I am currently watching three gray dots dance in a rhythmic, taunting loop at the bottom of my screen. The header tells me that ‘several people are typing,’ a phrase that has become the modern equivalent of a standoff in a dusty Western town, except instead of six-shooters, we are armed with carefully curated passive-aggression and a desperate need for consensus. This has been going on for exactly 7 minutes. I could have walked to their desks in less time. I could have called them and resolved the entire project roadmap in 17 seconds. Instead, I wait. I wait because we have built a digital empire of collaboration specifically so we never have to actually speak to one another again.

I recently went back and read my old text messages from 2017. It was a jarring experience, like looking at a version of myself that was unafraid of the period at the end of a sentence. Back then, communication felt like a straight line. You asked a question, you received an answer, and you moved on with your life. Today, communication is a fractal. A single question in a Slack channel spawns 7 threads, 17 side-bars, and at least 27 unnecessary Zoom invitations. We have replaced the efficiency of the human voice with the safety of the digital paper trail. If I type it in a channel with 67 other people, I can’t be the one who failed when the project goes sideways, right? We are hiding in plain sight, camouflaged by the very tools meant to make us visible.

The Audacity of Focus

Take my friend Reese C.M., for example. Reese is a playground safety inspector, a job that requires a level of physical directness that most of us have forgotten exists. Last Tuesday, Reese was out on a site checking the structural integrity of a 47-foot slide. While hanging off a ladder, Reese’s phone buzzed 87 times. It was the ‘Safety Coordination Council’ Slack group, debating whether the shade of green on the new safety signage was ‘too aggressive’ for a toddler’s cognitive development.

We have created a culture where the ‘ping’ is the product. We feel productive because our notifications are at an all-time high, but our actual output is buried under the weight of 147 unread messages in #general. I am guilty of this too. I once spent 57 minutes drafting a three-sentence response to a manager because I wanted to make sure I sounded ‘collaborative’ yet ‘firm.’ I was so worried about the optics of the interaction that I completely forgot the point of the conversation. I ended up sending a message that was so vague, it required another 27-minute meeting to clarify what I meant. This is the tax we pay for our fear of directness. We are literally billing our clients for the time it takes us to avoid talking to each other.

This digital bureaucracy isn’t just a time-waster; it is an emotional drain. It’s the feeling of being in 27 Slack channels and still having no idea what your own team is doing. It is the anxiety of seeing a red notification bubble and wondering if it’s a genuine emergency or just someone sharing a GIF of a cat in a toaster. We have traded the clarity of a five-minute conversation for the perpetual, low-grade fever of constant connectivity. We are ‘always on,’ but we are never actually present.

I remember a specific mistake I made about 17 months ago. I was managing a launch and decided to move all communication to a new, ‘streamlined’ project management tool. I spent 7 days setting up the boards, the tags, and the automated workflows… They were following the map so closely they didn’t notice they were walking off a cliff.

The Physical Toll

I often think about the physical cost of this digital empire. My neck is permanently tilted at a 27-degree angle from staring at a smartphone. My thumbs have developed a localized muscularity from scrolling through 1177 lines of chat history just to find a password that someone should have just emailed to me. We are physically molding our bodies to fit the needs of software that was supposedly designed to serve us. It’s a strange, silent transformation. We are becoming the appendages of our ‘productivity’ suites.

And let’s talk about the ‘asynchronous’ lie. We are told that these tools allow us to work on our own schedules, but the reality is that the expectation of an immediate response has never been higher. If I don’t respond to a Slack message within 17 minutes, people assume I have either died or quit. The ‘away’ status is a lie; we are never away. We are just in a state of varying degrees of availability. Even when I am at dinner with my family, the ghost of those 27 channels haunts my pocket. I can feel the phantom vibration… and it makes my stomach turn.

What would happen if we just stopped? What if we deleted the 17 useless channels and replaced them with a morning huddle that lasted exactly 7 minutes? What if we stopped ‘tagging’ people in documents and started walking to their offices? The fear, of course, is accountability. In a direct conversation, you can’t hide behind a ‘delayed send’ or a ‘bad connection.’ You have to be there, in the moment, with all your flaws and half-formed ideas. It is vulnerable. It is risky. It is human. And that is exactly why we avoid it.

The Hidden Rust

Reese C.M. once told me that the most dangerous part of a playground isn’t the height of the slide or the hardness of the ground; it’s the hidden rust inside the supports. You can paint the outside 7 different colors, but if you don’t look at the core, the whole thing is a hazard. Our collaboration tools are the fresh coat of paint. They make the organization look vibrant and busy, but underneath, the core of our communication is rusting. We aren’t connecting; we are just transmitting. We are sending 147 units of data and receiving 127 units of noise.