the returning cog

everything and nothing is the same. plus, i wrote a book.

well well well…if it isn’t ME again…

let’s not sugarcoat it: it’s been years. take some pity on me here. after a prolonged period of radio silence/dormancy, having to break the ice, revive the corpse, re-engage “my” “community,” etc. is frankly humiliating. perhaps most humiliating of all is that substack has absolutely gone gangbusters in the meantime. if i understand the business model correctly, you riff for awhile, drop a paywall immediately before revealing something mildly personal and/or celebrity-adjacent, throw in an outfit selfie with affiliate links, and suddenly you’re making six figures a year???

i was something of an early adopter here. i could’ve been one of the ships rising with the content tide! i could’ve been a contender, is what i’m saying. but instead i was apparently like “hmm no thanks i’ll just completely disappear for several years.” some might say that was a bit cool of me…

i wish i could say i was off finding peace offline, “connecting to my voice of inner knowing,” etc. no no. i’ve been right here the whole time. scrolling, skimming, belaying up and off paywalls. i’ll click anything. i remember nothing. i only recently developed the ability to identify the cadence and conventions of ai slop and frankly that hasn’t deterred me much at all. she’s a little hog at the trough, folks :(

but then was then and now is now, we begin at the beginning with a nice clean inhale. ultimately i need to also cut to the chase here and say: i wrote a book (again: absolutely dead-on marketing strategy to neglect mentioning this during the literal years it’s been underway!). it’s called don’t be evil and i’ll let you take a wild guess what it’s about!! i’m proud of it. i’m embarrassed by it. i’m proud of being embarrassed by it. the “galleys” are in and i look forward to one day describing the support of my substack community as indefatigable (i’m sure half of you at this point are like “wait sorry who is this?”).

you can pre-order here if the spirit moves. it’s at #493 in “scientist biographies” (?) on amazon, which raises more questions than it answers, but (so?) let’s crack the top 100 there, fam (??). i made the following promotional graphic on chatgpt to communicate the gist (we really had some fun, “it” and i…):

now back to the original charter of this substack, if i may…if we might…if you’ll have me…

in an attempt to “drop in,” i’m writing this longhand with a pen i randomly bought in beacon on mother’s day that says “not like the other girls — i’m WAY worse” (also picked up one that says “being mean to me is illegal” :)

i fished this email of the mailbag from early 2024—kind of a time capsule now, before the tech jobs market contracted into a tight little garrote around the neck, before orange man bad: the sequel began (i love how we’ve completely abandoned even the theatrical pretense of improving quality of life in the united states and are now just openly auctioning off every last shred of social contract to the highest bidder. end of empire comes at you fast!!!)

okeeee claire we’re gonna stay “on message”...

here’s the question:

I’ve been on a career break from tech for the last year and a half, and I’m now interviewing around again. I’ve been applying to positions that I think are more meaningful, such as public service or civic-oriented organizations, but haven’t had much success there. I am, however, getting interviews in the private sector. I’m not excited about going back to the corporate world, but I think that’s where I’ll end up at this rate.

How can I keep my soul intact throughout this process and when I ultimately do get a job that’s very much less than ideal? A part of me feels guilty for even asking this question because it’s such a privilege to have options and also make a relatively decent living. At this point, I see my tech job as a leverage for other things I want to do in my life that are much more meaningful, but I’m scared that I’ll revert to confusing this means as an end for fulfillment and ultimately my identity. I’m worried I won’t have the stamina and courage to push back against the techno-capitalistic psy ops that proliferate at these companies. Ultimately, I’m worried I’ll be a phony, a sellout.

thanks for reading.

