Run, you fool: the Thought Leaders are coming
I remember gesticulating wildly with the phone in my hand.
“Why!?” I was yelling at my wife, “This isn’t some corporate retreat or insurance conference!” The phone slipped from my hand, but even as it made a horrible noise on the tiles, I didn’t notice. A crack split across the tweet onscreen:
“This is an arts organisation!” I was ranting, raving, not listening to reason. “Why would they do this!?”
Lisa was shaking me, tears brimming in her eyes.“It wasn’t artists who made the decision,” she cried. I paused, looked at her as if I’d never seen her before. Lisa’s voice caught in her throat, she whispered, “It was arts administrators.”
The understanding hit me like a punch in the gut. We started packing immediately. Lisa gathered the essentials — toothbrushes, lighters and matches, passport — while I filled the car with petrol and called my mother. She agreed to hide the kids in the hills, hours out of the city where they’d be safe in the short term. I remember kissing them goodbye, feeling the chill in the air, the gathering clouds, dirty and heavy, and wondering if I’d ever see our children again.
We were glued to our phones overnight. One by one, friends and family fell to Likes, Shares and Reblogs. I felt keenest loss when my high-school girlfriend Instagrammed a screencap of a listicle of Tao the Pooh motivational quotes. We thought Lisa’s cousin had made it out alive when he posted a picture on a boat, but yelped in horror when we saw #devops #brandequity #futureproof #blueocean.
Next morning we took positions at the windows, boxes and sheets for visual cover. Lisa had her uncle’s shotgun, I had binoculars and a trolley pole. At 8:30am, we smelled the fairtrade coffee and held each other tight. At 9am, atop their food trucks, the Thought Leaders descended on our inner-city suburb. I heard mumbling about passive income and called out the positions of the first of them. Lisa took out three but missed on the fourth. While she reloaded, I fired a t-shirt cannon full of flyers that rained down on the street.
A few stopped to read them, and some even turned around and sprinted back to the city, but most tucked the flyers into their breast pockets or satchel bags and kept coming.
“The ‘$1000 off Richard Branson live speaking jam’ flyers didn’t work!” I yelled. “I need to go bigger. Will you be OK?” Lisa nodded, snapping the shotgun closed. “Look out!” I cried. Lisa spun and fired, blowing away a Thought Leader going on a deep dive. His Eventbrite nametag clattered to the ground.
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
I ran upstairs and started inflating the Seth Godin decoys. When I chanced a look out the window, I saw the grim reality of our situation: we were surrounded. I thought of the forced blogging camps in Sydney, and the coworking chambers in Brisbane. The all-day mindful cleaning seminars with 98% mortality rates. I heard gunshots below and collected the decoys. Lisa and I would make it. Whatever learnings and takeaways lay ahead, we’d survive. There’s no way they’d make us find our bliss.
