The 79 Messages of Stagnation

The red notification dot on the Slack icon feels like a tiny, bleeding wound. I click it, and there it is: #team-lunch-planning has 79 new messages since I went to the bathroom. The scroll is a vertical cemetery of discarded ideas. Sarah wants Thai but only if they have that specific peanut sauce that isn’t too sweet. Mark is fine with anything but points out that the parking at the Thai place is a nightmare after 11:59 AM. Someone, God bless their optimistic soul, suggests just ordering 9 pizzas to the office. They are ignored within 29 seconds. The conversation pivots to a debate about the ethical implications of a certain sandwich chain’s corporate donations. We are now 49 minutes into a discussion about where to spend $19 on a Tuesday morning, and the only thing we have achieved is a collective spike in cortisol.

I am currently sitting at my desk, trying to ignore the lingering taste of a sourdough slice I just bit into, only to realize too late that the bottom was a fuzzy landscape of blue-green mold. It’s a fitting metaphor. We let these tiny, trivial decisions sit out in the open for so long that they eventually spoil, turning a simple act of nourishment into a toxic exercise in group dynamics. My stomach churns, partly from the mold, but mostly from the realization that we are doing this to ourselves. We have mistaken ‘inclusion’ for ‘stagnation.’

The Safety of Collective Misery

We are terrified of accountability. That is the ugly truth hiding behind the 149-word Slack messages debating the merits of kale. If I am the one who says, ‘We are going to the taco truck, leave in 9 minutes if you want in,’ and the taco truck happens to be closed or the carnitas are dry, I am the one who failed. I am the target of the collective sigh. But if we spend four days debating it and reach a consensus through a weighted voting system, and the food still sucks, then no one is to blame. The ‘process’ failed, not the person.

The Exponential Scaling of Group Events

This phenomenon doesn’t just stay in the office. It bleeds into our personal lives, specifically into the nightmare of planning group events. Think about the last time you tried to organize a bachelor party or a family reunion. The complexity of the decision-making process scales exponentially with the number of people involved. You start with a simple idea-maybe a trip to the coast-and within 59 hours, you are managing a spreadsheet with 29 tabs…

This is why removing the core friction point is key. If you handle the foundational structure-like chartering a yacht in the Mediterranean via Viravira-the trivial arguments about napkin colors suddenly lose their power to derail the primary joy of the experience.

The Gift of Decisiveness

We are currently 109 messages deep into the lunch thread. Someone has now posted a link to a blog post about the history of the Reuben sandwich. We are no closer to eating. I feel the urge to intervene, to be the ‘Benevolent Dictator’ that every group secretly craves. In my work with Michael V.K., I’ve seen how clear, decisive boundaries can actually reduce anxiety. A student with dyslexia doesn’t want 49 different ways to spell a word; they want the one way that works.

Muting the Noise

I’ve decided I’m done. I’m not going to vote in the poll. I’m not going to weigh in on the sauce. I’m going to walk out the door, turn left, and walk 390 yards to the place that sells the soup I like. I might eat alone, or I might find one or two other rebels who have also reached their breaking point. The moldy bread is in the trash. The Slack channel is muted for the next 499 minutes.

There is a profound peace in the ‘no.’ There is a radical freedom in simply making a choice and living with it, even if the soup is a little too salty today. At least it’s my salt, and I didn’t have to form a committee to taste it.