"What do you think, son?"
"What?" I asked. I hadn't been paying attention.
"The site. You haven't made it up there yet, have you?"
"I did. A couple weeks ago."
"We should be breaking ground this week. Next week at the latest. What did you think?" he asked me. The company had begun as a brokerage but had ventured into real estate development in the past couple decades. That was my dad's bag. He was passionate about development, but in all the years I had spent in his world, I hadn’t caught the bug yet. It just didn't get my blood pumping the way it did for him. I didn’t think continued exposure would do the trick, but my dad apparently did.
"It's good," I said lamely. I had no comment. The development would start, then the homes would get sold, then we'd move onto something else. It always happened that way; there wasn't anything special about this time. If I’d had more of an opinion to offer, believe me, I would have given it. My dad chuckled lightly.
"Is it? I hadn't noticed."
"What do you want me to say?"
"Nothing, Cameron. Any more enthusiasm out of you, and you’d be bouncing off the walls," he said good-naturedly. If he wasn’t proud of me, he hid it well.
"You already know it's good, Dad. You don't need to hear it from me."
"Your opinion matters, Cameron. Eventually, a lot of people here are going to rely on your decisions going forward." I sighed but understood. It had been the same story the last twenty-nine years of my life. One day, it was going to be me behind that big desk, so I had to be ready for when that day came.
"I know," I said heavily.
"I don't think you do, Cam."
"I get it. I do. I just..."
"You just what?" he asked.
"Do you know about Kirk? Kirk Lourd?" I asked him.
"What about him?"
"I think he's cheating on his wife. I saw him outside the building a little while ago, kissing some woman who wasn't her."
"What Kirk does on his own time is his business. I don’t believe you’d want him looking over your shoulder. You should pay him the same respect."
"I wasn't going to do anything. I just... Is that it?" I asked. "Is it written in the rule book that once your household income is higher than a hundred grand, you have to do that?"
"Nobody has to do anything, Cameron. Kirk made the decisions he did because he wanted to. If there are rules, everyone makes their own."
"It seems that way, but it can't be. It's like there's a script everyone follows. People just do things because it's written for them."
"Is something wrong, Cameron?" he asked, leaning forward, balancing his elbows on his knees. He was almost sixty but passed for younger. He was in good shape, he walked with a straight back, and the graying hair and lines on his face just seemed to add to the authoritative air he had cultivated over years of being in charge.
"I've just been thinking lately about how artificial everything is. I feel like everything, the whole world, was engineered for us, and our only job is to keep it going," I admitted.
"You feel like someone's lying to you?"
"I just feel like there's something wrong, and I don't want to be part of it."
"The only real power anyone has is power over themselves."
"Does anyone really make their own choices?"
"Everyone does," he said definitively. "Refusing to take responsibility for yourself is still a choice. The only thing you or anyone can do is make the right choices. How are you going to do that if you’re too busy worrying about what other people are up to?"
"It's not just other people; it’s everything. It's how society was built, what it runs on. False narratives that trap you in vicious cycles. Rewarding corruption instead of virtue.”