The Illusion of Redundancy

The squeak of the marker was the only sound. Marcus was drawing our supply chain on the whiteboard, his diagram a confident series of boxes and arrows. Box A: Primary Supplier, Vietnam. Box B: Backup Supplier, Mexico. Two neat, parallel lines connected them to our assembly plant in Ohio. He capped the marker with a satisfying click. “We’re covered,” he said, looking at the 7 of us around the conference table. “If Vietnam has a lockdown, we pivot to Mexico. Redundancy.”

It was a beautiful diagram. Clean. Logical. The kind of thing that gets you a promotion. It was also a complete fantasy.

For 17 minutes, we’d been talking in circles about why both our Vietnamese and Mexican factories had simultaneously halted production of our flagship product. Both cited a sudden, critical shortage of ‘FX-227,’ the specific brilliant blue pigment that made our brand recognizable from 47 feet away. A coincidence, everyone said. A freak event. Black swan. But the silence in the room felt different. It wasn’t the silence of confusion. It was the heavier silence of a truth nobody wanted to voice.

The room is one degree too cold. Always. It’s a deliberate, low-grade discomfort designed to keep you alert, a corporate thermostat setting that whispers, “Don’t get comfortable.” On the screen, a stock photo of impossibly diverse and happy people laughing over a laptop. The facilitator, Mark, whose smile is so wide it looks painful, asks the question for the third time.

Silence. Not a thoughtful silence, but a terrified one. The air is thick with the sound of 41 people simultaneously calculating the career-limiting potential of every personal anecdote they possess. I think of the Q3 projections I completely botched last year, the misread of the data that cost the department at least $171,001. Sharing that would be vulnerable. It would be authentic. It would also be a spectacular act of professional self-immolation. Instead, a woman from marketing tells a charming, self-deprecating story about burning a lasagna for a dinner party. It’s a perfect offering: relatable, human, and utterly meaningless to her professional competence. Mark applauds. “Thank you for your courage, Sarah.”

This is the silent contract of modern corporate life.

The invitation to “bring your whole self to work” is printed in a beautiful, flowing script at the bottom of the page,

The Real Difficulty Isn’t Always Where You Expect It

We talk endlessly about difficulty in games. We debate the merits of punishing combat, of bosses with 3 distinct attack phases, of mechanics that demand frame-perfect timing. We’ve built an entire culture around the idea of ‘getting good.’ But we almost never talk about the other difficulty. The real difficulty. The cognitive load of simply existing within the game’s own internal logic. For so many of us, the hardest part of a game isn’t the gameplay; it’s the