Emergency Exit
#08 | August 2025
Last Month, In a Thought
August was a stress test I didn’t consent to. And it brought me to the brink.
No single catastrophe. Just the slow, grinding erosion of tolerance. Every morning, the alarm barked a threat: another day of bureaucratic nonsense dressed up as ‘healthcare’.
Every workplace I touched seemed to collapse in sync. Even on their best days, these systems run like shopping carts with a bent wheel. This month, they were competing to see who was more talented at implosion.
Communications frayed.
Boundaries dissolved.
Expectations multiplied without logic or care.
Through it all, I played janitor to everyone else’s chaos—triaging other people’s dysfunction, while mine sat smoldering in the background. There were no neat villains to blame, no tidy stories to bottle the absurdity. Just layer upon layer of stupid, each one gnawing another chunk out of my patience and sanity.
If there’s a flavor to that feeling, it’s metal and burned coffee. If there’s a sound, it’s fluorescent humming over conversations that pretend urgency is an attitude problem.
After enough blows, I stopped asking “how is this happening?” and start asking “how much longer until I split at the seams?”
I used to think I was building an exit. Every move a new seam in a parachute I’d yank when the drop finally came. But that future always lived in the abstract. August slammed it into my chest.
Desperation scratched at the walls. Anger hummed beneath the skin, constant and low.
I couldn’t run long enough to burn through the it. Couldn’t lift heavy enough to shut it out. Every morning felt like waking inside someone else’s 30-year plan and being told to smile and say thanks.
In the large-scale delivery systems I work in, too many layers have settled into mediocrity. Here, pretending is the job. Pretending the protocols make sense. Nod as if the crowns on top weren’t handed out at random. Over time, the slickest magicians float upward and become fluent in the dialect of velveted non-answers and gratitude confetti that says nothing.
Change threatens them. Efficiency exposes them. Optics are defended and outcomes are optional.
They optimize for the absence of complaints, not the presence of excellence. Feedback is “welcome” in theory, so long as it never arrives as an actual contention.
It’s all theater; courage worn like a borrowed costume.
And everyone learns the choreography: vent in the hallway, acquiesce in the meeting. They see the cracks. But saying it out loud means owning the responsibility to do something. And doing something requires spine…
I’m not built for that arrangement. Something in me refuses to perform agreement I don’t feel.
I can’t pretend something works when it doesn’t.
I can’t pretend I don’t gag at incompetence when it’s staring me in the face; though I’ve had to learn.
I can’t swallow stupidity just because the herd already gulped it.
August burned the diplomacy off my tongue.
There were days where my finger hovered over the big red abort button: quit everything, walk away, and sift through the wreckage later. The fantasy of escape wasn’t fleeting. It became a ritual. I’d run the scenarios in my head. Calculate the financial runway. Imagine the relief of just... stopping.
But there wasn’t an exit yet. Only a scheduled pause.
Only the calendar yanked the handbrake—trip I’d locked in months ago: Copenhagen → Stockholm → Norway.
I didn’t know how desperate I was for extraction until the plane’s tires unstuck from the runway.
Copenhagen
I smuggled myself into Copenhagen under the banner of a longevity conference I’d booked months ago—my standard alibi for leaving town. Call it “work,” then let the city play decoy. Pleasure up front, business in the margins.
I had a second motive tucked in my carry-on: to see if the buzz held up. Copenhagen is the poster child of “most livable” lists, but I trust crosswalks and coffee lines more than slogans.
The city doesn’t announce itself.
It seduces you…slowly. It doesn’t strut or sell. It whispers through details.
I arrived. I walked. I thought: “This is... fine?”
Then the pattern emerges. You begin to realize that there’s no friction. Movement is easy. Navigation is intuitive. Everything works the way it’s supposed to. Every corner has been touched by intention.
Bike lanes weren’t an afterthought, but embedded.
The bikes whisper past on their own lanes.
Trains show up when your watch says they should.
Train stations accommodate cyclists with dedicated cars and built-in rails on the stairs.
