Through the Fog
Fog at work is often structural. Here’s how to keep clarity, protect your attention, and decide what to keep feeding, and what to let go.
How to keep clarity and purpose in a workplace designed for theater
Automotive OEMs often share profits with employees. It changes the nature of meetings and which ones survive. Under profit-sharing, nonsense meetings don’t survive long.
“Wait, wait,” Jim said once, holding up a hand. “We’ve burned an hour and we’re no closer. Our data’s thin in two important places.” He looked around the room and started counting. “If we keep going, we’ll torch another three grand just sitting here. That’s coming straight out of our profit-sharing checks. Let’s stop.”
I saw it repeat a few times, and the mechanism clicked. Profit-sharing turned time into a number everyone could see coming out of their own pockets.
It’s easy to frame this as thrift, or a blue-collar suspicion of bureaucracy. I see it as a culture where someone could name waste without making it personal. The numbers made reality speak bluntly in a language the room could hear.
Most workplaces don’t have that.
They run on softer currencies: alignment, visibility, stakeholder comfort, narrative safety. In a complex organization, this type of meeting is often necessary at times. The trouble begins when they become the only currencies that clear. When legibility outranks reality, people adapt. The work shifts, quietly, from changing the underlying system to changing the story told about the system.
That is where the fog starts.
The danger of fog
Fog is the lived experience of trying to do serious work inside an environment where feedback like Jim's is delayed, filtered, or politicized. You can still be competent. You can still be diligent. But you stop getting clean signal about what matters, what moves the needle, what’s performative, what’s real.
In a healthy system, effort meets consequence. You try something and the world pushes back. In a theatrical system, effort meets applause. You try something and the room nods. A deck gets approved. A project acquires a name. The system itself, the product, or the service offer, stays where it was.
The danger of fog isn’t just that it wastes time, although it does. The danger is what it does to a person’s energy, health, and inner accounting.
If you stay long enough in an environment that rewards presentation over causality, you begin to recalibrate. You learn that saying “we don’t know” is riskier than being wrong. You learn to write documents that survive blame rather than documents that solve problems, or to trade safety for clarity.
Over time, discernment drifts, because we adapt to the system we are in.
And then, one day, you notice the quiet injury. Your calendar is full. Your résumé has verbs like streamlined, led, delivered, achieved. Your paycheck clears, but you can’t quite say what you built that touched the real world.
Questions that cut the fog
At that point, the most useful move is not a speech about authenticity. It’s a private set of questions that restores reality-contact, the way an operator checks a gauge. They aren’t motivational. They are diagnostic. They keep you from spending your life polishing things that cannot bear weight.
The first question is the longest-horizon one, because fog shrinks time. It makes the next meeting feel like the only real thing. A good counterweight is to ask what you would be proud to tell your grandchildren you did, built, fixed, defended, or learned. Not because grandchildren are the point of life, but because that future-facing imagined listener has a way of dissolving office mythology. You can’t impress a teenager with “stakeholder alignment.” You can, sometimes, impress them with what you protected, what you repaired, the positive difference you made in others' lives, and what you made more humane.
Then comes the question Jim’s profit-sharing culture smuggled into the room: if you owned even one percent of this company, what would you stop doing tomorrow? It’s a way to borrow the owner’s clarity without needing the owner’s permission. Fog thrives on vague costs. This question forces a price onto your calendar. It makes you notice which rituals exist purely because of habit, and because no one is charged with stopping them.
And even when you cannot stop them, you can still refuse to let them be total loss. In many workplaces, the most realistic move is to convert some portion of the theater into transferable skill. What are you learning that you can carry, even if the strategy changes, leadership turns over, or you leave? Negotiation, systems thinking, writing that actually clarifies, the habit of measuring impact. The point is to keep your growth independent of the organization’s mood and structure.
