Nothing hurts quite like the sound of a mouse click that deletes three weeks of work, except perhaps the silence that follows it. I’m staring at the Jira board right now, watching a blue cursor hover over a cluster of 126 tasks that, as of 9:46 AM, no longer exist. My boss just walked out of a ‘visioning session’ with the C-suite, and apparently, our entire Q3 strategy has been replaced by a sketch on a napkin. It’s funny, in a dark way. I actually just closed 106 browser tabs by accident-a literal fat-finger error-and as the screen went blank, I realized it was the perfect metaphor for our current corporate culture. We don’t have a roadmap anymore; we have a Etch A Sketch being held by someone with a nervous tic.

We call it agility because ‘agility’ sounds like a virtue. It sounds like a mountain lion or a world-class athlete. It doesn’t sound like what it actually is: a fundamental inability to commit to a direction for more than 336 hours. When leadership changes its mind weekly, it’s not being nimble. It’s being volatile. We’ve moralized this volatility, treating the ability to abandon work without crying as a character-building exercise for the rank and file. If you’re frustrated that your project was killed for the 6th time this quarter, you’re just ‘not embracing the change.’ You’re ‘stuck in the old waterfall mindset.’ It’s a brilliant bit of gaslighting that turns executive indecision into a departmental KPI.

The Vibrating Engineer

I remember Muhammad J.-M., a court sketch artist I shared a studio with back in 2016. He used to sit in the back of high-stakes trials with a piece of charcoal that looked more like a charred bone than a drawing tool. He didn’t draw the faces of the defendants; he drew the tension in their shoulders. He once told me that the hardest thing to capture isn’t movement, but the vibration of someone trying to stand still while the ground is shifting beneath them. That’s what our engineering team looks like right now. We are vibrating. We aren’t moving forward, but we are certainly moving. Muhammad J.-M. would have had a field day with the jagged, frantic lines of our last ‘All Hands’ meeting. He’d have sketched the CEO with 46 different arms, all pointing in different directions, each one holding a different ‘top priority.’

Agility as Armor

Agility is the armor worn by indecision.

Pivot or Seizure?

I’m not saying we should never change course. That would be 66 times worse. But there is a massive difference between a pivot based on data and a pivot based on a podcast the CEO heard over the weekend. One is an evolution; the other is a seizure. We’ve lost the ability to distinguish between the two because we’ve stopped valuing consistency. We treat ‘staying the course’ as if it’s a form of cognitive Rigor Mortis. But consistency is where the actual work happens. It’s where the 236 small bugs get fixed and the user experience actually gets polished. You can’t polish a stone if you keep throwing it away and picking up a new one every Friday afternoon.

The Craving for Stability

In the middle of this chaos, I find myself craving systems that don’t move. I think that’s why some people are so drawn to regulated environments or even specific types of entertainment. There’s a certain psychological relief in knowing the rules of the game won’t change while you’re in the middle of a play.

For instance, when people visit a platform like จีคลับ, they aren’t looking for the rules of the game to be ‘agile.’ They want to know that a winning hand today is a winning hand tomorrow. They want the security of a defined structure. In the workplace, we’ve traded that security for a perpetual state of ‘becoming,’ which is really just a permanent state of ‘not doing.’

The Complicity of Burnout

I’ll admit, I’ve been part of the problem. I’ve nodded along in meetings when I should have asked for the data backing up the 76th strategy shift of the year. I’ve used the jargon. I’ve said things like ‘we need to be fluid’ when what I really meant was ‘I’m too tired to fight this.’ That’s the vulnerability of it-the burnout makes you complicit. You stop being a builder and start being a professional rewriter. You stop caring about the quality of the code and start caring about the speed of the deletion. It’s easier to delete something you don’t love, so you stop loving the work. It’s a defense mechanism.

We are not moving fast; we are vibrating in place.

Roadmaps as Smudges

Muhammad J.-M. used to say that the most honest part of a sketch is the smudge. It’s the part where the artist’s hand dragged across the paper, leaving a blur of what used to be there. Our roadmaps are nothing but smudges now. There’s no sharp line, no clear horizon. Just a grey haze of ‘current focuses’ that will be ‘learnings’ by Tuesday. I wonder if leadership realizes that the cost of these pivots isn’t just the $1576 in lost dev time per person, per week. It’s the erosion of trust. When you tell a team that ‘this is the most important thing we’ve ever done’ every six days, the word ‘important’ loses its meaning. It becomes white noise.

The Great Resignation’s Deeper Meaning

There was a moment about 56 minutes ago where I almost walked out. Not because I was angry, but because I felt irrelevant. If the work I do today can be discarded tomorrow without a second thought, then my presence here is purely ornamental. I am a placeholder in a cubicle, waiting for the next whim to be handed down. That’s the deeper meaning behind the ‘Great Resignation’ or whatever we’re calling the current state of labor. It’s not just about money; it’s about the desire to build something that lasts longer than a Slack notification. We want to be part of a narrative, not just a series of disconnected anecdotes.

What We Need: A Cool Down Period

So, what do we do? We have to start asking for the ‘Why’ behind the ‘What.’ When the roadmap shifts, we need to demand the 16 pieces of evidence that justify the cost of the transition. We have to stop accepting ‘agility’ as a catch-all excuse for a lack of vision. It’s okay to say no to a pivot. It’s okay to point out that we haven’t finished the last three pivots yet. We need to advocate for a ‘Cool Down’ period-a solid 26 days of focused, uninterrupted execution after every major strategic shift. No new ideas, no shower thoughts, just work.

Reclaiming Context

I’m going to try and reopen those 106 tabs now. It’s going to take me at least 36 minutes to find where I was, and I’ll probably miss something important. But at least I’m trying to recover my context. I wish leadership would do the same. I wish they’d look at the graveyard of deleted branches and abandoned Figma files and realize that every one of those was a piece of someone’s time and energy. You can’t just keep hitting ‘refresh’ on people’s lives and expect them to keep showing up with the same enthusiasm. Eventually, the screen just stays blank. Blank. The next time someone tells you to be ‘agile,’ ask them if they mean they want you to be fast, or if they just want you to be okay with being lost. There’s a big difference, and it’s time we started drawing a line in the charcoal, just like Muhammad J.-M. would have done-sharp, dark, and permanent.