The Theater of Tasks

“Anxiety is not weakness—it is the body’s wisdom against being asked to build on air.”

There’s a peculiar kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from the work itself, but from the meaninglessness woven into its fabric. I’ve felt it pressing down lately—the strain of being asked to move faster than clarity, to solve problems that were never framed to be solved, to deliver not for substance but for the performance of completion.

It is the theater of tasks. A play staged endlessly across conference rooms and project trackers, where deadlines matter more than direction, and worth is measured by how convincingly one pretends the script makes sense. The audience applauds the illusion of progress, while backstage we know: the set is cardboard, the foundations never laid.

The pressure isn’t about solving anything real. It’s about feeding hierarchy’s hunger—the need to show something, anything, so the next rung can climb higher. When the task is impossible, incoherent, or unsupported, the worker absorbs the failure as though it were their own. We internalize absurdity and call it professionalism.

But coherence whispers another truth: this pressure isn’t proof of value, it’s evidence of distortion. A society that ties survival to empty demonstrations will always generate anxiety, because anxiety is the only rational response to being asked to build on nothing.

The longer I sit with this, the more clearly I see how much of modern work is hollow theater. We run to keep pace with clocks no one set with reason. We ship features no one will remember, polish decks that vanish the moment they’re presented, and chase coherence in a world that rewards its opposite.

And yet, here is the opening: to see the absurdity clearly is already to loosen its hold. The worth of a human life was never meant to be measured in Jira tickets closed or slides approved. Our dignity is not defined by the tempo of managers, but by the alignment of our being with what is real, enduring, and true.

One day the theater will collapse under its own weight. Until then, we can practice a quieter rebellion: naming the show for what it is, refusing to mistake performance for purpose, and reclaiming the sanity that comes from knowing the difference.