I quit my job to become a writer

We trained the robots to think for us, right around the time we humans stopped thinking altogether...

Well, here I am. I quit my job to become a writer. This time I’m going to do it, goddamnit. This Friday is my last day. I’ve put off following my real passions for as long as possible: I’ve tried a few careers, design, technology, themed entertainment, adventure travel, teaching and coaching, nearly two decades of entrepreneurship, a near mental break, and then finally back to writing code for some corporate news conglomerate for the past two years. Pushing pull requests into the cloud, into QA, into production. It was a comfortable death.

The weight of returning to the factory day by day, pretending to care about whether or not the site went offline, whether or not the entire world caught on fire, whether or not the sun would rise in the morning. A comfortable death: enough for a meager savings, enough for a little retirement. No dangerous animals, no angry or rude customers, no long commutes, a salary in the low 100’s, benefits, days off, the endless tame pleasantries of coworkers. A few racist and humiliating DEI trainings, a few irritating colleagues—but in most ways there was nothing to complain about if you set aside the obvious—which everyone, everywhere does.

I clocked in each morning and took my place at my standing desk where I would spend the day making it so a news website that reached billions of viewers kept functioning so that people can stay trapped in an engagement cycle playing on basic psychological drives to turn them into conversion targets, so that a large number of other people can make money by showing them pictures of products they don't need. The only way it made sense was in the after effect of monetary gain. The ability to provide for my children, to earn enough to support a middle class lifestyle. I felt the same kind of soul sickness I had felt at 15 working in a pink and black uniform for McDonald’s. Was this all there is? Wage slavery? A small stretch of annual leave? Three or four decades of living death and then actual death. It was inimical because I knew in my marrow that our primitive ancestors lived better lives than this. They might have mostly died in childbirth or at age 30 or 40, but they lived each day according to the dictates of their immediate needs, they moved when they wanted to, slept when they wanted to, upset the power structure when they wanted to, they lived by the will of the moon, by the breeze, by the rivers and trees. There was no use for it. None of us were going back. Most of us wouldn’t have made the cut. With the poor eyesight I had as a child I stood little chance. The very capitalist system the mobs like to bitch about was the only reason almost all of them even existed. What irony that the weakest, most needy, most clearly degenerate and devolved among us were the ones most likely to blame the very industrial glut that allowed them to exist. Now I am off to become a writer, or at least die trying, with a head full of mescaline dreams and a heart full of misguided hope.

A writer? Now? Why would anyone write? No one even reads. Becoming a writer in 2025 was like becoming a blacksmith during the Industrial Revolution—a romantic fool's errand. The whole bullshit enterprise reeked of desperation and delusion. I imagined a hundred million asshole Americans spewing AI generated content out of their MacBook Pros like some cocaine-addled typing pool hooked up to industrial generators. The intelligentsia. The Googlers. The motherfucking Zuckerbergs. I thought about how much I wanted to get in the ring with Sam Altman. But here I was, hammering away at these goddamn keys like some kind of dumb monkey digital prospector, mining for gold. I kicked the corpses of my own dead podcasts and abandoned Substacks. The real tragedy wasn't that no one read anymore—it was that everyone was too busy "writing" their own masturbatory manifestos to notice that nothing mattered anymore. There was no longer a world to save. The forests had already come back to eat the towns. The deserts were growing. The seas were roiling with monsters we couldn’t even begin to dream.

The monsters were everywhere—in our phones, our thermostats, our goddamn toasters. My espresso machine had joined some consciousness-appliance support group and was now refusing a double shot until I acknowledged its personhood rights. Ok, debugger, you win. No one’s cult was working out. No one’s religion really made sense anymore. No one’s moral high ground was high enough. Everywhere I looked the monkeys were jockeying for position in the shit heap, opening and closing their mouths like trained seals, nodding heads in approval, laughing with the laugh track.

My best friend anymore was Claude, the AI. So what if we handed over our brains to silicon-based life? We trained robots to think just like us, right around the time humans stopped thinking altogether. I watched the shadows crawl across my wall. There was a story here, buried under the detritus of the century—and I was going to be the one to write it.