I missed the Q4 strategy meeting. THE Q4 strategy meeting, where my team was supposed to present the culmination of eight months of our blood, sweat, and frankly, my *entire* twenties. Because my dad, bless his seventy-something heart, decided that 7 AM was the perfect time for a neurological emergency, requiring a two-hour drive to a specialist in Bumfuck, nowhere. And I did it, of course I did it— filial piety and all that immigrant kid baggage— but all I felt, clutching the steering wheel, was this cold, hard, calculating RAGE at the career capital I was burning, like some kind of perverse human sacrifice. What IS this feeling? It’s not love, it’s not resentment, it’s… a deep, existential dread that my life is being dictated by an invisible, intergenerational force I can’t quite name.