The Weight of Loaves

River K.L. is currently scraping the remaining bits of dough off a wooden workbench with a steel bench knife. The sound is rhythmic, a sharp *skritch-skritch* that punctuates the low hum of the industrial cooling unit in the back. It is 3:07 AM. For a third-shift baker, work is not a concept or a status update; it is a weight. It is the literal 47 kilograms of flour hauled from the storage room, the 127 loaves of sourdough currently cooling on wire racks, and the physical heat radiating from the deck oven that singes the hair on their forearms. There is no ambiguity here. If the bread is there, the work was done. If the bread is burnt or missing, the work failed. It is a binary, brutal, and deeply honest reality.

The Digital Stagecraft

Compare this to the glow of a MacBook screen at 7:07 PM. You are still sitting at your desk, the same one you’ve occupied since 8:47 AM. You are currently clicking through a 27-slide deck for the third time today, adjusting the hex code of a blue border by a single digit. It doesn’t actually change the message of the presentation. It doesn’t improve the data. But the act of doing it, of being seen to be doing it-perhaps by sending that ‘final’ version via email with a timestamp that proves you were working late-is the performance. We have entered the era of productivity theater, where the stagecraft of being busy has successfully cannibalized the act of actually producing something of value.

This performance isn’t just a harmless waste of time; it’s a systemic crisis of meaning. When we reward the theater of activity over the substance of output, we create a culture of permanent exhaustion. We are tired not because we have built something great, but because we have been holding a pose for 77 hours a week.

The Cage of Performance

“

The costume of the professional is a cage of our own making.

“

There is a specific kind of hollow feeling that comes from a day of 7 back-to-back Zoom meetings where nothing was decided. You close the laptop and realize your hands are clean, your mind is fried, and the world is exactly the same as it was when you woke up. This is where the friction lies. We are biological creatures designed for feedback loops. We need to see the dough rise. We need to see the wall painted. In the absence of physical proof, we invent digital proxies. We measure ‘engagement’ and ‘velocity’ and ‘synergy,’ terms that are often just sophisticated ways of saying ‘we moved some air around the room today.’

Finding the Non-Fakable Work

This is why I find myself thinking about the tangible world more often lately. I think about the people who actually move bodies through space or put objects in hands. There is a profound honesty in a physical experience that office life has almost entirely scrubbed away.

For example, if you look at the operations behind segwayevents-duesseldorf, you see a version of productivity that is impossible to fake. A tour starts at a specific coordinate; it travels a specific path; it concludes with a group of people who have physically moved from point A to Point B. You cannot ‘perform’ a Segway tour. You cannot ‘circle back’ on a physical movement through the streets of Düsseldorf. There is no Slack status that can substitute for the actual rotation of the wheels.

The Efficiency of Silence

I caught myself doing it again yesterday. I was in a thread with 17 other people, and I felt the urge to chime in with a ‘Great point, thanks for sharing!’ just so my name would appear in the notification feed of the upper management involved. I had nothing to add. I resisted the urge, but it left me with a lingering sense of dread. Was I being productive by staying silent and working on my actual task, or was I being ‘unproductive’ by failing to participate in the social ritual of the office?

The Loss of Boundary

River K.L. doesn’t have to tweet about the bread to prove they are a baker. The flour on their shoes and the 247 calories in every slice of their rye are the only proof required. There is a dignity in that which we have traded for the convenience of remote work and the vanity of digital presence. We have won the right to work from our couches, but we have lost the boundary of when work ends, because when work is a performance, the curtain never actually stays down.

Admitting the Fear

If we want to fix this, we have to start by admitting that we are scared. We are scared that if we stop the theater, people will realize how little ‘essential’ work we actually do in an 8-hour window. Most true deep work-the kind that moves the needle-usually happens in bursts of 97 minutes of intense concentration, not in a steady 480-minute stream of clicking. But admitting that would mean changing how we pay people, how we manage them, and how we value our own time. It would mean prioritizing the ‘what’ over the ‘how many.’

The Rebellion of Empty Space

I recently deleted 77 unnecessary files from my desktop-the ones I had color-coded so carefully. It felt like a small act of rebellion against my own performative instincts. The desktop looked empty, and for a moment, I felt like I hadn’t done anything. But then, I realized the emptiness was just space. Space to actually start.