The Transactional Trap: Spreadsheets and Handshakes

The business card is too slick. My thumb slides off the corner as I try to pin it against my other fingers, which are already holding a lukewarm glass of sparkling water. The man who gave it to me, a fellow I think is named Daniel, is already scanning the room over my shoulder, his eyes doing the rapid, predatory calculation of a bird of prey looking for its next meal. My own brain is doing the same disgusting math. Who’s here? Who matters? What’s the optimal conversational path through this room to maximize… what? Value? Opportunity? It feels like trying to solve a spreadsheet with handshakes.

We’ve turned our social lives into a series of transactions. Every coffee is a networking opportunity. Every dinner is a strategic alliance. Every weekend brunch is a chance to leverage a personal brand. I’ve read enough articles and listened to enough podcasts to know this is a bad thing, a soulless byproduct of late-stage capitalism. And yet, I checked my own color-coded calendar on the way here and saw I have exactly

44 minutes

blocked for this “High-Value Networking Mingle” before my next scheduled event, a call to optimize a workflow. I am the problem I’m complaining about.

The Unseen Rot: A Metaphor for Relationships

The hum is the first thing you notice. Not the presenter, not the 115 slides titled ‘SynergyFlow Integration-A New Dawn,’ but the low, monotonous drone of the projector fan. It’s the sound of a Tuesday afternoon being slowly sacrificed to the gods of corporate progress. On screen, a man named Dave clicks through 17 different menus, sub-menus, and modal pop-ups to log a single task. A task that, until last Friday, took two cells in a shared spreadsheet.

Someone to my left, a logistics coordinator who has been with the company for 15 years, whispers to the person next to her, ‘Can we just keep using the spreadsheet?’ The whisper is a tiny spark in a room filled with dry tinder. You can feel the wave of silent, desperate agreement ripple through the 35 people in the room. Nobody nods. Nobody makes a sound. But we all think it. We are all, collectively, holding our breath and praying for the spreadsheet.

The words hang in the air, thick and syrupy like cheap perfume in a hot car. ‘Well, of course Mark is questioning the process. He’s an ENTP.’

And just like that, Mark ceases to be Mark. He is no longer the guy who has been with the company for 13 years, who single-handedly fixed the disastrous server migration of ’23, who can tell you the precise pressure at which the office coffee machine produces a palatable espresso. He is no longer a person with valid, experience-based concerns about a workflow that is demonstrably inefficient. He is a type. A four-letter code that explains him, categorizes him, and conveniently dismisses him all at once.

I feel a familiar tightness in my chest. I’ve been in this meeting, or a version of it, at least 43 times. The names change, the acronyms on the whiteboard evolve, but the fundamental shortcut remains the same. We have become absolutely addicted to the neatly packaged fiction of personality tests. We use them to hire, to form teams, to explain friction. We’ve taken the beautiful, chaotic, unpredictable mess of human personality and tried to shove it into 16 neat little boxes. It’s corporate astrology, and we’re all pretending to read the stars while the ship is

The stack has a weight. Not just the physical heft of 22 sheets of 142-pound cold-press paper, but a psychic gravity. They sit on the corner of my desk, a monument to my own indecision. These aren’t the good ones. The good ones-all two of them-are framed, or at least propped up on a shelf, basking in the delusion that they might one day be framed. No, these are the others. The muddy landscapes, the portraits with one eye slightly higher than the other, the color studies that ended up looking like a toddler’s spilled juice. They are not good enough to keep, but apparently, they are too precious to throw away.

I used to be a devout archivist of my own mediocrity. I had boxes-so many boxes-filled with sketchbooks containing maybe three decent drawings and