The entire infrastructure feels like it was designed by someone who respects time—yours and theirs.
Safety was not up for debate; you don’t have to armor up just to be treated like a person.
I combed Reddit before I got there, looking for running routes that felt safe. The replies came with a grin: “All of them.” Then they piled on: “You’d have to scour the map to find a corner that feels sketchy in this city…”
Stairs step straight into the canals. The harbors are meant for swimming. Every detail feels like it belongs in a city that expects you to participate, not just pass through.
The city tugs you to the water, into the current, into each other.
One evening, I ended up on my hotel rooftop. The sky was overcast, moody and thick, the kind of grey that makes you clinch your bathrobe tighter. The air had bite, but the pool was heated, radiating warmth like like a body holding its breath.
Nobody else had bothered to come up. It was just me, submerged and alone, my body floating in heat while the cold kissed my face. Silence wrapped around me.
There wasn’t joy exactly. Just stillness. And relief. The contrast felt like punctuation after weeks of noise: here, finally, was a moment that didn’t demand anything from me.
No interruptions.
No one’s ineptitude to triage.
No one else’s agenda feeding on my valuable time or dignity.
Just stillness.
For the first time in weeks, my nervous system let go. My breath slowed. And I felt something like peace.
Even the food made its case.
The Danish bakeries? They operate on a different axis.
Every few blocks, another storefront pulling warm sugar into the street. Flaky marvels daring you to pretend you weren’t impressed. I’d take a bite and stop mid-step; like my brain needed extra bandwidth just to process it.
They didn’t ask for your attention. They seized it.
The city wore its high standards like a badge, and its dining scene burnished that badge night after night.
And the conference I supposedly attended? Predictably dull. Uninspiring. It fizzled the way most conferences do. But, I didn’t care. I had already walked or biked every corner of the city that mattered to me and inhaled its rhythm.
Copenhagen had made its argument. Not through noise or spectacle, but through measured foresight, competence, and the audacity of a place run by grown-ups who liked themselves enough to enforce excellence.
No one element was extraordinary. But together, they formed a rebuttal: proof that systems can work if designed by competent adults, and that quality of life is an engineering choice.
After weeks of moving through environments that scraped away my patience, a stillness rose that dared me to believe that better was possible.
Stockholm
Stockholm wore a greyer coat. Handsome…sure, but nothing that made me long for a repeat visit. Not quite like Copenhagen.
It helped me see something clearly: every city I’d consider moving to—Copenhagen, Zurich, Tokyo, Singapore—is more expensive more than Toronto.
People in Toronto never stop grumbling about the cost of living. And yes—next to smaller Canadian cities, under a tax system that gives residents little back for every dollar it takes—Toronto will chew through your paycheque.
Yet, the cities worth living in don’t come cheap. And plenty make Toronto look affordable.
If you want a city that crackles, it charges admission.
A burger in Stockholm runs $35.
Tokyo rents can gut you.
Zurich and Singapore charge a luxury fee for breathing.
Here’s the splinter under the skin. Toronto isn’t expensive because it’s great. It’s expensive and mediocre. That’s what grates people.
Side quest: Tried to capture a Viking. Got captured instead. Dangerous fellow, dressed in fur and iron. Johan Hedevåg
Next Stop (Maybe)
August chewed me up and left teeth marks.
Copenhagen reminded me what it feels like when your environment isn’t engineered to wring you out. When systems work. When dignity isn’t something you have to fight for.
I refuse to spend the next decade hauling the dead weight of mediocrity and cowardice—mine or anyone else’s.
Life expands when you’re untethered.
I want to be untethered from people I don’t respect and from systems that break out in hives at competence; somewhere that doesn’t require me to contort myself to survive.
That’s what I’m clawing my way out of. August made the walls feel higher than usual. Even if the month sanded the skin off my resolve, I’m still climbing.
Still reaching. Arm out, fingertips grazing the edge.
Still restless.
Still chiseling a shape clicks into its own shadow.
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