The Rhythm of Denial

The cursor is blinking at me with a rhythmic, taunting frequency, exactly 53 times per minute if I’ve counted correctly, which I probably have because I have nothing better to do while the blue-tinted light of the monitor burns into my retinas. I am sitting in Conference Room 3, which smells perpetually of burnt popcorn and the specific, metallic scent of an over-taxed air conditioner. Around me, 13 people are nodding in a synchronized wave of corporate hypnotism. We are discussing Project Phoenix. Project Phoenix is dead. It has been dead for 83 days, ever since the primary API integration failed and the lead developer quit to start an organic goat farm in Vermont, yet here we are, staring at a slide deck that says ‘Status: Green’.

I pull a microfiber cloth from my pocket and begin cleaning my phone screen for the 23rd time today. There is a smudge on the left corner that refuses to vanish, a tiny oily ghost of a thumbprint that irritates me more than the $883,003 we have poured into this technical abyss. I rub harder. My screen is so clean it’s starting to feel porous, but the smudge remains. It is like this project. We keep rubbing the same dead ideas, hoping they’ll eventually shine, but we’re just wearing down the glass.

I look over at the project manager, a man who has spent 13 years at this company and whose entire identity is now tethered to the successful delivery of a software suite that currently cannot even launch a login screen. He is speaking about ‘synergy’ and ‘long-term roadmap stability’. He knows. I know he knows. We all know. But if he admits it’s a failure, his bonus for the quarter vanishes. If the VP admits it, her strategic vision for the year is revealed as a hallucination. So, we all agree to keep the zombie walking. We feed it meetings. We feed it status reports. We feed it our best hours, knowing those hours will never yield a single line of functional code. It’s an institutional cowardice that has become the standard operating rhythm.

The Reality of the Needle

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My friend Chloe K.L. works as a pediatric phlebotomist, a job that requires a level of honesty we seem to lack in the boardroom. She spends her days finding veins in 3-year-olds who are convinced she is a literal monster. Chloe doesn’t have the luxury of pretending. If she misses the vein, there is no ‘Status: Green’. There is only a crying child and a visible lack of blood in the vial. She told me once that the worst thing a phlebotomist can do is keep digging when they know they’ve missed. You have to pull the needle out, apologize, and start over.

In our world, we just keep digging for 103 hours a week, pretending we’re about to hit the vein any second now.

The Fear of the Void

Why are we so afraid of the ‘pull-back’? It’s the sunk cost fallacy, sure, but it’s deeper than that. It’s a fear of the void. If we stop Project Phoenix, what do these 13 people do tomorrow? We’d have to confront the reality that we spent 133 days doing absolutely nothing of value. That realization is a special kind of ego-death that most people will do anything to avoid. So we continue the charade. We add 3 more features to the requirements doc. We schedule 23 more ‘alignment syncs’.

I find myself thinking about the physical spaces we inhabit and how they reflect our internal disarray. When you’re stuck in a zombie project, your environment starts to feel like a cage. You notice the peeling laminate on the desks, the way the carpet in the hallway has been worn down into a path of grey misery by the feet of 403 tired employees. You realize that a bad decision, once made, has a way of becoming structural. It’s like choosing the wrong floor for your house and then trying to convince yourself for 23 years that you actually like the color ‘Despair Beige’.

Joining the Necromancy

I stop cleaning my phone. The smudge is gone, finally. I look up, and the VP is asking me for my input on the Q3 rollout plan. I could say something. I could be the one to point out that we don’t have a backend. I could mention that the 3 prototypes we built all crashed during the internal demo. Instead, I hear my own voice say, ‘I think if we focus on the mobile-first UX, we can mitigate some of the latency issues.’

We have spent $63,003 this week alone on ‘consultancy fees’ for a firm that is essentially just telling us that we’re doing a great job being wrong.

There is a strange comfort in the busy-work. As long as we are in meetings, we are ‘working’. If we kill the project, we are just people sitting in a room with nothing to do, and that is when the existential dread really sets in. We’d have to ask ourselves why we are here. We’d have to admit that we are replaceable. The zombie project protects us from the truth of our own insignificance within the corporate machine. It gives us a name to put on our LinkedIn profiles. It gives us 33 action items to track in Jira. It is a beautiful, expensive, soul-crushing lie.

I’ve noticed that the more pointless a project is, the more jargon it accumulates. Project Phoenix has 73 distinct acronyms. I’ve started making some up just to see if anyone notices. Last week, I mentioned the ‘STFU protocol’ for data integrity, and three people took notes. No one asked what it stood for. They just assumed it was another layer of the complexity they are paid to manage. We are building a cathedral of nonsense, and we are all very proud of the stained-glass windows we’ve painted on the cardboard walls.

The Contrast: Aliveness vs. Stasis

I remember a time, maybe 13 years ago, when I actually cared about the output. There was a project-let’s call it Project Alpha-where we actually built something that people used. It was simple. It worked. It had 3 core functions. When it failed, we fixed it. When it was finished, we celebrated. There was no zombie because the project was alive. It breathed. But Project Phoenix was born dead. It was a product of a committee that was more concerned with ‘market positioning’ than with actually solving a problem. It was destined to be a ghost from the moment the 53-page charter was signed.

The Call for Honesty

We need more people like Chloe. We need people who aren’t afraid to say ‘I can’t find the vein’ and stop. We need a culture that celebrates the ‘kill’ as much as the ‘launch’. Because every hour we spend on a zombie project is an hour we aren’t spending on something that actually matters. We are wasting our lives in 30-minute increments, and for what? To maintain a spreadsheet? To protect a VP’s ego? To avoid the 3 minutes of awkwardness that comes with saying ‘this isn’t working’?