The system is down. Not slow, not glitchy-down. The kind of down where the #engineering Slack channel transforms into a firehose of panicked red-circle emojis and the VP’s name starts appearing with an ominous frequency. Everyone is scrambling, proposing theories, running diagnostics that spit back useless, cryptic errors. The shared screen in the Zoom call shows a cascade of failing server pings, a digital heartbeat monitor flatlining in real time. For 19 agonizing minutes, there is only chaos.

And then, Kevin logs on.

He doesn’t type in the channel. His icon just turns green. A collective, virtual breath is held. He’s a wraith, a legend who appears only when the sky is falling. He doesn’t join the call. He doesn’t ask for a summary. He just… dives in. For the next nine hours, the only evidence of his existence is the furious blur of commits scrolling by in the repository log. The rest of the team-29 engineers-are relegated to the role of spectators, offering useless words of encouragement into a void. Then, silence. Followed by a single, curt message from Kevin at 3:19 AM: “Should be fixed now. Cache needed clearing on the secondary node.”

And just like that, it is. The pings return. The website loads. The VP sends a company-wide email praising Kevin’s Herculean effort, his ownership, his sheer brilliance. A $4,999 spot bonus hits his account before sunrise. Kevin is the hero. The rockstar.

No one mentions that

The Predictability Paradox

The cap on the whiteboard marker makes a faint squeak against the plastic tray. It’s the third time Brenda has picked it up and put it down. We’re 43 minutes into a two-hour sprint planning meeting for the marketing team, and the air in the room has the texture of lukewarm gelatin. The task at hand? Assigning story points to the user story, ‘As a reader, I want a new blog post, so I can learn about Topic X.’

Brenda, our newly certified scrum master, circles the number 5 on the board. A few people nod. I feel a familiar tightening in my chest. “Can’t we just… write the blog post?” I ask. It comes out quieter than I intended. “It will probably take about a day, maybe a day and a half if the research is tricky.”

Velocity. A word that once meant speed, now a metric weaponized to ensure no actual movement happens at all. We spend so much time oiling the gears of the machine that we never turn it on. We are performing the sacred rituals of agility-the stand-ups,

The brush rests on the edge of the water jar, a single bead of murky brown water rolling down its handle. My pulse is a frantic little drum against my ribs, the kind of rhythm I usually associate with too much coffee or reading my own symptoms online at 1 AM. The page in my journal is finished. A wash of watercolor, a few tentative lines of ink, a fern I saw on a walk. For a moment-maybe 11 seconds-there was peace in the making of it. Now, that peace is gone, replaced by a low-grade, buzzing anxiety. The work isn’t over. The real work is about to begin.

This is the great, unspoken trade we all made. We didn’t get a global village for creatives; we got a global amphitheater with millions of seats and a scoreboard that resets every minute. We were told social media would democratize creativity, but it didn’t. It turned creativity into a performance. It added the crushing weight of an audience to what should