The mouse pointer hovers over the ‘Join’ button, a pulsing blue rectangle that feels more like an ultimatum than an invitation. I can feel the phantom vibration of my phone in my pocket, even though it’s sitting face down on the mahogany-veneer desk. This is the third time today I’ve been summoned to the digital altar of the ‘Q3 Synergy Pre-Sync,’ a gathering designed specifically to discuss what we will discuss in the actual meeting scheduled for 17 minutes after this one ends. The blue light of the monitor reflects off my glasses, and for a fleeting 7 seconds, I consider just closing the laptop and walking out into the rain. I just parallel parked my car perfectly on the first try-a tight spot on a 37-degree incline-and that minor triumph of spatial awareness feels more real, more significant, than anything that is about to happen in this 47-minute vacuum of productivity.

The Architecture of Avoidance

We are addicted to the ‘Sync.’ We are terrified of the ‘I.’ To sit alone in a room and actually think-to wrestle with a problem until your brain feels like it’s been rubbed with sandpaper-is a lonely, terrifying endeavor. Thinking requires accountability. If I sit in silence and come up with a solution, and that solution fails, the failure belongs to me. It has my fingerprints all over it. But if I can gather 17 people into a virtual room and dilute that idea until it’s a lukewarm soup of consensus, I have successfully manufactured a shared alibi. If the project collapses, we all collapsed together. No one is fired for a group hallucination. This is the fundamental architecture of the modern corporate maneuver: the transformation of individual risk into collective inertia.

The Tyranny of Attendance

In our world, we’ve replaced the sand with spreadsheets and the tide with ‘action items.’ We schedule these sessions to avoid the crushing weight of the blank page. The blank page demands a decision. The meeting demands only attendance. We’ve created a ritual where the appearance of collaboration is more valuable than the result of the work. I once spent 7 hours in a single day across various calls, and at the end of it, I realized I hadn’t actually produced a single line of value. I had merely coordinated the coordination of future coordination. It’s a fractal of avoidance.

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The meeting is the ghost of the work we are too afraid to do alone.

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We talk about ‘alignment’ as if we are celestial bodies or high-performance tires, but usually, it’s just a code word for ‘please don’t let me be the only one holding the bag.’ When 17 people are aligned, no one is actually leading. We are just a school of fish moving in unison, hoping the shark of accountability picks off someone in the back. This is why the ‘pre-meeting’ is the most cynical invention of the last 47 years. It is a dress rehearsal for the consensus. It’s where we sand down the sharp edges of any truly original thought so that by the time the actual meeting starts, there is nothing left to disagree with. We’ve pre-chewed the ideas so they’re easy for the organization to swallow, even if they have no nutritional value.

Seeking Tangible Resistance

This craving for the tangible, for the direct connection between action and consequence, is why people are starting to flee the abstract world. We are tired of the digital fog. We want to feel the resistance of the world again. We want to know that our movements matter. It’s why I find myself increasingly drawn to experiences that can’t be simulated in a Zoom tile. If you want to feel the ground beneath you, to actually move through space rather than just scrolling through it, you might find yourself looking at something like segwaypoint-niederrheinas an antidote to the digital paralysis. There, the balance is yours. The direction is yours. If you lean too far, the feedback is instant and physical. There is no committee to vote on your center of gravity.

Logan L.-A. once told me that the hardest part of sand sculpting isn’t the carving, but the ‘compacting.’ You have to pack the sand so tightly that there’s no air left between the grains. Meetings are the air. They are the gaps in the structure that make the whole thing fragile. We think we are building a solid foundation by including everyone, but we are often just adding bubbles of hesitation. A truly solid organization is built on the density of individual thought, not the fluff of collective indecision. We need more people who are willing to be the ‘I’ in the room, even if it means being the one who is wrong.

Look at the faces in those 12 tiny boxes. (Wait, I count 17 today, two people are calling in from their cars). Look at the eyes. Everyone is doing the same thing. We are all looking at the little green light of our cameras, wondering if the others can tell we are actually clearing our inboxes or looking at 27 open tabs of unrelated research. We are physically present but intellectually absent. We are waiting for someone-anyone-to say something definitive so we can agree and move on to the next calendar block. We have outsourced our thinking to the ‘vibe’ of the group.

The Visceral Energy of Risk

I remember a project from 1997 where we had no meetings. None. We had a shared board and a deadline that felt like a guillotine. We were terrified, but we were also incredibly focused. Every decision was a gamble made by a single person. If the designer chose the wrong color, the designer fixed it. If the coder wrote a bug, the coder stayed late. There was a raw, visceral energy to it because the stakes were personal. Now, we have ‘Agile’ frameworks and ‘Scrum’ masters and 7 different ways to track a task, yet we produce work that is 77% less interesting because it has been filtered through the collective fear of everyone in the ‘Sync.’

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from a day of meetings. It’s not the ‘good’ tired you feel after a day of manual labor or intense creative output. It’s a grey, dusty exhaustion. It’s the feeling of your soul being slowly nibbled away by ducks. You haven’t done anything, yet you are spent. You’ve spent the day navigating the egos and anxieties of 17 different people, ensuring that everyone felt ‘heard’ while ensuring that nothing actually ‘happened.’ It is a performative labor that serves no one but the bureaucracy itself.

The Work Finally Begins

The meeting is ending now. Someone is asking if we should ‘circle back’ on Tuesday at 7:07 AM. I look at the perfect parallel park I executed earlier and I realize that the most important things I do today will have nothing to do with this screen. They will be the moments where I am the only one at the controls. I click ‘Leave Meeting.’ The silence that follows is the most productive thing I’ve heard all day. It is the sound of the work finally beginning. It is the sound of the sand being compacted, grain by grain, until it can finally hold its own weight.