I walked past a community garden yesterday, you know? Like, just on my way to grab lunch, and there were these people, like, genuinely getting their hands dirty, planting things. And it just… hit me. Hard. My mom always sends me pictures of her prize-winning squash at the county fair, and my dad’s constantly telling me about the new irrigation system they installed, and I just nod along, send back a 'looks great!' emoji, and then immediately go back to drafting some executive summary about Q3 performance. And suddenly, looking at this tiny urban patch of dirt, it felt… wrong. It’s not like I don't love my job. I DO. Mostly. I mean, the promotion last year was HUGE, and I just finished my leadership training module, and my boss said I'm 'exceeding expectations' on my last review, which is, like, the holy grail in this company. So why do I feel this… emptiness? Like, I spend all day optimizing workflows and streamlining communications and it's all so abstract, you know? It’s all about metrics and projections and I can practically feel my soul shriveling a little more with every PowerPoint presentation. My parents, they just grow food. Tangible. Real. I remember when I was like, 10, and I swore I’d never work on the farm. All that dirt and sweat and early mornings. My hands always chapped from the cold, and I hated the smell of the compost. I just wanted to wear nice clothes and go to an office and have a 'career' like the women in movies. And here I am. Wearing a power suit, sitting in a glass tower, and making… well, making money, I guess. But for what? To buy more pre-packaged, mass-produced organic produce from the grocery store when my parents are literally harvesting it a few hours away? The irony is not lost on me, trust me. Sometimes I think about calling them, just blurting it out, like, "Hey, remember when I said I’d never come back? LOL, jk, can I learn how to prune tomatoes?" But then I imagine the look on their faces, you know? And all the 'I told you so's' that would be implied, even if they never said it. Plus, what would I even DO there? I haven't picked a vegetable that wasn't from a CSA box in like, over a decade. I’m completely deskilled for that kind of work. I’d be a liability. An absolute disaster. So I just keep going. Wake up, hit the gym, get dressed, go to work, pretend I care about the synergy of our cross-functional teams, come home, order takeout, scroll through Instagram, rinse, repeat. And then I see someone planting a seed in a little urban garden and it throws my whole carefully constructed life into this, like, existential crisis. What am I even doing? Is this what being an adult is? Just… feeling vaguely disoriented all the time and wondering if you made a HUGE mistake like ten years ago but now it’s too late to fix it? God. I don't know what to do with this feeling.