watch my clock: 3:57 PM. 3:58 PM. The tension in my jaw is a physical weight, $77 worth of dental work waiting to happen if I keep clenching like this.

What If We Just Stopped?

I find myself wondering what would happen if we just stopped. If, for 17 days, every meeting was deleted. No syncs, no stand-ups, no ‘let’s-take-this-offline’ offlines. Would the company collapse? Or would we suddenly find ourselves finishing our work by 2:07 PM and rediscovered the hobby of being a person? The anxiety of that possibility is what keeps the calendar full. We fill the gaps because we are afraid of what we might find in the emptiness. We might find that the 67-minute meeting was the only thing giving our day a sense of structure, however hollow that structure might be.

Momentum vs. Presence

As the call finally ends at 4:07 PM, I am left with a profound sense of exhaustion that has nothing to do with physical labor. It is the fatigue of the soul, the weariness of having participated in a lie. I close the laptop lid. The room is quiet. The 5:07 AM intruder is long gone, her clarity a distant memory. I look at my to-do list, which has remained unchanged for the last 67 minutes, and I realize that the true cost of the meeting wasn’t the time spent. It was the momentum lost. It takes 27 minutes to get back into a state of flow after an interruption, which means this meeting didn’t just cost an hour; it cost the entire afternoon.

The Courage to Be Unnecessary

We don’t need better agendas. We don’t need better ‘meeting hygiene’ or ‘facilitation skills.’ We need the radical honesty to admit that most of what we do in these digital squares is theater. We are actors playing the role of ‘Productive Employee’ because the alternative-trusting people to do their jobs without a babysitter-requires a level of courage that most corporate structures are designed to crush. Until we value output over visibility, we will continue to drown in the shallow end of the calendar.