The next question is crisper: does this work touch the real system, or only the story about the system? Some story work is legitimate, because humans coordinate through narrative, however if your career life is spent entirely on narrative, it becomes a kind of professional malnutrition. This is the question that separates a deck that guides action and immediate decision from a deck that soothes, placates, or anesthetizes anxiety. It’s also the question that reveals whether you are being asked to build a bridge, or to paint a mural of a bridge.
Finally, there is the only question that never lies: who do you become repeatedly if you keep doing this? In the small daily sense. Do you become more precise, more courageous, more able to tell the truth kindly? Or do you become evasive, performative, addicted to approval, trained to flatter bad ideas because it’s safer than naming reality?
These questions do not solve your particular workplace, yet they do solve something more intimate. They keep you from disappearing inside it, which matters, because most people are not free to walk away the moment a job disappoints them. Kids. Health insurance. Location. A spouse’s job. Aging parents. Family expectations. Debt. The simple fact of needing the paycheck, on a specific date, every month. The constraints are real. “Just quit” is often a luxury belief dressed up as courage.
So the practical stance is not constant exit each time this plays out. It is staying without surrender.
Prickly pear decisions
After the cold snap lately, my prickly pear did something instructive. For a day or two, it looked fine. Then it began to sort itself. Some pads stayed green. Others faded toward a chalky gray-green, as if the plant were deciding what it could afford to keep alive.
That is how staying works in fog, too. You don’t try to save every meeting, every ritual, every narrative. You keep what still has feedback, what still teaches, what still touches the real system. You stop feeding the rest.
Staying in a foggy workplace
Staying can look like this: you choose one domain where you insist on reality-contact, even if everything else is theater. You make one part of your work undeniably real. You build a skill that compounds. You price meetings privately, even if no one else will say it out loud. In the nonsense meetings, you learn the quiet art of appearing present without donating your attention. A page of “notes” can be a shopping list, or a few sharp acronyms for what you’d say if the room wanted truth.
And in some environments, that isn’t a quirky tactic. It’s basic protection. When meetings are routinely litigated, unioned, or FOIA’d, your notes stop being notes and become discoverable artifacts that can be repurposed by people who were never in the room. I saw this play out in an institution where formal complaints were daily weather and where meeting notes were sometimes treated as a resource to be extracted. Departments actually FOIA’d each other’s notes and records as strategy, not transparency. It was a way of manufacturing artifacts for later fights.
Once, a union leader mentioned, casually, that they might want to FOIA my notes on something routine. I handed over my bound notebook. She flipped through page after page.
“They’re no good to me,” she said. “Some sort of code?”
She handed it back.
“They’re no good to me either,” I replied, truthfully.
The acronyms held for the moment, long enough to trigger the next action, and then they dissolved. That was the point. No one ever requested them again.
You set boundaries that don’t require permission, like declining the third pre-meeting in a week and sending a written update instead. You keep your inner ledger clean.
Leaving the fog
Leaving is still part of the picture, but it belongs at the edge of the frame. Leaving becomes the right move when the answers to those questions stop being mixed and start being consistently bleak. When your work never touches the real system. When you are not learning anything you can carry. When the person you are becoming is someone you don’t respect. When the fog is no longer episodic weather and becomes the climate.
Some people leave loudly, with a moral narrative. More often, good people leave quietly. They don’t make a speech. They simply stop trading their attention for theater. They take what they’ve learned and they go.
Until then, clarity is not a gift your workplace gives you. It’s a discipline you practice inside it.
— Madonna Demir, author of Systems & Soul, part of the Future of Work Series
The Future of Work Series is a continuing investigation into the systems architecture of modern labor. We look beyond job titles and org charts to reveal the mechanisms that keep employment running: income-distribution scaffolding, emotional labor economies, make-work roles, managerial theater, and the incentives that quietly shape entire industries. These essays map where work is drifting, why it feels increasingly hollow or performative, and how the hidden structures of today’s labor systems define the work of tomorrow.
Madonna Demir
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