The floor presses into my knees, a dull ache that mirrors the one in my lower back from sleeping on the sofa for the last 15 nights. Her grunt of effort is a sharp, percussive sound in the quiet living room. ‘Just five more,’ I say, my voice trying for a cheerfulness I haven’t genuinely felt in months. Her eyes, squeezed shut against the strain of the leg lift, don’t open. One… two… the muscles in her thigh tremble violently. She’s fighting. We’re fighting. But sometimes, in the silence between the numbers, I can’t tell what we’re fighting for anymore, or who we’re fighting against.

After, when she’s settled on the couch with a fortress of pillows, the phone rings. It’s the school. ‘Mr. Davies, just confirming you’re picking Mason up today?’ The secretary’s voice is polite, but there’s an edge. I’m late again. It’s the third time in 15 days. ‘Yes, I’m on my way now,’ I lie, looking at the clock. It will take me at least 25 minutes. I feel a hot flush of shame, followed immediately by a surge of white-hot resentment that has no target, so it just ricochets around inside my skull, denting everything. I love my wife. I love my son. But I despise this choreography. This exhausting, endless dance dictated by a single moment of

The low, persistent hum from the server rack behind the wall is the only thing confirming you’re actually employed. It’s day three. The laptop they gave you is pristine, its screen a mirror reflecting a face that’s hovering somewhere between hopeful and bewildered. Your assigned ‘buddy’ sent a calendar invite for a coffee chat next Tuesday; an auto-reply informed you he’s on vacation in Belize. You’ve read the employee handbook twice. You now know more about the company’s dental plan and its policy on inter-office dating than you do about the project you were hired to lead.

We talk about onboarding as a logistical puzzle. Does the employee have a badge? A password? A direct deposit form? We treat it like we’re assembling flat-pack furniture. Follow the instructions, insert Tab A into Slot B, and at the end, you have an employee. It’s a profound, expensive, and almost universal misunderstanding of the assignment.

I met a woman, Nora C., a few months ago. She’s a retail theft prevention specialist, which is a sterile

The world is swimming. Not in a pleasant, oceanic way, but in the stinging, blurry way it does when you get cheap shampoo directly in your eye. It’s a chemical fog, a promise of ‘ultimate clarity’ that delivers only a smear of light and shadow. The feeling is… appropriate. It’s the perfect metaphor for staring at an analytics dashboard that tells you 1,000,001 people have seen your work.

A sharp, impressive number. A number that ends in 1, which feels complete, definitive. It’s a number you can screenshot and post with a humble-brag caption. I did. I posted a video, a carefully constructed 41-second piece about the subtle absurdity of corporate lanyard culture. I spent 11 hours on it. The lighting was perfect. The final shot, a lanyard slowly tightening around a sad-looking desk plant, was what I considered a moment of quiet genius. The numbers started climbing. 1,001. 10,001. Then the big one. I had arrived.

Then I made the mistake of reading the comments, all 4,281 of them. The first one, posted 1 second after the video went live, said: ‘First!’ The second: ‘Song name?’ The third was a string of 11 unrelated emojis. Scrolling down, I found a heated argument about pineapple on pizza that had absolutely nothing to do with my video. My quiet genius, my commentary on the slow strangulation of the individual in a