The blue light from the second monitor is casting a faint, sickly glow against the coffee mug I haven’t washed in 4 days. On the primary screen, a cursor is blinking inside a text box on a slide titled ‘Iterative Scaling for Synergistic Growth.’ It’s the 44th slide of the morning. Somewhere in the ether of the digital call, a voice is droning on about ‘optimizing touchpoints’ for the 14th time in the last 20 minutes. I find myself staring at the mute icon, wondering if anyone would notice if I just stopped breathing for a second. Instead, I move the mouse-not to the PowerPoint, but to the tab tucked away in the corner. I’m checking my yield.

Owen S.-J., a packaging frustration analyst who spends his life figuring out why people can’t get into their electronics boxes without a chainsaw, once told me that the most expensive part of any product isn’t the material. It’s the friction. He pointed out that if you have 14 layers of tape on a box, you aren’t protecting the product; you’re just making the customer hate the brand before they even see what’s inside. Corporate life is that 14th layer of tape. It is friction for the sake of friction. But for those of us with a foot already out the door, that friction is a gift. It provides the camouflage.

While the ‘performers’ are busy sharpening their digital pencils, the rest of us are calculating exactly how many shares of a stable utility stock we need to buy to never have to hear the word ‘synergy’ again.

There is a cognitive surplus happening in the background of every useless meeting. When your brain checks out of a conversation about ‘deliverable timelines,’ it doesn’t just go dark. It goes looking for value. For many, that value is found in the meticulous construction of a dividend-paying portfolio. It’s a strange, bifurcated existence. On one hand, you’re an employee participating in a charade that feels like it was scripted by a malfunctioning AI. On the other, you’re a cold-blooded capital allocator. You are taking the 404 dollars you just earned while sitting in a ‘brainstorming session’ and putting it into an asset that will pay you for the rest of your life.

I remember one particular afternoon when the absurdity reached a peak. We were 64 minutes into a call about the color of a button on a landing page. I realized that my hourly rate, when broken down, meant the company had just spent over $234 to listen to four people argue about ‘burnt sienna’ versus ‘terracotta.’ In that same window of time, I had quietly researched three different REITs and calculated my projected income for the next 4 years. The contrast was so sharp it felt like a physical weight in my chest. I wasn’t angry anymore. I was grateful. Every minute they wasted was a minute they were paying me to build my own world.

I’ve made mistakes along the way, of course. There was the time I accidentally shared the wrong screen during a presentation, revealing a spreadsheet that had absolutely nothing to do with the quarterly budget and everything to do with compounding interest. I managed to play it off as a ‘personal financial literacy project for the team’s wellness initiative,’ a phrase so drenched in corporate-speak that nobody questioned it. They actually praised me for it. That’s how deep the theater goes. If you use the right buzzwords, you can hide a revolution in plain sight.

Managing this duality requires a specific set of tools. You can’t just wing it with a notepad and a calculator. You need a system that tracks the progress of your escape as clearly as your boss tracks your ‘key performance indicators.’ When you see the numbers moving in the right direction, the frustration of the 4th meeting of the day begins to evaporate. It’s no longer a burden; it’s a transaction. I’m trading 34 minutes of my attention for 4 more shares of a high-quality dividend stock.

This is where something like Dividend Ledger becomes more than just a piece of software. It’s a dashboard for your autonomy. When you’re stuck in a digital room with 14 people who are all pretending to care about a spreadsheet they haven’t read, looking at your own ledger is a reminder of reality. It’s the proof that the theater has an end date. You aren’t just collecting checks; you’re collecting hours of your future life. Each dividend payment is a small piece of a fence you’re building around your time.

Maybe authenticity isn’t about being present in a situation that is fundamentally inauthentic. Maybe it’s about having the courage to acknowledge that you don’t belong there and doing whatever it takes to leave.

I look at my dividend calendar and I see 24 specific dates throughout the year where I get a ‘bonus’ that has nothing to do with my performance review. Those are the dates that matter. Those are the dates that tell me the theater is working-for me. The meetings will continue. The slides will keep multiplying. The 14 layers of tape will stay on the box. But underneath it all, the product is already being moved out of the warehouse.

It’s a long road, but at 4% yield at a time, you’ll get there. And when you finally walk out that door for the last time, the theater will still be going on, people will still be nodding at 44 slides, and you’ll finally be able to meditate for 14 minutes without checking the clock once.