u/mrpotatoesz

There’s a moment in meetings, around the forty-minute mark, where I stop hearing the words. Not because I’m distracted, but because I’m paying too much attention. Something about the conviction in the room becomes visible in a way it wasn’t before. The fluency, the stakes, the genuine seriousness with which a number is being discussed. Underneath all of that, a thought arrives I can’t find a place for: Tuesday afternoon, 23rd of June 2026. This specific Tuesday afternoon that won’t come again. I write it in my notes and wait for the meeting to end. 

My notes from these meetings are otherwise useful — action items, owners, dates and deadlines. And then, in the same pen, the same hand: Tuesday afternoon. I have a small collection of them now: a Wednesday, mid-morning; a Thursday, late. Each one written like evidence and filed as if I’ll need it one day, but I will never look at them again. 

What fades in those minutes, is not my visible interest. Interest I can fake indefinitely, I have made a living from it. What fades is the sense of being inside it. One moment you are in the meeting, the next you are watching it — from somewhere behind your own eyes, a distance you didn’t choose and cannot close — and what you are watching is a room full of intelligent people taking something so seriously that you can no longer take seriously. You cannot explain the difference between you and them, because ten minutes ago you were them. Nothing happened. The illusion simply ended.

You wait for the meeting to end, make notes, nod, and you make sure you seem engaged.

On the days when I can see it clearly, here is how such meetings usually go. 

The revenue number is not going to be hit this quarter, the whole room knows this. Targets are set too high, intentionally or by mistake — but the meeting does not stop. After that conclusion is subtly stated, someone says: let’s focus on what we can control. No one calls it a pivot. We are asked: we increasing client meetings per person this week? Are we aligned to the VP’s product priorities and are we bringing them into every conversation? Is the pipeline clean, are the deal values ambitious enough, and are we showing ambition, meaning: are the numbers in the system large enough to suggest we believe in ourselves?

Not one of these things will bring the revenue back. 

The room accepts this in about four seconds. The engagement redirects, and what I cannot explain, even after having watched it happen every quarter for more than ten years, is that the interest which follows is genuine. These are not people performing curiosity they don’t feel. They are specifically engaged with whether a certain tool this week is used enough. The conviction doesn’t require the things to matter, it arrives on its own, fills the room and asks everyone to lean forward, and everyone does.

It’s not despair, because that would be a position you could argue with, a feeling that points somewhere. This is something colder: the simple inability to re-enter the agreement.

You can participate: use the right words, ask the right questions. But you are watching, from behind your own eyes, the distance between you and the room does not close, and you have realised that it never will.

A Saturday morning, I’m twelve years old. A knock at the door and I’m already moving before a thought has formed. Running toward it before knowing who it is or whether it’s even for me. The slight held breath of the moment before opening.

Tommy is standing there. He hadn’t called or texted — we had no phones. There was no plan. He had simply decided, that morning, that the afternoon might be better if I was in it, and walked over to find out.

Excitement. The kind whose only requirement is not knowing what’s on the other side.

I sit in the meeting thinking I hope that one day out of seven will feel that way.

We went to collect the others. Third house, fourth friend and deciding somewhere between them what the day would look like. After the people came the plan. Assembling itself from whoever was free, whatever someone had discovered that week, wherever none of us had been before. Each of them distinct: none of it chosen the way you’d staff a meeting — rationally, predictably, in advance. We were not aligned to anything. We were just there, together, with the afternoon still entirely unspent. Nobody sent a calendar invite, nobody needed one. It was, if I had to name it, the only kind of meeting where the point was only to be there.

I can still name every one of them. I’m not sure I could name everyone in this meeting without checking the invite.

The knock at the door required someone to decide, without knowing, whether I’d be in, that showing up was worth it anyway. I was always home.

The calendar invite requires none of this. It recurs on its own. It asks only that you not cancel it.

The meeting ran four minutes over. The invitation was already in the calendar, sitting in every Tuesday for the foreseeable future, with no end date. We were, it noted, showing ambition.

It is a very different meeting than the one I remembered.

There’s a moment in meetings, around the forty-minute mark, where I stop hearing the words. Not because I’m distracted, but because I’m paying too much attention. Something about the conviction in the room becomes visible in a way it wasn’t before. The fluency, the stakes, the genuine seriousness with which a number is being discussed. Underneath all of that, a thought arrives I can’t find a place for: Tuesday afternoon, 23rd of June 2026. This specific Tuesday afternoon that won’t come again. I write it in my notes and wait for the meeting to end. 

