Title: The Gentle Art of Fading Away

In a town no one had heard of until the HR department held its first mindfulness seminar, there lived a group of highly professional professionals. Their job? Feeling sad about others' successes, and radiating subtle disappointment when things worked out just fine without them. It was a difficult job, but someone had to silently resent.

At the head of this melancholic movement stood Elias, who—despite being an expert in absolutely nothing—was frequently referred to as "the man who knows how to nod seriously at meetings." His specialty was casting emotional fog into otherwise clear discussions. No one really remembered when he started working there, but everyone agreed he must be important. After all, he frowned often.

The organization soon became a haven for this new emotional aristocracy. Titles were handed out generously: Vice Minister of Vibes, Coordinator of Sighs, Chief Officer of Professional Ambivalence. Meetings were held not to make decisions, but to exchange slightly nervous glances and pause dramatically before saying, "Well, it’s complicated."

When someone dared suggest a direct answer to a question, they were gently reminded that things were too delicate to be solved so easily. "Let’s revisit that once we feel it more deeply," Elias would say, having felt nothing since 2011.

Then came a character named Tam, who—against all social instincts—used logic. Worse, he cited open data. He even, God forbid, wrote code. The community labeled him "technically helpful, emotionally disruptive." Tam believed success could be shared, and intelligence wasn’t a limited resource, which was of course very triggering.

He did not cry at meetings. He did not sigh during budgeting. He simply fixed things.

The slow decay began, as all things in bureaucratic decay do, with a calendar invite no one accepted. Performance reviews turned into performance rituals. Those who once derived pleasure from failure and pain from success began experiencing confusing blends of both. Elias was spotted weeping during a colleague’s resignation—no one knew if it was from loss or joy. Possibly both.

Eventually, even they couldn’t distinguish between pain and pleasure anymore. A new awareness set in, where every passive-aggressive email began to feel like a confession. "Please loop me in" turned into "I’m scared of being forgotten." "Can we align expectations?" meant "I don't know what I’m doing, but I used to sound like I did."

One by one, they faded—some into other NGOs, others into consultancy roles where they could charge by the hour for being mildly confused. Their final exit was quiet, save for a few dramatic sobs carefully placed for effect. Yet those sobs—if we examine them closely—were no longer purely painful.

They were tinged with the absurd ecstasy of being noticed while disappearing.

Tam stayed behind, quietly making things work. He wasn’t hailed as a hero. Heroes, after all, need an audience—and this one had left to "reconnect with their inner uncertainties."

In the absence of performance sadness, the office grew brighter, quieter. The coffee machine was repaired. The network stopped crashing. No one wept in the restroom while scrolling LinkedIn.

Peace reigned.

And the ones who had faded? They were still out there. Somewhere. Writing heavily footnoted papers on organizational empathy. Charging extra for emotionally calibrated consulting.

But here, in the silent realm of function and code, their ghostly sighs no longer echoed.

Because true irony is not that they left.

It’s that no one missed the performance.