I am currently dabbing a mixture of glycerin and liquid soap onto a lukewarm turkey while my forehead pulses with the rhythmic throb of a fresh bruise. I walked into a glass door about 24 minutes ago. It was one of those floor-to-ceiling sheets of architectural transparency that is meant to signify openness but, in reality, just serves as a very hard reminder of where you aren’t allowed to go. My vision is still a bit hazy, a soft-focus filter applied to the sterile kitchen studio, which is fitting because my entire career as a food stylist-Aria L., at your service-is about the curated lie. I spend 44 hours a week making things that are technically edible look like things you would actually want to eat, which are two very different categories. But even as I glue sesame seeds onto a bun with surgical precision, I cannot stop thinking about the email I received from a friend who works in a skyscraper 4 blocks away.

She spent her entire morning collating the status reports from 4 separate departments into a master report, which will be summarized for a steering committee that meets once every 4 weeks to approve the minutes of the last meeting.

If she stopped doing that job tomorrow-if she simply vanished into the ether-would the world tilt? Would the supply chains collapse? No. The only thing that would happen is that the steering committee would have to postpone their meeting by 14 minutes to wonder where the summary went, before eventually realizing they didn’t need it to approve the minutes of a meeting that also didn’t produce anything. This is the rise of fake work. It is a sprawling, ivy-like growth of internal complexity that exists solely to manage the complexity that the organization itself created. We have reached a point in corporate evolution where the tiger is no longer hunting; the tiger is busy writing a 44-page manual on the optimal way to sharpen its claws, while a sub-committee of 4 other tigers reviews the font choice.

Motor Oil and Status Reports

I find a strange, twisted kinship between my job and hers. I use motor oil instead of maple syrup because it doesn’t soak into the pancakes. It looks more like syrup than syrup does. In the corporate world, the ‘status report’ is the motor oil. It is a lubricant that makes the machinery of the office look like it’s moving, even if the gears aren’t actually connected to anything on the outside.

We are obsessed with the image of productivity. We measure the success of a day by the number of notifications we cleared, which is like measuring the health of a forest by how many leaves we managed to count before they hit the ground. I remember 4 years ago, I worked on a shoot for a major bank. They wanted a photo of ‘innovation.’ I spent 4 hours trying to make a lightbulb look like it was glowing with the fire of a thousand suns, while in the background, 44 executives in grey suits argued about whether the ‘glow’ was on-brand.

The Existential Cost of Invisibility

There is a specific kind of existential dread that comes from knowing your output is invisible. It’s a quiet, humming anxiety that sits in the back of the throat. It’s different from the exhaustion of physical labor. When I spend 14 hours on my feet styling a single bowl of cereal, my back aches, but I can point to the photo and say, ‘That exists.’ My friend in the skyscraper cannot point to anything. Her work is a series of digital pulses that trigger other digital pulses, a recursive loop of ‘following up’ and ‘circling back.’

We manage the bloat. We attend the 4th meeting of the week to discuss the 4 deliverables that were supposed to be finished 4 days ago but were delayed because the person responsible was in a different meeting. This phenomenon is a symptom of a loss of purpose. When a company grows past a certain threshold, it stops being about the product and starts being about the process. The process is safe. The process can be measured with KPIs that end in 4. You can’t fail a process if you follow all the steps, even if the steps lead off a cliff.

“There is a profound honesty in a physical structure. You can’t ‘fake’ a structural beam. If it isn’t there, the roof falls in. If the glass in the door I hit wasn’t real, I wouldn’t have this lump on my head.”

There is a redemptive quality to work that occupies 3D space, work that provides a sanctuary or a function beyond its own internal logic. For those looking to escape the abstraction of the digital void, focusing on tangible environments like those created by Sola Spaces provides a necessary grounding. It is a reminder that work can result in something you can actually touch, something that filters the sun and holds the rain at bay, rather than something that just populates a slide deck.

The Vocabulary of Indigestion

I’ve noticed that the more ‘fake’ the work is, the more jargon we use to describe it. We ‘leverage synergies’ and ‘operationalize verticals’ because if we used plain English, we would have to admit that we spent 444 dollars on a lunch to decide which color the ‘Submit’ button should be. My food styling is the same. I don’t say I’m ‘putting cardboard between the burger patties to make them look taller.’ I say I am ‘optimizing the vertical stack for visual impact.’ It sounds better. It justifies the invoice. But at the end of the day, it’s still just cardboard. The corporate world is filled with people putting cardboard between the layers of their spreadsheets, praying that no one takes a bite and realizes it’s all indigestible.

I remember a guy I dated 4 years ago who was a ‘Director of Strategic Implementation’ for a company that made software for other companies to track their strategy. He worked 64 hours a week. He was always stressed. He had 4 different phones. One night, I asked him what would happen if his company just stopped existing. He sat in silence for about 4 minutes, staring at his reflection in a glass of wine. Then he said, ‘The people using our software would probably be relieved because they wouldn’t have to fill out the strategy trackers anymore.’ He quit 4 weeks later. He’s a carpenter now. He smells like cedar and has a permanent layer of sawdust under his fingernails, and he is the happiest man I know. He doesn’t have a ‘strategy.’ He has a chisel.

From Workload to Worth-Load

We are currently facing a crisis of meaning that no quarterly earnings report can solve. The dread isn’t about the workload; it’s about the worth-load. We are social animals designed for contribution, yet we’ve designed a system that rewards the appearance of contribution over the fact of it. We have created a class of ‘managerial feudalism’ where the lords demand reports instead of grain, and the peasants spend their lives perfecting the margins on those reports to avoid being noticed as redundant. I see it in the eyes of the people who come to my shoots-the marketing assistants who are terrified of the 4th round of revisions because they know their boss only asks for revisions to prove they are still a boss.

Sanity in the Physical World

I’m going to finish this turkey. I’m going to paint it with a glaze of brown bouquet sauce and yellow food coloring until it looks like it was roasted by a grandmother in a 1954 commercial. It’s a lie, but it’s a lie with a clear beginning and an end. When the shutter clicks, my work is done. I don’t have to write a summary of how I painted the turkey for a committee to review in 24 days.

Do you ever wonder, if the lights went out and the servers crashed, how much of your life’s work would remain visible in the dark?