My notes from these meetings are otherwise useful — action items, owners, dates and deadlines. And then, in the same pen, the same hand: Tuesday afternoon. I have a small collection of them now: a Wednesday, mid-morning; a Thursday, late. Each one written like evidence and filed as if I’ll need it one day, but I will never look at them again. 

What fades in those minutes, is not my visible interest. Interest I can fake indefinitely, I have made a living from it. What fades is the sense of being inside it. One moment you are in the meeting, the next you are watching it — from somewhere behind your own eyes, a distance you didn’t choose and cannot close — and what you are watching is a room full of intelligent people taking something so seriously that you can no longer take seriously. You cannot explain the difference between you and them, because ten minutes ago you were them. Nothing happened. The illusion simply ended.

You wait for the meeting to end, make notes, nod, and you make sure you seem engaged.

On the days when I can see it clearly, here is how such meetings usually go. 

The revenue number is not going to be hit this quarter, the whole room knows this. Targets are set too high, intentionally or by mistake — but the meeting does not stop. After that conclusion is subtly stated, someone says: let’s focus on what we can control. No one calls it a pivot. We are asked: we increasing client meetings per person this week? Are we aligned to the VP’s product priorities and are we bringing them into every conversation? Is the pipeline clean, are the deal values ambitious enough, and are we showing ambition, meaning: are the numbers in the system large enough to suggest we believe in ourselves?

Not one of these things will bring the revenue back. 

The room accepts this in about four seconds. The engagement redirects, and what I cannot explain, even after having watched it happen every quarter for more than ten years, is that the interest which follows is genuine. These are not people performing curiosity they don’t feel. They are specifically engaged with whether a certain tool this week is used enough. The conviction doesn’t require the things to matter, it arrives on its own, fills the room and asks everyone to lean forward, and everyone does.

It’s not despair, because that would be a position you could argue with, a feeling that points somewhere. This is something colder: the simple inability to re-enter the agreement.

You can participate: use the right words, ask the right questions. But you are watching, from behind your own eyes, the distance between you and the room does not close, and you have realised that it never will.

A Saturday morning, I’m twelve years old. A knock at the door and I’m already moving before a thought has formed. Running toward it before knowing who it is or whether it’s even for me. The slight held breath of the moment before opening.

Tommy is standing there. He hadn’t called or texted — we had no phones. There was no plan. He had simply decided, that morning, that the afternoon might be better if I was in it, and walked over to find out.

Excitement. The kind whose only requirement is not knowing what’s on the other side.

I sit in the meeting thinking I hope that one day out of seven will feel that way.

We went to collect the others. Third house, fourth friend and deciding somewhere between them what the day would look like. After the people came the plan. Assembling itself from whoever was free, whatever someone had discovered that week, wherever none of us had been before. Each of them distinct: none of it chosen the way you’d staff a meeting — rationally, predictably, in advance. We were not aligned to anything. We were just there, together, with the afternoon still entirely unspent. Nobody sent a calendar invite, nobody needed one. It was, if I had to name it, the only kind of meeting where the point was only to be there.

I can still name every one of them. I’m not sure I could name everyone in this meeting without checking the invite.

The knock at the door required someone to decide, without knowing, whether I’d be in, that showing up was worth it anyway. I was always home.

The calendar invite requires none of this. It recurs on its own. It asks only that you not cancel it.

The meeting ran four minutes over. The invitation was already in the calendar, sitting in every Tuesday for the foreseeable future, with no end date. We were, it noted, showing ambition.

It is a very different meeting than the one I remembered.

Four weeks ago I was visiting my parents after not having seen them for a few months. The second day all three of us were sitting in the living room on our phones. I started to feel weird about it. I felt it before but always chose to ignore it. We were not talking, not sharing like we used to, I could clearly feel the distance between us. I felt like there was so much still unsaid, so much to share and learn. We always ended up making small talk the first day and the second day was already followed by a wall of phones and minimal communication.

I’ve worked in big tech for more than a decade helping promote the very platforms that consume attention. I never really thought much of it until lately, reflecting on how my life has become. Difficulty maintaining attention long enough to read a good book, reaching for my phone during TV-shows and even during conversations with friends and family. I started to feel like I lost myself slowly without realising.

Two weeks ago, after ignoring what I knew I had to do, I finally decided to delete IG, FB, X and TikTok, all of it in one go.

