Maria’s thumb hovers over the ‘Play’ button, but the vibration in her palm is faster than her reflexes. It is 8:54 PM. The screen of her phone illuminates the living room with that sickly, pale blue light that signifies an intrusion. It is Slack. It is her boss. ‘Hey, got a sec to look at the 24-page report?’ The movie, a beautiful black-and-white restoration she has waited 44 days to watch, remains paused. She knows the arithmetic of this moment. If she ignores it, the phantom guilt will itch at the back of her skull until she cannot focus on the subtitles anyway. If she responds, the next 64 minutes of her life belong to a spreadsheet. She chooses the spreadsheet, not because she is a ‘team player,’ but because the ‘Away’ status feels like a confession of laziness in a world that never sleeps.

The Exhaustion of Immediacy

I am currently writing this while recovering from a fit where I sneezed 14 times in a row. My eyes are watery, and my brain feels like it has been rattled inside a tin can. As a podcast transcript editor, my name is Zoe M.-L., and I spend my days listening to people talk about ‘synergy’ and ‘pivot strategies’ in high-definition audio. I hear the pauses. I hear the sighs that the listeners never get to hear because I cut them out. Lately, the sighs are getting longer.

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There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes through a condenser microphone when a CEO talks about ‘flexibility’ while clearly checking their emails in the background.

This isn’t actually a debate about where you sit. The location is a red herring. The real war is being fought over the expectation of immediacy. We have taken the worst part of the cubicle-the assumption that if I can see you, I can interrupt you-and expanded it across 24 time zones. My boss claims to love ‘deep work,’ yet he freaks out if I don’t respond to a direct message within 4 minutes.

The Broken Airlock of Transition

My desk is exactly 4 feet from my bed. There is no ritual of transition anymore. In the old days, even a bad commute served as a sensory airlock. You moved from ‘Work Self’ to ‘Home Self’ through the medium of a subway car or a rainy windshield. Now, the airlock is broken. The pressure has equalized, and the result is a permanent, low-grade nitrogen narcosis of the soul.

There is a massive contradiction in how we value presence. We claim that output is the only thing that matters in a remote environment, but we reward those who are the most visible on the dashboard. It is a performance of productivity. I once made a mistake in a transcript for a major tech lead-I accidentally left in a 44-second rant about how much he hated his own calendar-and for a moment, I considered leaving it in just to see if anyone was actually listening.

The Exploitation of Dedication

We are burning out the most dedicated people first because they are the ones who can’t help but answer. The slackers, the true experts in corporate evasion, have already figured out how to rig their mouse-movers and automate their ‘Good morning!’ messages. It is the people who actually care, the ones like Maria, who end up staring at a frozen movie screen while their heart rate climbs for no reason other than a ‘Hey, got a sec?’ notification.

I remember taking a trip to a local landmark recently, just to feel something that didn’t have a refresh rate. When you are actually engaged with the world, like when you are following a

Zoo Guide to see how a silverback gorilla ignores the entire universe in favor of a single piece of fruit, you realize how pathetic our ‘urgent’ pings really are.

The Architecture of Exhaustion

It is 10:14 PM now. I should be sleeping, but the blue light is still humming in my brain. I wonder if we will ever have the courage to actually turn it off. Not ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode-which is just a polite way of saying ‘I’m hiding’-but actually off.

I realized the other day that I have 34 different tabs open, and 14 of them are different ways for people to reach me. Each one is a little door that I haven’t locked. The compulsion is baked into the marrow now. I sometimes think about quitting the transcript business and just becoming a gardener, but then I realize I’d probably find a way to Slack the tomatoes. ‘Hey, got a sec to grow 14% faster?’

If we want the freedom we were promised, we have to embrace the silence. We have to be okay with the fact that someone, somewhere, might have to wait 24 minutes-or 24 hours-for a response. The world will not end. The spreadsheet will still be there. The report will still be 44 pages of corporate jargon that no one will read past page 4 anyway.

Reclaiming Presence

Maria eventually turned her phone over. She didn’t reply. She sat there in the dark for 14 minutes, her heart hammering, waiting for the sky to fall. It didn’t. The room remained quiet. The cat didn’t judge her. She pressed ‘Play,’ and for the next 114 minutes, she wasn’t a ‘team player.’ She was just a woman watching a movie. It was the most radical thing she had done all year.

If we don’t fight for absence, we are just living in the office, and that is a 2024 tragedy we don’t have to accept.