Drops of condensation formed a rhythmic, metallic ticking against the inner wall of the shaft as I sat on the floor of the elevator. The air felt like wet wool. It had been 27 minutes since the motor coughed and died, leaving me suspended between the 7th and 8th floors of a building that smelled vaguely of floor wax and corporate apathy. In those 27 minutes, something strange happened. I reached for my phone, instinctively prepared to document my ‘unfortunate adventure’ for the 1,007 people who follow my professional updates, but there was no signal. No bars. No LTE. Just a black glass slab reflecting my own tired eyes. Without the ability to broadcast the moment, the moment suddenly became heavy. It became real. It was no longer a story to be told; it was just a man in a box.

Victor J.-P., a man who usually spends his Tuesday afternoons explaining the 77 principles of vertical integration to mid-level managers, was suddenly stripped of his audience. As a corporate trainer, my life is a series of performances. I teach people how to optimize their time, yet there I was, realizing that I haven’t truly ‘rested’ in at least 7 years. Every book I’ve read lately was chosen because the spine looked good in a stack on my nightstand. Every video game I’ve played was preceded by 37 minutes of adjusting the RGB lighting on my desk so the glow would look ‘authentic’ in a Discord stream. We have turned our leisure into a competitive sport where the primary metric is not joy, but the perceived quality of the rest itself.

We are living in an era where the hobby has been colonized by the brand. If you go for a run but don’t track the 7.7 kilometers on an app that shares your route with your ex-coworkers, did your heart rate even actually increase? The anxiety of the ‘unrecorded life’ is a silent epidemic. I see it in the eyes of the executives I train. They spend $4,997 on home espresso machines not because they crave the caffeine, but because the ritual of the ‘perfect pour’ is a transferable piece of social capital. We are no longer participants in our own lives; we are the marketing department for a product that doesn’t exist.

I remember a specific instance about 17 months ago. I bought a vintage 1957 typewriter. It was heavy, smelled of oil and old basements, and cost me exactly $247. I told myself I wanted the tactile feedback, the ‘honest’ resistance of steel on paper. In reality, I spent three days framing a photo of it next to a glass of scotch I didn’t even like. I wrote 7 sentences on that machine. The rest of its life has been spent as a prop. This is the contradiction of the modern creative: we value the aesthetic of the process more than the output of the work. We are curators of a museum of things we don’t actually use.

This performance isn’t just exhausting; it’s corrosive. It changes the way we perceive value. We start to ignore the internal hum of satisfaction because it doesn’t have a ‘like’ button attached to it. I’ve caught myself feeling disappointed by a beautiful meal because the restaurant’s lighting was too dim for a clear shot. Think about that for a second. The physical reality of a delicious experience was dampened by the failure of its digital shadow. That is a psychological glitch of massive proportions. It’s like being upset that a ghost doesn’t show up in a mirror while the person standing right in front of you is offering you a hug.

In my training sessions, I often talk about the importance of ‘deep work,’ but I rarely mention ‘deep rest.’ Deep rest is invisible. It is messy. It involves drooling on a pillow or staring at a wall for 17 minutes without a single thought in your head. It is the opposite of the ‘rest’ we see on Instagram, which is usually just a different kind of productivity. If your relaxation requires a tripod, it isn’t relaxation; it’s a production. We need to find ways to reclaim the private moment. We need to find tools and spaces that allow for genuine connection without the pressure of the external gaze. Sometimes that means stepping away from the mainstream noise and finding a platform or a community like ems89 that values the substance over the sizzle. We need to stop treating our lives like a 24/7 reality show where we are both the star and the exploited cameraman.

There is a specific kind of freedom in being unobserved. The 27 minutes I spent in that elevator were more restorative than any ‘self-care’ Sunday I’ve staged in the last year. Why? Because there was no one to impress. I couldn’t even impress myself because I was too busy wondering if the air was running out. (It wasn’t, but the mind likes to play those games). I realized that I have been a corporate trainer for 17 years and I’ve spent at least 7 of those years worrying about how my training looks on a slide deck rather than how it actually lands in the minds of the people in the room.

I recall a conversation with a colleague, a woman who had spent $777 on a digital detox retreat. She spent the entire weekend writing about how much she wasn’t using her phone. She came back with 47 pages of notes that she eventually turned into a blog post. She didn’t detox; she just changed the medium of her performance. We are so terrified of the void that we fill it with the noise of our own descriptions. We describe our lives instead of living them. We are like the 107 tourists I saw in Paris who all had their backs to the painting so they could get the perfect selfie with the frame. The art was behind them, and they were looking at themselves.

If we want to fix this, we have to embrace the ugly. We have to allow ourselves to have hobbies that we are bad at. I want to play the guitar so poorly that no one would ever want to hear it. I want to bake a cake that looks like a geological disaster but tastes like heaven. I want to exist in a space where the ROI is exactly zero. The obsession with ‘monetizing’ or ‘optimizing’ our hobbies is a poison. It turns the one area of our lives that should be free from the market and hands it over to the accountants. I tell my trainees that efficiency is for machines. Humans are meant to be inefficient. We are meant to be slow. We are meant to linger on the 7th floor between the buttons.

When the elevator finally lurched back to life, the sensation was jarring. It was like being pulled out of a dream. The doors opened on the lobby, and the sounds of the world rushed in-the pinging of phones, the click of heels, the 37 different conversations happening at once. My phone buzzed in my pocket. 7 notifications. One was a ‘memory’ from three years ago, a photo of a sunset I don’t remember seeing because I was too busy choosing the right filter for the clouds. I felt a wave of genuine grief for that lost sunset. It was a beautiful moment that I had traded for a handful of digital validation.

We are at a crossroads. We can continue to perform our lives for an audience that doesn’t really care, or we can start to reclaim the 27 minutes. We can start to build lives that feel good on the inside, even if they look like a mess on the outside. It’s a difficult shift to make. It requires us to be okay with being invisible. It requires us to admit that Victor J.-P. is just a name on a business card and that the real person is the one sitting on the floor of a stuck elevator, breathing in the smell of floor wax and feeling the heartbeat in his own fingertips. That version of me doesn’t need a filter. That version of me is already 100% complete, 7 days a week.