It’s been weird, I feel like there’s a gap in my days, not a bad one, just empty space that’s waiting to be filled. I started journaling again, after so many years. Turns out I had a lot to say, many feelings about this topic that I had suppressed. I’m still working through them. I still grab for my phone a few times an hour without really opening anything useful, I assume that need will slowly fade as well.

I’m curious how the next few weeks will change and how I’ll feel. I’ll post another update in a month.

I’m curious if anyone else has felt and suppressed this lingering feeling “why am I not making the most of the time with my parents / loved ones at the moment”. Not knowing what to actually talk about anymore, where to start and how - After so many years of superficial communication.

Ten years in ad tech. This is what stayed with me after another meeting about ROAS.

There is a sentence I have said so often it no longer needs me to be present while I say it. You need to lower the ROAS target — what the clients get back for what they spend — or increase the budgets, ideally both. The first time I said it I rehearsed it a few times, the way you rehearse something you’re not yet sure you believe to be right. By number 40 I could say it while thinking about what I will have for lunch in a few hours.

It took me a while to realise no one in the team was lying. A lie requires someone to know the truth and then choose against it. This moment lacks that. Around the third year, the slide, the next number and the question about whether this should continue, stopped arising. Just like a word repeated long enough, stops sounding like one.

I’m good at my job. I want to be clear, that’s the whole problem.

After a few quarters, we have a client who spends exactly what they earn from spending it. We refer to this as the client “increasing market share”. I think of it sometimes like the client is on an induced coma. Alive, maintained, unable to fully live, the machines profitable for whoever is running them. When the target cannot go any lower, lower meaning asking the client to lose money on purpose — the conversation does not end, it changes. We then shift to branding. The reasoning is always ready, always sounds logical: they are not unprofitable, they are simply not known well enough yet because they haven’t invested in branding.

I have never run out of a next reason. There is always a second lever once the first is pulled and a third lever behind that. I have concluded there is no floor. Only the next floor, indefinitely, and a client willing to keep believing in floors.

They wanted the induced coma too. It is easier than the alternative, because that would be admitting the growth was never coming, and finding out what the business is without it.

I am the market share and the green dashboard in someone else’s afternoon. At my parents’ house my phone does the same work on me that I do. I want to put it away. I mostly don’t. I am there technically, and also in a feed assembled by someone exactly like me, who lowered a target or raised a budget so this would reach someone at this hour. It works on me the exact way it’s supposed to. I know, in a precise professional sense, exactly why it does.

Back in the days my father used to build our computers. He would buy the individual parts separately, assemble them, format the hard drive and make sure it ran clean before he called it finished. He was the one who would explain tech to me when I was young. Now he asks me, frustrated because his Apple Pay has stopped working on his watch and he doesn’t know why, and I walk him through it the way he used to walk me through everything else.

I wonder how many of these afternoons are left with my parents. I know it’s a number. I know that it is smaller than it feels from inside it, and that I spend a portion of each one somewhere else and return without quite registering that I left.

I was on the other side, I knew I was on the other side and I kept scrolling.

Curious if this resonates with anyone else.

Four weeks ago I was visiting my parents after not having seen them for a few months. The second day all three of us were sitting in the living room on our phones. I started to feel weird about it. I felt it before but always chose to ignore it. We were not talking, not sharing like we used to, I could clearly feel the distance between us. I felt like there was so much still unsaid, so much to share and learn. We always ended up making small talk the first day and the second day was already followed by a wall of phones and minimal communication.

I’ve worked in big tech for more than a decade helping promote the very platforms that consume attention. I never really thought much of it until lately, reflecting on how my life has become. Difficulty maintaining attention long enough to read a good book, reaching for my phone during TV-shows and even during conversations with friends and family. I started to feel like I lost myself slowly without realising.

Two weeks ago, after ignoring what I knew I had to do, I finally decided to delete IG, FB, X and TikTok, all of it in one go.

It’s been weird, I feel like there’s a gap in my days, not a bad one, just empty space that’s waiting to be filled. I started journaling again, after so many years. Turns out I had a lot to say, many feelings about this topic that I had suppressed. I’m still working through them. I still grab for my phone a few times an hour without really opening anything useful, I assume that need will slowly fade as well.

I’m curious how the next few weeks will change and how I’ll feel. I’ll post another update in a month.

I’m curious if anyone else has felt and suppressed this lingering feeling of “why am I not making the most of the time with my parents or loved ones at the moment”, or maybe even not knowing what to actually talk about anymore, where to start and how. After so many years of superficial communication.