The Green Dot Imperative

The mouse cursor travels in a slow, rhythmic diamond shape across the monitor, a tiny digital ghost haunting the desktop. It is 2:31 PM on a Tuesday, and I am currently sitting on the floor of my hallway, staring at a patch of sunlight, while my computer convinces the world that I am deeply engaged in a spreadsheet. This is the modern ritual. The Slack icon is a steady, vibrant green-the color of productivity, the color of safety. If it turns amber, the anxiety starts. If it stays amber for more than 11 minutes, it feels like an admission of guilt.

Why is it that taking a 10-minute break to breathe feels like a revolutionary act of rebellion that must be hidden behind a $21 plastic device designed to simulate human movement?

So, we jiggle the mouse. We send 41 meaningless ‘check-in’ emails. We react with emojis to messages we haven’t actually read, all to maintain the illusion of ‘responsiveness.’

The Brutal Honesty of Heavy Machinery

I am a medical equipment installer by trade, or at least I was for the better part of 21 years. My name is Cora B.K., and my world is usually one of cold steel, lead-lined walls, and the heavy, metallic smell of an MRI suite under construction. In my world, you cannot fake the work. If the 1001-pound magnet isn’t calibrated to the micrometer, the machine won’t work, and someone might actually die.

But lately, I’ve been spending more time in the administrative wings of these hospitals, or tucked into the ‘home offices’ of the consultants who manage the logistics. I see the difference. I see the frantic clicking. I recently sat in a meeting where a project manager made a joke about ‘agile synergy bottlenecks’ and everyone laughed. I didn’t understand the joke. To be honest, I pretended to understand it because the social pressure to be ‘in’ on the corporate vernacular is its own kind of theater. I let out a sharp, practiced bark of a laugh, even though I was actually thinking about whether I’d tightened the 31st bolt on the gantry mount. I felt like a fraud, not because I didn’t get the joke, but because I was participating in a performance of belonging that had nothing to do with getting the equipment ready for patients.

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the performance is the poison

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The Tax of Pretense

This obsession with being ‘on’ is an anxiety response. When a manager can’t see you, they stop trusting that you are working, so they demand metrics that are easy to measure but impossible to value. How many tickets did you close? How fast did you respond to that Slack thread? These are the breadcrumbs of the digital age, but they don’t lead to a gingerbread house; they lead to burnout.

I remember installing a diagnostic array in a clinic in rural Ohio. There was a young tech there, maybe 21 years old, who spent the entire morning staring at her phone. I thought she was slacking off. Later, I realized she was manually monitoring a patient’s heart rate telemetry because the central server was down. She was doing the most important work in the building, but if her boss had looked at her ‘status’ on the company portal, she would have been flagged as ‘away.’ We are measuring the wrong things because the right things are too hard to quantify through a screen.

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from pretending to work. It’s actually more taxing than doing the work itself. When I’m hauling a 71-pound crate up a ramp, I know why I’m tired. My muscles are spent. But when I spend a day ‘managing my presence,’ I feel a hollow, grey fatigue that a night’s sleep can’t touch. It’s the fatigue of a lie.

Erosion of Authenticity

This theater erodes our ability to connect. If everything is a performance of productivity, then nothing is authentic. This applies to our lives outside the office, too. We’ve started treating our relationships like we treat our Slack statuses. We ‘check in’ with people. We ‘optimize’ our social calendars. We send a quick text because it’s ‘responsive,’ but we forget how to actually be present.

It’s the difference between a mass-sent ‘thinking of you’ and the vulnerability found in something like love letters for her, where the effort isn’t a performance for a manager, but a genuine attempt to be seen by another human soul. Genuine connection requires the one thing productivity theater forbids: the luxury of taking your time.

I once made a mistake on a job site-a real, physical mistake. I installed a lead shield 11 inches to the left of where it belonged because I was trying to look like I knew what I was doing while the Chief of Surgery watched me. I was so focused on the theater of ‘Cora the Expert’ that I stopped being ‘Cora the Installer.’ I didn’t admit it for 31 hours. The theater was more important than the radiation safety of the room. That’s the danger.

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the shield is leaking

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The Cost of Busywork

We see this in every sector now. The software engineer who writes 101 lines of ‘fluff’ code because the GitHub activity graph needs to look busy. The teacher who spends 41% of their time filling out ‘engagement’ rubrics instead of actually engaging with the students. We are all jiggling the mouse in our own way. We are all terrified that if we stop, someone will realize that the system we’ve built is largely held together by scotch tape and performative enthusiasm.

We have to ask ourselves what we are losing in this exchange. We are trading our sanity for a green dot. We are trading the ‘deep work’-the work that actually moves the needle, the work that installs the MRI correctly-for a series of shallow pings. Corporate culture has become a house of mirrors where we are all staring at our own reflections, making sure our ties are straight and our screens are bright, while the actual foundation of the building is cracking.

The Clarity of Completion

I’m not saying we should all quit and become installers. Trust me, my knees hurt, and the $1101 I spent on physical therapy last year says this isn’t the easy path. But there is a clarity in the physical world that we are losing in the digital one. In the physical world, when you’re done, you pack your tools and you go home. You don’t have to keep your wrench ‘active’ so the foreman knows you’re still a committed employee. The work speaks for itself.

I think about that MRI machine. It doesn’t care about my Slack status. It only cares that the electricity flows through the right copper wires and that the cooling system is at the exact right pressure. It demands the truth. Maybe we should start demanding the same from our work lives. We are more than the sum of our clicks. We are more than a green light in a sidebar.

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the curtain is heavy

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Next time you feel the urge to jiggle the mouse, maybe just let it sit still. Let the light turn amber. Take a breath. Look at the 11 tabs you have open and ask yourself how many of them actually matter. The world won’t end if you’re ‘away’ for 21 minutes. In fact, that might be the only time you’re actually there.