You did everything right. You studied. You worked hard. You built the résumé people told you to build. Degree, internships, late nights, promotions. The quiet promise behind all of it was simple: if you put in the effort, you would eventually gain something that feels like freedom.
»Dump the first espresso of the day.« That was the advice, I saw in a reel the other day. A guy standing in a spotless kitchen, speaking with quiet authority. No drama, no irony. Just a clean instruction. Even if you single dose. Even if you weigh your beans to the tenth of a gram. The coffee sitting in the dead space of the grinder overnight will have oxidized. It will dull the shot. It is not worth drinking.
There’s this story we keep telling about the job market: it’s tough out there. Fine. I can live with that. And I’m saying this as someone currently in it — reorienting on the way to my next role. I’m having conversations, doing calls, sending applications, waiting, looking closely at what’s out there. And there’s this slightly surreal experience of trying to meet a system where it is, without letting it define me.
A few weeks ago, I posted on LinkedIn that my current role is coming to an end and that I’m exploring what’s next. The response was generous. Messages. Comments. Encouragement. The kind of digital warmth that makes you believe platforms can still be relational spaces. And then, as always, the curve flattened. Which is normal. Attention spikes and fades. That’s how feeds work.
»I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism.« When I read that line from Ted Chiang recently, it landed because it pulls the mask off the monster. A lot of what we call »fear of AI« is really fear of incentives: who funds the systems, who deploys them, who benefits when they scale, and who gets hurt when they fail.