Lol.

I quit a six-figure job because of a recurring Wednesday meeting.

Not dramatically. I just stopped showing up.

The meeting was called "Alignment Sync." It had seventeen standing attendees. Its stated purpose, written in the calendar invite in 2019 and never updated, was to "discuss Q3 priorities."

It was now 2023.

There is a tribe in the Peruvian highlands — I visited after my sabbatical — who make decisions by passing a single stone. Whoever holds the stone speaks. When they have nothing to say, they pass it. The whole village resolves land disputes in under four minutes.

Our Alignment Sync had no stone. It had a shared Google Doc that nobody scrolled past slide two and a project manager named Gerald who said "let's take that offline" an average of eleven times per session.

The information conveyed in every single meeting could have been — was, in fact, already — contained in the Thursday recap email that Gerald also wrote and that nobody read either.

I am not saying Gerald was the problem.

Gerald was a symptom.

The real disease was our collective terror of the inbox and our deep, mammalian need to sit in a room together pretending to be useful.

I passed my stone.

I sent an email.

I have not looked back.