The hum is the first thing you notice. A low-grade, electronic drone from the projector that’s been running for at least three hours. It’s a sound that promises nothing but delivers on its promise relentlessly. My right leg has fallen asleep, and the cheap polyester of the chair is starting to feel permanently fused to my skin. Up front, a perfectly nice man named Kevin is reading bullet points off his 47th slide. The topic is ‘Synergistic Agility in a Post-Digital Framework,’ and each word feels like a small, flavourless stone being dropped into my brain.
I’ve been criticizing Kevin in my head for the last two hours. His cadence is hypnotic in the worst way. His tie is slightly askew. He keeps using the laser pointer to circle words that are already in 72-point font. He is the architect of this windowless purgatory. It’s his fault. And yet, as he clicks to the next slide, I notice his hand trembles just a little. A tiny coffee stain, shaped like a sad little ghost, sits on his left cuff. And it hits me: Kevin is a prisoner here, too. Kevin didn’t invent Synergistic Agility. He’s just delivering the message someone, somewhere, decided was worth $777 a head for us to hear.
So I’ll stop blaming Kevin. I’ll do what he’s doing anyway-participate in the charade-but the blame has to go somewhere else. Because this entire exercise, this multi-thousand-dollar day of stale pastries and intellectual anesthetic, isn’t for me. It’s not for Kevin. It’s not for any of the 27 people in this room furtively checking their phones beneath the draped tables.
It’s a Legal Document.
This training isn’t designed to make us better at our jobs. It’s a performative ritual of compliance. It’s a line item on a budget that allows an executive, somewhere on the 37th floor, to sleep well at night. It’s a shield.
When someone inevitably messes up, the company can produce a signed attendance sheet and say, “But we trained them! We held a seven-hour seminar.” The content is secondary. The goal isn’t education; it’s insulation. The sheer, expensive pointlessness of it all isn’t a bug, it’s the entire feature. It’s a profound disrespect for our time disguised as an investment in our development.
A Sharp Injection of Reality
This thought is so distracting that I almost miss my phone buzzing again. I pull it out from my pocket, shielding the screen with my hand, and see it. Ten missed calls. My phone has been on vibrate, but the setting must have switched to silent. For the entire morning, while I’ve been absorbing diagrams about stakeholder funnels, the actual world was trying to get my attention. My stomach tightens. Was it the school? The vet? A project on fire? It’s a sudden, sharp injection of reality into a profoundly unreal space. The world that pays my salary, the one where my actual skills are needed, has been calling, and I’ve been in a sensory deprivation tank listening to a man read his own slides.
That is the true cost of this.
The Wisdom of Bailey
It’s not just the wasted hours. It’s the opportunity cost of being unavailable for what truly matters. It’s the slow, corrosive message that our active intelligence is not required here. Just our passive presence. They don’t want your brain; they just want your body in a chair for a verifiable number of hours. It reminds me of Bailey C.-P., a person I met once who worked as a groundskeeper at a historic cemetery. Bailey had more practical, earned wisdom in their little finger than was present in this entire conference room.
Bailey never attended a seminar on ‘Advanced Horticultural Frameworks.’ Bailey’s training was the soil itself. It was the 137-year-old oak that shed its leaves differently each autumn. It was the subtle shift in the wind that predicted a flash frost. Bailey learned which plots held water and which dried out too fast not from a manual, but from decades of walking the same paths, feeling the give of the earth beneath their feet. It was a constant, iterative process of doing, observing, and adjusting. A mistake wasn’t a failing; it was just new data for tomorrow. The training was the work, and the work was the training. It was deeply practical, completely self-directed, and genuinely educational. The stakes were real, but the environment was forgiving enough to allow for learning.
We can’t all have a job with such a direct feedback loop. Most of us work in abstractions, on screens and in meetings. But the principle remains the same: real learning happens through engagement, not passive reception. It happens in an environment where you can act, see the result, and act again without catastrophic consequences. This is the entire philosophy behind any effective learning tool, whether it’s a flight simulator for a pilot or a stock market simulator for beginners for someone wanting to understand markets without losing their life savings. It’s about creating a sandbox where mistakes are the primary vehicle for growth. It’s the anti-PowerPoint.
expertise is grown, not installed.
It is a living thing that requires practice, context, and the freedom to make non-fatal errors.
The Demand for Mediocrity
What Bailey understands instinctively is what corporate training deliberately ignores: expertise is grown, not installed. It is a living thing that requires practice, context, and the freedom to make non-fatal errors. The company that hired Kevin and paid for this room doesn’t actually want us to have that kind of expertise. That would be messy and unpredictable. It might lead to us questioning the very processes they’re trying to drill into us. What they want is predictable, documentable mediocrity. They want a workforce that has been ‘certified’ in Synergistic Agility, not a workforce that is actually agile. The certificate is the product, not the skill.
I look up. Kevin is on slide 57 now, talking about ‘Cross-Functional Idea Showers.’ He’s lost the room entirely. Half the attendees are staring into space with the vacant look of people who have mentally gone to their happy place. The other half are typing furiously on their laptops, doing their actual jobs under the pretense of taking notes. We are all complicit in this quiet fraud. We trade a day of our finite lives for a checkmark on a corporate to-do list.
The hum of the projector seems louder now, a monotonous soundtrack to the silent agreement we’ve all made. I put my phone away, the list of missed calls a stark reminder of the real world waiting outside. I won’t find out what they were about for another two hours. For now, I’m just a body in a chair, a name on an attendance sheet, a participant in a ritual designed to protect everyone but the people it claims to serve.
