I looked down at my slides, then back at the faces across the boardroom. It was my turn to speak, but my mind was blank. I used to practise presentations to the point of boredom to prevent this from happening. With enough preparation, I could pitch regardless of how I felt. But this time, the lines would not come. My colleague, sensing the silence, took over and carried the meeting to its conclusion. Afterwards, he asked what had happened.

After three years in marketing, I’d become accustomed to selling things I did not care about. I was unsettled by the contents of this presentation, though. We were proposing that a tourism board distribute its campaign through a low-grade ad network, packaged as going viral. Commercial internet virality had developed through forwarded emails, social-bookmarking sites and community-ranked news aggregators. By 2009, the term had become industry shorthand, with scant regard for the voluntary peer-to-peer spread that made something genuinely viral. I found it hollow and vaguely dishonest.

It already took considerable effort for me not to zone out during pitch presentations. There in the boardroom, as I fought my own judgement in real time, the mismatch between my stated position and actual values seemed to trigger a temporary loss of executive function. The experience made me consider the turns that had taken me from growing up as an artistic kid to doing this for a living.

The company director was not surprised when I handed in my notice. ‘Going to Japan alone, I thought you must have been soul-searching,’ he said. It was true. Soon after the failed presentation, I’d used the last of my holiday allowance and what remained of my overdraft to visit Tokyo for the first time.