The Distraction of Stagnation

The metallic taste of copper fills my mouth as I accidentally bite the side of my tongue, a sharp, pulsing distraction while Sarah from Marketing explains the ‘strategic alignment’ of a color palette I will never actually use. I am staring at 13 small rectangles on my monitor. There are 13 faces, most of them frozen in that semi-permanent state of polite boredom that characterizes the modern white-collar existence. My tongue throbs, a physical manifestation of the psychic pain of this 33-minute call that has, thus far, achieved exactly nothing. We are currently debating whether a specific shade of blue conveys ‘trust’ or ‘stagnation.’ I want to tell them that what conveys stagnation is the fact that we have spent 13 minutes on a single hex code, but I keep my mouth shut and nurse my wound.

I am Lucas Z., and my actual job-the thing I was hired to do-is dyslexia intervention. I spend my real hours helping children decode the complex, often cruel architecture of the English language. I understand how symbols work. I understand how clarity can change a life. But in these corporate-adjacent meetings I am forced to attend as a consultant, I see the opposite of decoding.

The Output is the Next Meeting

43 minutes into the hour, the inevitable happens. Someone-I think it’s Greg from Operations-realizes we haven’t actually made a decision. ‘This is a great start,’ he says, his voice brimming with a hollow kind of enthusiasm. ‘But I think we need to dive deeper into the cross-functional implications. Let’s take this offline and circle back next Tuesday.’

And there it is. The primary output of this meeting is not a decision, a strategy, or a creative breakthrough. The primary output is a second meeting. This is the secret economy of the modern workplace: we trade our hours for the promise of future hours. We meet because we are terrified of individual autonomy. We meet because we don’t trust ourselves to be right, and we certainly don’t trust our colleagues to work without being watched by the collective eye of the calendar invite.

The Uncompromising Logic of Learning

I think about the kids I work with. When a child with dyslexia finally connects the sound of a phoneme to the shape of a letter, it is a moment of pure, unadulterated clarity. It is hard-won. It is the result of 3 sessions of intense focus, or perhaps 103.

There is no ‘circling back’ in literacy intervention; you either understand the logic of the word or you don’t. Yet, here I am, an adult among adults, watching people actively un-learn how to be clear. We have replaced the hard work of thinking with the easy work of ‘syncing.’

My tongue is still throbbing, a rhythmic reminder that I am physically present in a space where my mental presence is entirely optional. I look at the cost of this call. If you calculate the hourly rate of 13 specialists, this 60-minute session has cost the organization approximately $833. For $833, we could have purchased enough specialized reading materials to serve 3 entire classrooms. Instead, we have purchased a ‘follow-up’ and a slight sense of shared frustration. This is the math of the modern bureaucracy. It is a math that always ends in a remainder of wasted potential.

The Perverse Incentive of Presence

We treat synchronous time as if it were a free resource, a limitless well from which we can draw whenever we feel a slight breeze of uncertainty. But time is the only truly finite thing we have.

We have reached a point where ‘working’ has become synonymous with ‘being seen to work.’ If your calendar is empty, you are viewed with suspicion. If your calendar is a solid block of overlapping rectangles, you are viewed as vital. This creates a perverse incentive to schedule things that don’t need to happen. We create complexity so that we have something to manage. We schedule the ‘pre-read’ call, the ‘alignment’ call, the ‘debrief’ call, and the ‘next steps’ call. It is a nested doll of administrative overhead, and inside the very last doll, there is usually nothing but a single, lonely action item that could have been handled in a 3-sentence email.

The Comfort Blanket of Process

As long as there is a follow-up scheduled for next month, the project is still alive, regardless of whether it should have been killed 13 weeks ago. We are keeping zombies on life support with the power of the recurring invite.

But the corporate world isn’t interested in goals; it’s interested in the process. The process is a comfortable blanket. If we are ‘in process,’ we aren’t yet ‘in failure.’

The Terror of Completion

There is a specific kind of trauma in being a specialist in a world that loves generalist chatter. As a dyslexia specialist, I see the mechanics of communication fail every day, but usually, it’s because of a neurological hurdle. In meetings, the failure is intentional. It is a choice we make to avoid the discomfort of silence and the terror of being finished with our work. Because if we finish our work, what will we do with all that empty space on our calendars? We might have to actually think. And thinking is much harder than meeting.

I exit the Zoom call. The silence of my office is sudden and heavy. I have 13 minutes before my next session with a student. In those 13 minutes, I will not check my email. I will not ‘reach out.’ I will sit here and feel the pulse in my tongue and wonder how many millions of hours are being swallowed by the ‘circle back’ monster at this very second. We are a species that has mastered the art of talking ourselves into circles while the actual world waits for us to do something real. I think about the 43 slides waiting for me in my inbox for the next call. I think I’ll just delete them. If it’s important, they’ll surely schedule a meeting to tell me why.