There’s a particular feeling you get when you step outside in a big, crowded city. The moment the door swings open, a wave of motion hits you — buses rushing by, people navigating sidewalks without eye contact, a thousand tiny urgencies moving in every direction. You don’t stop to think about it. You just step in and let yourself be carried by the current.

That’s how my workdays feel.

Disclaimer: This isn’t about frustration or dissatisfaction. I love my work. I love the people I work with. But I can’t help but notice that something about the way we work has changed — not for worse, not for better, just… different. This is a reflection on that feeling.

I open my laptop, and before I’ve had a moment to center myself, I’m pulled in. The Slack messages, the calendar reminders, the decision requests—every thread moving at its own rapid pace, every moment already accounted for. The day unfolds in a series of 30-minute meetings, one-hour calls, quick Slack alignments, and in between, I try to make sense of it all.

The problem isn’t just that decisions are made too fast. It’s that there’s no space for thinking anymore.

Making decisions without living in them

I look at my team’s calendars sometimes, tracing the patterns of our work across weeks and months. When do the important decisions actually happen? Always in the meeting slots—the spaces that exist between other things. We gather, we debate, we push for alignment, and by the time the clock runs out, the decision is either made or postponed to another slot.

And here’s the thing: the decisions themselves are good. We make them efficiently. We weigh the right trade-offs. We drive forward in ways that benefit the company and the product. If you measured us by outcomes alone, we’re doing well.

But what I miss — what I think we’ve lost, is the experience of truly sitting inside a problem.

There’s a difference between solving something and living in it long enough to understand it deeply. The former is productive. The latter is meaningful. And modern work prioritizes the former so aggressively that the latter has almost disappeared.

I don’t miss slow decision-making. I don’t wish we took longer to execute. But I do miss the feeling of crafting a decision rather than just making it. I miss the weight of it—the kind of decision that lingers in your mind after you leave work, the kind that feels like an intellectual adventure rather than a task to be checked off.

I miss the depth of being fully immersed in a problem, not because it’s necessary, but because it’s deeply satisfying.

The isolation of remote work

And then there’s the way we work now, the remote layer on top of everything.

At first, I thought remote work would give me more time to think. No office distractions, no impromptu meetings pulling me away from focus. But what I’ve realized is that remote work has only compressed everything even more.

In an office, decisions don’t always happen in a meeting room. They continue. You leave the meeting, grab coffee with a colleague, talk through the problem again. You sit next to someone and hear them mumble a thought out loud, and suddenly, a new idea is born.

But in remote work, everything is a discrete event. A call starts, a call ends. You don’t know when you’ll talk to that person again unless it’s scheduled. The flow of work—of conversation, of shared thinking—has been broken into fragments.

I miss the in-between moments. The continuation of relationships that office life provided—the way a casual chat could lead somewhere unexpected, the way knowledge was absorbed naturally rather than documented in Wiki pages and Slack threads.

There’s a kind of loneliness in remote work that isn’t about being physically alone. It’s the loneliness of only interacting when necessary. When did work relationships become meetings instead of experiences?

What we’ve lost

I don’t think this is about remote vs. office. It’s not even about fast decision-making. It’s about what work has become a series of events, rather than a continuous, unfolding process.

It’s about how we’ve lost the feeling of craftsmanship, the feeling of shaping something with care rather than assembling it from pre-existing parts.

It’s about how unpredictability has replaced stability to such a degree that my brain no longer expects anything to hold its shape.

It’s about how, in the pursuit of agility, we’ve lost the ability to sit with ideas, to let them breathe, to know that when we walk away from a decision, it won’t be rewritten before we’ve had time to absorb it.

It’s about how we no longer share work, we just pass it between us in scheduled slots.

Maybe this is just the way things are now. Maybe it works better than I want to admit. But I can’t shake the feeling that something essential has been lost.

Are we even noticing it?