The air in the conference room has that recycled, 44-degree bite that makes the back of your throat feel like you’ve been swallowing powdered chalk. I’m sitting here, shifting in a chair that emits a shrill, metallic protest exactly 4 times every time I breathe too deeply, and I’m watching Dave. Dave is the facilitator. He is currently wielding a dry-erase marker like a scepter, hovering it over a pristine white board that has seen more performative gestures than a Shakespearean playhouse in the 16th century. He looks at us-a collection of 14 adults who could be doing anything else-and he delivers the killing blow. He says, ‘Okay, great discussion, team. Really robust. So, the action item here is for John to circle back with marketing and synergize on the deliverables.’

I watch John. John nods. It is a slow, solemn movement of the chin, the kind of nod you’d expect from a general agreeing to a peace treaty that will save 34,000 lives. But John isn’t saving lives. John is holding a lukewarm latte and staring at a spot on the wall about 24 inches above Dave’s head. I know John. We’ve been in 44 meetings together this year alone. John isn’t going to circle back. Marketing doesn’t even know John’s last name. The ‘deliverables’ are a ghost ship lost in a fog of Jira tickets and unread Slack threads. Yet, in this moment, the room exhales. The tension, which had been building for 54 minutes of aimless circular talk, suddenly evaporates. By assigning this ‘action item,’ Dave has performed a secular exorcism. He has cleared the room of the guilt of wasting an hour of our finite human existence.

The Performance of Productivity

My name is Maya F.T., and I spend most of my time teaching people how to survive the elements. I’ve seen 4 different people break down in tears because they couldn’t start a fire with a Ferro rod in the rain. They cry because the reality of their situation is undeniable. But here, in this carpeted purgatory, we have invented a language specifically designed to deny reality. We call it ‘Live Action Role-Playing,’ or LARPing, but for productivity. We are all pretending to be workers. We are pretending that the scribbles on the whiteboard represent progress. We are pretending that the ‘Action Item’ is a real thing, rather than a psychological sedative.

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The action item is a psychological sedative designed to numb the pain of a wasted hour.

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When we assign a task that we know, deep down, will never be completed, we are engaging in a collective agreement to maintain the status quo. To admit that the action item is a farce would be to admit that the meeting itself was a waste of $4,444 in collective hourly wages. And if the meeting was a waste, then perhaps the project is a waste. And if the project is a waste, then what are we doing with our lives? That is the existential cliff that most people are terrified to look over. So, we nod. We assign. We ‘circle back.’ We create a buffer of 64 bullet points that will eventually be archived in a folder titled ‘Q3 Initiatives’ and never opened again.

Mechanical Honesty

It’s fascinating how we’ve built these systems of performative labor. In my line of work, if I tell a student that their action item is to secure the perimeter of the camp, and they don’t do it, a bear might eat our bacon. Or worse. There is a mechanical honesty to the world outside these walls. It reminds me of the way some people approach their home maintenance. You can tell yourself you’re going to water the lawn every day at 4 AM, but you won’t. You’ll sleep in. You’ll forget. The only way to actually ensure the grass stays green is to install a system that doesn’t rely on your performative promises.

When you look at the precision of something like Wilcox Brothers Lawn Sprinklers & Landscape Lighting, you see the antithesis of the corporate action item. It is a system built on actualized commitment-the water flows because the engineering demands it, not because a manager needed to feel productive before lunch. There is no ‘circling back’ with a sprinkler head. It either pops up and does the job, or the system is broken and you fix it.

The Silence of Truth

Instead, we get the ‘Action Item.’ It’s a polite way of saying ‘I’m done with you for now.’ It’s the period at the end of a sentence that shouldn’t have been written in the first place. I’ve often wondered what would happen if we just stopped. What if, at the end of the next meeting, Dave said, ‘We’ve talked for 54 minutes and achieved nothing. There are no action items because we haven’t actually decided to do anything.’ The silence would be deafening. It would be 84 times more uncomfortable than the squeakiest chair in the building. But it would be true. And truth is a rare commodity in a world where we’ve replaced results with rituals.

Weight vs. Buoyancy

I think about this every time I set up a base camp. I don’t give my students ‘action items.’ I give them responsibilities. If you’re in charge of the 44-gallon water supply, and we run out, it’s not because of a ‘lack of synergy.’ It’s because you didn’t do your job. There is a weight to that. It’s a weight that makes you move differently. It makes you alert. It makes you real. Corporate life is an attempt to remove that weight, to make everything buoyant and light and consequence-free. But without weight, we just drift. We drift from one 14-person meeting to the next, collecting 24 imaginary tasks that will haunt our to-do lists like the ghosts of a life we aren’t actually living.