The mouse moves. Just a little wiggle to the right, a lazy circle, enough to keep the screen from dimming. It’s 7:42 PM. The cursor blinks patiently in a sea of white space on a document titled ‘Q4_Strategy_v12_final_FINAL.docx’, a file I haven’t actually typed a word in for over two hours. My own icon in the corner of the screen glows a reassuring, toxic green. Active.

It’s a lie, of course. My brain is soup. My contribution to the gross domestic product in this moment is functionally zero. But my boss’s icon is also green. And so is her boss’s. A little constellation of availability, twinkling in the digital twilight of the workday. To go dark now would feel like a confession of dereliction. So I wiggle the mouse. We all wiggle the mouse. It’s the digital equivalent of making sure the boss sees you shuffling papers as they leave the office, a pantomime of productivity that somehow became more important than the productivity itself.

The Cracks in the Facade

I used to believe this was a good thing. I really did. At a previous company, I was the one championing the instant messenger rollout, extolling the virtues of “frictionless communication” and “enhanced team visibility.” I’d look at the grid of faces, a mosaic of green dots, and feel a surge of pride. Look at us, all here, all working, a humming hive of collaborative energy. I once privately seethed at a designer whose status was ‘Away’ for 42 minutes straight during a critical project phase. What was he doing? Napping? Running errands? Then his status flickered back to green, and a moment later, he uploaded a set of designs that completely solved the complex user flow problem we’d been stuck on for days. He wasn’t away; he was thinking. With a pen and a notebook. Offline.

That was the first crack in the facade for me. The realization that the green dot doesn’t measure work. It measures presence. And in the process, it penalizes deep work, contemplation, and the kind of disconnected problem-solving that real breakthroughs require. We’ve traded a culture of accomplishment for a culture of availability, and the price is our sanity.

The Cost of Hyper-Availability

This obsession with digital presenteeism creates a permanent, low-grade anxiety. It’s the feeling of being perpetually on call, of never truly being able to disconnect. Your laptop is closed but your phone is on the nightstand, and you know a single notification could pull you right back in. A study I read-or maybe I just imagined reading it, the details are blurry now-suggested that this state of hyper-availability costs companies an average of $272 per employee per month in lost focus and cognitive fatigue. It feels right. The brain isn’t meant to be a router, constantly pinged for status updates. It’s a muscle that needs cycles of intense work and genuine rest.

A Different Kind of Presence: Aisha’s World

My friend Aisha J.-P. doesn’t have this problem. She’s an aquarium maintenance diver for a company that services large, private installations. Her job involves descending into massive tanks, some holding over 22,000 gallons of saltwater, to scrub algae, check filtration systems, and monitor the health of the animals. When she’s 22 feet down, surrounded by silent, gliding parrotfish and the gentle hum of the pumps, no one can reach her. There is no Slack underwater. There is no green dot. Her output is breathtakingly tangible. The tank is either clean, or it isn’t. The ecosystem is either thriving, or it’s cloudy.

We were talking about this the other day. Her partner works in tech, and he lives and dies by the green dot. He’s become conditioned by it, this need for constant, visible validation that he is, in fact, working. This anxiety has started to bleed out from his professional life into their home. He’s become obsessed with monitoring, with knowing the status of everything at all times. He just spent a weekend researching security options, fixated on installing a new high-definition poe camera to watch their driveway. He explained the technical merits of Power over Ethernet with an intensity he usually reserves for sprint planning. Aisha just looked at him and said, “Or, we could just trust that the world isn’t going to end when we’re not watching it.”

It was a perfect line, delivered with the calm of someone whose job success is measured in water clarity and the vibrant colors of healthy coral. His digital leash was tightening his grip on the physical world; her work in the physical world had set her free from the digital one.

We seem to have forgotten this. We’ve been seduced by the tool. The indicator, designed to show if someone was available for a quick chat, has mutated into a moral barometer. Green means good, productive, dedicated. Yellow means slacking, distracted, suspect. We’ve gamified surveillance and turned it inward, becoming our own micromanagers. I’ve caught myself doing it-quickly switching back to an active window when I see a message come in, as if the sender could somehow perceive the inactivity that happened 2 seconds before.

It’s a ridiculous, pavlovian response to a stimulus that has no real bearing on the quality of my work. The most creative idea I had last month came to me while I was staring at a wall, my icon a contemptible shade of yellow. The most productive I’ve been was when I shut everything off for a full day and just wrote, my status showing as ‘Offline’ for 8 solid hours, an act that felt almost rebellious.

The Quiet Tyranny

It’s a quiet tyranny. There’s no explicit company policy that says, “Thou shalt remain green from 9 to 5 and preferably also from 5 to 9.” It’s more insidious than that. It’s a cultural norm that calcifies over time, created by a thousand tiny assumptions and glances at a digital status. It’s the manager who says, “I sent you a message but you were away,” with a hint of accusation in their voice. It’s the colleague who DMs you with “u there??” if you don’t respond within 12 seconds. Every instance reinforces the rule: be available, be seen, be green.

Aisha services 12 of these massive aquariums. She describes the feeling of entering the water as a shedding of noise. The outside world, with its pings and notifications and expectations, dissolves. There is only the task at hand: the rhythmic scrape of her tools against the acrylic, the slow dance with a curious grouper, the intense focus required to handle delicate organisms. The work demands her full presence, not her digital avatar’s. When she surfaces, the evidence of her labor isn’t a timesheet or a status report; it’s the renewed brilliance of a miniature ocean, a self-contained world humming with life. Her proof of work is life itself.

For the rest of us, our proof of work has become a blinking light, a symbol that proves nothing except that our computer is on and we’ve touched the mouse in the last 2 minutes. We wiggle and we click, keeping the lie alive, hoping the performance is enough. But the anxiety is real, the burnout is real, and the pristine, silent clarity of Aisha’s underwater office feels a million miles away.