The air in here has the texture of lukewarm gelatin. A low hum from the projector fan is the only thing moving. On screen, a slide titled ‘Q3 2028: Deep Dive & Synergistic Alignment’ glows with the unearned confidence of a horoscope. Mark, our VP of Blue-Sky Thinking, is pointing a red laser at a bullet point so vague it could be about launching a satellite or changing the brand of coffee in the breakroom. We have been in this room for five hours, meticulously planning a future that feels less plausible than time travel, while our entire industry is being rewritten by a tool that was a graduate student’s thesis 15 months ago.
This is the ritual. The great corporate seance where we attempt to contact the spirit of the future and ask it for stock projections. We spend months and a budget of at least $45,575 on consultants to produce a 235-page document that will be functionally obsolete before the ink dries. It’s an act of collective delusion, an elaborate stage play we perform to convince ourselves that the universe is a tidy spreadsheet, not a glorious, chaotic storm.
The Illusion of Control
I spent last weekend assembling a flat-pack bookshelf. The instructions were a masterclass in clean design and logical progression. A beautiful, laminated