-a returning cog

phew. you’re cooking here, cog.

this very cleanly frames the stakes: how do you not let the all-consuming weather of corporate life (the performance reviews, the psy-ops, the moral-emotional language management uses to get you bought into the future they’re selling) colonize your mind/sense of self/inner life?

something enduringly interesting to me is that there so many people in these tech workplaces who seem genuinely unbothered by the contradictions, the hypocrisies, the weirdness. i saw a bunch of old coworkers posting glowing tributes to youtube for its 20th anniversary recently and had a real “???” moment. not the old singsong corporate-devotion routine! not in the year of our lord 2026 (ok fine technically 2025)! but honestly…they’re fine. they can fully lock into the performance of belief and bootlickery—enthusiastically glossing over the increasingly obvious hollowing-out effects tech is having on society—without experiencing any of it as a low-grade spiritual crisis. and we love that for them (?).

you are not gonna be that person. neither am i! it’s ok.

so the risk for you probably isn’t becoming a total phony or sellout. the bigger issue is that the burden of being “awake” makes the corporate gig inherently more psychologically full of friction and miserable potholes.

when i look back on my last few years at google, part of what made me so psychically combustible was that i was simultaneously:

1. over it and constantly activated by what i perceived as the incompetence and fakeness of management
   and yet also

2. still deeply identified with the role and the game.

i still wanted the work to offer tangible meaning and i still wanted the assessment of my performance to conclude i was amazing and worthy, despite my increasingly rock-hard conviction that the work was fake, the workplace flooded with pseudo-religious rhetoric masking pretty classic capitalistic growth pursuits, and the management bad and unworthy of my respect.

honey…the cannon was loadinggggg.

honestly, if i could point to one thing i maybe would’ve done differently, it’s this: i would’ve held the job less tightly.

not in a cynical or deadened way. not quiet quitting or fully checking out. more like: seeing the job clearly for what it actually was.

because paradoxically, once you see the contradictions more clearly, dealing with the day-to-day becomes more painful, not less. every meeting bristles. every performance review becomes excruciating because like, who are YOU to try to qualify and diminish who i am, man. the emails and management-speak become psychologically taxing because some part of you is constantly trying to reconcile irreconcilable things.

i think i could’ve stood to get a little more ram dass-ian “observer mind” about my google experience. observing where i got activated. where the emotional patterns arose (more or less daily by the end there??). where i was reflexively trying to adapt myself to the environment. the repressed good-girl-ism. the pathological commitment to social/hierarchical harmony. all of that.

and the thing is, observer mind doesn’t necessarily de-fang your perspective on the corporation. it’s not about becoming numb or suddenly deciding everything is fine. the awareness doesn’t magically fix it.

but it does soften total identification with it and give you enough room to ask:
ok. what actually needs to change here? (and unfortunately by “change” i mostly mean within. another classic trap is trying to fix the structure itself. it ain’t gonna be fixed, hon...). maybe it’s the job itself. maybe it’s your relationship to status and validation. heck, maybe it’s simply your “stated boundaries” (remarkably, looking back on my 12 years at google, my whole thing was basically “never having boundaries???” perhaps related to eventually blowing up my entire life and job, paging dr. freud/becky!!)

so that’s my basic advice here, honestly: learn to hold the job more lightly.

i think this is going to become increasingly important as the external world gets more chaotic and insane and corporations continue trying to narrate reality back to workers in highly managed moral-emotional language while also obsessively hammering home their disposability. and the ai push is accelerating all of this of course—an executive-class attempt to make knowledge workers less autonomous, less scarce, more dependent on rented systems of cognition controlled by a tiny number of literally omnipotent companies. grim stuff, folks!

do the work well, collect the paycheck, let it fund your actual life. make friends. make stuff. stop demanding moral and existential coherence from the corporation.

because the answer isn’t becoming less aware or perceptive. it’s learning how to perceive the psyops clearly without letting the whole thing consume your psyche.

now put THAT in your pipe and smoke it (?).

you got this. it’s been 2.5 years since you wrote in so you’ve probably either found enlightenment or become an innovation fellow at anduril. all the best to you!!!

the mailbag remains open! more soon.