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"The Real Innovation Crisis: Nobody’s Showering Anymore"
Work In ProgMess: Your weekly reminder that the bar can always be lower.
WASHINGTON, DC — In a stunning development that absolutely nobody in management is prepared to address, sources confirmed this week that the root cause of declining innovation isn’t AI, market saturation, or leadership churn—it’s that nobody showers anymore.
“Back in the early days of remote work, people were full of ideas,” said Dr. Erin Volkman, a cognitive neuroscientist turned LinkedIn thought leader. “Then one day they stopped commuting and...stopped showering.”
Volkman’s research, which tracked soap sales, DM usage, and patent filings over the last four years, revealed a disturbing trend: as daily hygiene decreased, so did groundbreaking ideas. The tipping point? “When people started calling dry shampoo a productivity hack.”
A SHOWERLESS NATION
In San Francisco, a 29-year-old startup founder who asked to remain anonymous (but you can smell him from here) admitted he hadn’t showered in six days.
“I used to have epiphanies in the shower,” he said, adjusting a hoodie that may have once been navy. “Now I just scroll my team’s standup notes while stress-eating pickles at 10am.”
THE DEATH OF IDLE THOUGHT
“People used to walk,” said one grizzled UX researcher, staring blankly out the window of a WeWork. “Like, just…walk. No AirPods. No Trello. Just legs and silence.”
He described a time when leaders embraced boredom, where meetings ended and thinking began. “Now it’s Zoom. Then Zoom. Then Zoom again. And suddenly it’s 7:18pm and you’re crying because you accidentally sent your grocery list to the client channel.”
WE’RE NOT WORKING FROM HOME. WE’RE LIVING AT WORK.
The phrase, once considered poetic, is now a diagnosis.
The Federal Office of Occupational Therapy (FOOT) recently issued guidelines urging employees to “shower recreationally” and take “non-task-oriented walks.”
CONCLUSION: THERE IS NONE. NOBODY THINKS ANYMORE.
At press time, the phrase “shower thoughts” had been replaced in the company glossary with “Asynchronous brainstorm assets.”
We asked ChatGPT for a quote. It responded:
“Without the shower, there is only Slack. And Slack is not where great ideas are born. It is where they go to ask for permission.”
Q: What do showers, long walks, and staring into space have in common?
A: They’ve all been canceled in favor of ‘quick syncs.’
Better A: They are also what these great thinkers had in common. Mozart. Einstein. DaVinci (Source: The Creating Brain. Andreasen, Nancy)