The Weight of Being Watched

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I find myself adjusting his halter for the 37th time. I don’t need to adjust it. It’s perfect. But the donors are watching, and my supervisor is leaning against the gate with a clipboard, so I have to look busy. I have to look like I am applying some sophisticated, invisible technique that only a professional therapy animal trainer with 17 years of experience would know. It’s a lie. I am just fidgeting to avoid the judgment of being still. This is the core frustration of our current existence-the terrifying realization that if we aren’t vibrating with visible activity, we are perceived as broken. We have collectively decided that the hum of a spinning wheel is more valuable than the silence of a completed thought. I remember a Tuesday not long ago when the facility director walked past my office and I spent 7 minutes intensely staring at a blank spreadsheet, clicking cells at random, just so I wouldn’t be caught staring out the window at the clouds.

We have turned our lives into a series of 67-second clips of productivity, edited to remove the pauses. But the pauses are where the actual healing happens, both for the animals I train and for the humans who eventually pet them. Barnaby knows this. He is currently standing so still that a fly has landed on his nose and remained there for 17 seconds. He is achieving a level of zen that I can only dream of, while I am out here simulating a 7-stage process of ‘connection’ for an audience that wouldn’t know a genuine connection if it bit them on their $777 designer vests. The contrarian truth that no one wants to admit is that laziness-or what we call laziness-is often the only sane response to a system that demands infinite growth on a finite planet. True efficiency isn’t about doing more; it’s about having the courage to do absolutely nothing until the right action becomes unavoidable.

The Harvest Cycle Statistics

The constant, often invisible, extraction of value from time and rest.

The Atmosphere of Busyness

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I once spent 87 days trying to train a particularly stubborn goat named Gregory. I tried every technique in the manual. I used 27 different types of treats. I consulted 7 other trainers. Nothing worked. Finally, I got so fed up that I just sat in the pen with him and ignored him for 117 minutes. I stopped trying to ‘train’. I stopped trying to look like a trainer. I just existed in the same space. By the end of the session, Gregory walked over and rested his head on my knee. He didn’t want a trainer; he wanted a companion who wasn’t trying to harvest a specific result from him. We are constantly harvesting each other. We are harvesting our own time. We are turning our hobbies into side hustles and our rest into ‘recovery’ so we can go back to the harvest tomorrow at 7:07 AM.

“He didn’t want a trainer; he wanted a companion who wasn’t trying to harvest a specific result from him.”

The temperature in this barn is currently 97 degrees, and the air is thick enough to chew. It’s the kind of heat that makes your thoughts turn into molasses. I often think about the climate of our work environments, both the literal and the metaphorical. If we don’t have the right atmosphere, nothing thrives. In my home office, where I write the training manuals that nobody reads, I finally broke down and looked into climate control solutions that wouldn’t break the bank. I found that installing something like MiniSplitsforLess was the only way to keep my brain from melting into a puddle of 77 different useless ideas. It’s hard to be a philosopher of animal behavior when you’re sweating through your third shirt of the day. But even with the air conditioning, the internal heat of performative busyness remains. We are constantly under the magnifying glass, and the sun is always out.

The Power of Refusal

I decide to stop. I let the lead rope go slack. I stop adjusting the halter. I stop looking at the clipboard in the corner of my eye. I stand there, matching Barnaby’s stillness. The silence in the pen stretches out for 107 seconds. It is uncomfortable. The donors start to whisper. My boss shifts his weight. A fly circles my head 7 times before landing on my shoulder. I don’t brush it off. For the first time in 247 days, I am not trying to be the person the spectators paid to see. I am just a human standing in the dirt with a horse that doesn’t care about my resume.

I think about the 777 different ways I could have handled this demo. I could have used a clicker. I could have used a whip. I could have used 17 types of high-value grain. But the only thing that worked was the one thing I was terrified to try: stopping. We are afraid that if we stop, the world will forget us. We are afraid that if we aren’t the loudest, most active person in the room, we will be replaced by someone who is. But there is a 97 percent chance that most of what we do doesn’t matter anyway. Most of our emails, most of our meetings, most of our ‘hustle’ is just sawdust in the air.

The Cycle of the Circle

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I look at my boss again. He looks confused. He’s checking his watch, which probably cost $1007 and tells him exactly how many seconds he has left to live, though he’d never look at it that way. He wants to move on to the next demonstration. He has a schedule. He has 17 more items on his to-do list before he can go home and drink a 7-ounce glass of expensive scotch and wonder why he feels so empty. I feel a wave of pity for him. He is the most well-trained animal in this barn. He follows the invisible lead rope of his own ambitions with 117 percent dedication, never realizing that he’s just walking in circles in a 47-foot ring.

We need to embrace the contrarian path. We need to be more like Barnaby. We need to find our knot in the wood and stare at it until the world stops making sense. We need to realize that our value isn’t tied to our visibility. I am going to go home today and I am going to sit on my porch for 47 minutes. I am not going to read a book. I am not going to listen to a podcast. I am not going to ‘process’ my day. I am just going to sit there and let the 7 o’clock sun hit my face. My neighbors will walk by and think I’m being lazy. They will see a man who isn’t doing anything ‘essential’ for the economy. And they will be right. And that is exactly the point.

Done Looking Busy

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