The Digital Stations of the Cross

I’m clicking the mouse button. 53 times in the last three minutes. A rhythmic, dull thud of plastic meeting plastic that echoes against the walls of this room. I just finished a task-a simple edit to a project brief-and now I am performing the digital stations of the cross. First, I mark it complete in Asana. Then, I open the Jira ticket and move the little card from ‘In Progress’ to ‘Review.’ I hop over to Slack and post a link in the #marketing-updates channel, making sure to use the ‘check mark’ emoji so the algorithm knows I’m a team player. Finally, I update a shared Google Sheet because, for some reason, the Head of Sales doesn’t trust the other three systems.

I’m doing this because I’m terrified of being invisible. In a world of remote collaboration, if you didn’t document it in 13 different places, did the work even happen?

The Groundwater of Digital Trust

We bought this software because we were promised connection. We were told that geography was a relic of the 20th century and that ‘asynchronicity’ was the new freedom. But as I stare at the 233 unread messages in my sidebar, I’ve never felt more isolated. Every notification is a tiny demand for my attention, yet none of them feel like a conversation. They feel like a summons.

Hugo M.K. knows about toxic environments. As a hazmat disposal coordinator, Hugo spends his days dealing with the literal sludge of industrial oversight. He once told me that the most dangerous spills aren’t the ones that explode; they’re the ones that seep into the groundwater for 13 years before anyone notices the trees are dying. Digital collaboration tools are the groundwater of the modern office.

– Hugo M.K., on seepage

Hugo doesn’t use Slack when he’s cleaning up a $503 chemical leak. He uses a radio. He uses his eyes. He looks at the person standing 13 feet away from him and he gives a thumbs up or a ‘stop’ gesture. There is no ambiguity. There is no ‘thread’ to get lost in. There is only the immediate, visceral reality of the task at hand.

The Panopticon and the Red Dots

This is the death of trust. In a high-trust environment, you don’t need a timestamped log of every thought. You need a shared understanding. But we’ve traded that understanding for a dashboard. We’ve built a digital panopticon where we are both the prisoners and the guards, constantly checking each other’s ‘active’ status.

I hate it. I hate the red dots. I hate the ‘huddle’ feature that makes me feel like I’m intruding on someone’s funeral. And yet, I keep the tabs open. I am a hypocrite. I will finish this article and I will post it to a project management tool, and I will wait for the little ‘eyes’ emoji to appear so I know I’ve been perceived.

The Loneliness of Connectivity

There is a specific kind of loneliness that comes from being ‘connected’ to 103 people but speaking to none of them. You see their avatars. You see their typing bubbles. You might even see a grainy version of their face on a 23-minute Zoom call where everyone is looking at their own reflection rather than the person speaking. But you don’t feel them. You don’t catch the micro-expressions, the hesitant intake of breath before a bad idea is challenged, or the collective sigh of relief when a deadline is met.

We’ve digitized the work, but we’ve sterilized the worker.

The Graveyard of Intention

Hugo M.K. once had to neutralize a spill in a basement that had been sealed since 1983. He said the air down there was heavy, not just with fumes, but with the stillness of things left alone for too long. Sometimes I think our digital workspaces are like that basement. They are full of half-finished thoughts, abandoned documents, and ‘ping’ requests that were never answered. It’s a graveyard of intention.

We keep adding more tools to solve the problem created by the previous tools. We have a ‘hub’ for our ‘hubs.’ We have an AI that summarizes the meetings we were too busy to attend because we were in other meetings. It’s a recursive loop of inefficiency that we have rebranded as ‘innovation.’

The Freedom of Erasure

I remember a time-or maybe I dreamt it-when a project was just three people in a room with a whiteboard. There was no ‘version history.’ If you erased something, it was gone. That sounds terrifying to a modern manager, but to a human, it sounds like freedom. It meant that the only thing that mattered was the conversation you were having right then. You couldn’t ‘look back’ at the logs to find someone to blame, so you had to move forward together.

Now, we spend 33% of our time documenting what we did, 33% of our time explaining why we haven’t done more, and the remaining 33% of our time wondering why we’re so burnt out. The math doesn’t add up to a life. It adds up to a spreadsheet.

The Digital Pressure Gauge

The Leap of Faith

Maybe the answer isn’t a better app. Maybe the answer is fewer apps. Or no apps. Maybe the answer is walking over to Hugo’s desk-if he had one-and saying, ‘I’m stuck. Can you help me?‘

But Hugo is probably busy disposing of something orange and bubbling in a drum marked ‘Hazardous.’ And I’m busy. I have 13 more tabs to check before 5:03 PM. The red dots are calling. They don’t love me, but they’re the only thing that seems to know I’m here.

What would happen if we just stopped? If we let the Jira tickets expire and the Slack channels go dark? The world might not end. The ‘work’ might even get better. Because without the audit trail to hide behind, we’d be forced to look at each other again. We’d be forced to trust that the person on the other side of the glass is actually doing their job, not because a software told us so, but because we know them.

Until then, I’ll keep clicking. I’ll keep updating. I’ll keep leaning to the left in my structurally unsound chair, waiting for a notification that feels like a hand on the shoulder. I’ll be waiting a long time.