Joker Carving His Own Freedom: Foucault, Hawk Tuah, The Panopticon

Arthur Fleck's laughter in the film Joker (2019) was disturbing because it feels forced from him by a world that cannot contain or understand his pain (1). He confesses at one point, "I just don't want to feel so bad anymore," as if trying to explain an emotional burden no one can see much like so many of us who suffers from anxiety, depression, or with neurodivergent minds. From the outset, this involuntary laughter marks him as someone who does not fit the categories that doctors and social workers want to impose on him. He laughs at inappropriate times, in inappropriate places, and for reasons that he himself seems unable to articulate. Yet this inability to conform, to align his affect with socially approved emotions, is part of what makes his character resonate. It recalls what Michel Foucault diagnosed in the modern era: the ways in which power operates through careful observation, classification, and normalization (2). In Joker, the audience witnesses how easily an individual who cannot be disciplined into normality becomes an object of pity, confusion, and eventually, fear.

In a crowded bus, Arthur Fleck's laughter fills the cramped space, reverberating off the metal walls and blending with the ambient noise of the city.

The world Fleck plays in resembles a broken stage. By around the 7:50 mark in the film, he has already expressed his desperation and has been laughed at while trying to entertain a child on a bus (3). His involuntary laughter creates a bridge between tragedy and mockery. By the time his mother casually dismisses his dream of being a comedian ("Don't you have to be funny to be a comedian?"), the viewer sees how every attempt to craft a stable identity falls apart. The hospital scene at 29:00, where he inadvertently drops a gun, or Thomas Wayne's contempt for the struggling population at around the 39:00 mark, illustrate how oppressive social structures refuse him a coherent role (4). The environment is saturated with despair and humiliation.

The imposing structure of the panopticon loomed above, its circular design allowing a solitary guard to observe the prisoners within, their faces marked by a mix of resignation and defiance.

Foucault's Discipline and Punish describes the shift from overt violence to subtler, internalized mechanisms of discipline. In modern society, power functions like a panopticon, maintaining a state of conscious and permanent visibility (5). Social media and digital platforms now amplify this surveillance. Each piece of content: every video, post, meme - becomes an examination, a data point. The algorithm's unseen eye watches, classifies, and determines what is worthy of attention and what should be buried. Fleck's laughter, had it occurred in our current digital zeitgeist, might appear on someone's feed as an oddity for a moment before being categorized, tagged, and eventually monetized or discarded (6). This parallels the way all forms of resistance risk being converted into a commodity.

We see this dynamic today in online spaces, where absurd humor--especially among younger generations--resists clear interpretation. Consider the Dadaists in post-World War I Europe, artists who rejected the rationality and order that had failed so spectacularly (7). They produced nonsense poetry, collage, and performance art that refused to convey stable meaning. In their refusal to "make sense," the Dadaists exposed the absurdity of the larger system. Today's TikTok creators and meme-makers channel a similar logic (8). The nonsense they produce--jump cuts, random audio overlays, unpredictable juxtapositions--mirrors that earlier anti-rational impulse. By doing so, they create micro-spheres of resistance, moments that slip out of neat categorization. In these fleeting bursts, we find echoes of the Joker's laughter: a refusal of coherent narrative that cannot be easily harnessed for profit.

Shown here are a set of Dadaism images from Post War Germany/Weimar Republic that are aburdist features are similar to what short form videos produce today on Tiktok

But modern capitalism is agile. As soon as something appears truly resistant, it risks being integrated into the cycle of production, marketing, and consumption. This process is evident in what has come to be called the Hawk Tuah phenomenon (9). Hawk Tuah began as an online sensation, someone seemingly authentic and outside the polished norms of influencer culture. She built a brand that felt raw, even rebellious. Yet before long, she turned her sudden fame into a crypto scheme, "rugging" millions from her followers and then disappearing. The disappointment and rage that followed reveal a pattern: what starts as a break in the system's logic can quickly become a product to sell. Authenticity is commodified, marketed, and eventually exploited (10).

Commentators like emily.anne.g on Threads have noted that the Hawk Tuah brand became a form of merchandise--something that began as a voice of authenticity was reduced to products and endorsements (11). Once trust was established, the pivot to fraud was both shocking and strangely predictable. In an environment saturated with surveillance and exploitation, what people crave is something real. But this craving itself becomes valuable. Some have argued that we live in a cultural moment that is particularly permissive of scams, perhaps because so many feel desperate for quick relief in a precarious economy. Post-COVID inflation, rising costs of essentials, and general despair mirror historical conditions such as those in post-WWII Germany (12). In both cases, systemic breakdowns create fertile ground for scams and deception. If Fleck's laughter is the sound of a system failing to heal its wounded, then Hawk Tuah's scam is that same system's logic turned inward--an opportunistic strike that plays on collective vulnerability.

Inflationary data from 2016 to 2024

Foucault argued that power is not just repressive but productive. It creates norms, truths, and even objects of resistance. The Hawk Tuah phenomenon shows how the system can produce the conditions for its own critique and then reabsorb that critique for profit. When resistance becomes "trendy," it loses its capacity to unsettle. It is no longer a laughter that baffles and disturbs. It's a branded slogan on a T-shirt or a memecoin. As soon as people "get it," it ceases to threaten. This is why the Joker's final declaration : "You wouldn't get it", resonates. Once the system understands and categorizes a form of resistance, it can neutralize it.

TikTok's absurd content tries to avoid this fate. Users embrace incomprehensibility as a strategic maneuver. When everything serious and meaningful can be packaged and sold, the only way to resist might be to refuse meaning altogether. The more nonsensical the performance, the harder it is to monetize. Yet this is a delicate dance. Absurdity can be momentarily liberating, just as Fleck's laughter can momentarily unsettle. But the algorithm continuously learns. Absurdities become genres, genres become marketing niches, and soon we have companies selling "authentic chaos" as a brand. The cycle repeats, each time pushing content creators to find new forms of illegibility that resist interpretation.

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault notes that "where there is power, there is resistance." Resistance is embedded in the networks of power themselves. This suggests that no matter how efficiently the algorithm tries to categorize us, some expressions will still exceed its grasp. Arthur Fleck's transformation into the Joker represents a trajectory from victim to an agent of chaos. By the film's end, he discovers that his life is not a tragedy but a comedy. This twist acknowledges that what truly unsettles the system is not a coherent, rational protest, but a form of defiance that defies understanding. Chaos eludes neat storylines.

Post war Germany inflationary data

This tension is historically grounded. Consider the legacy of artists like Otto Dix or Hannah Höch in the Weimar Republic. They produced unsettling and challenging works that reflected the trauma and fragmentation of post-war society. Their art resisted easy interpretation, revealing the cracks in the Enlightenment's faith in rationality and progress. Today's meme culture, shaped by the pressures of late capitalism, echoes this legacy. Just as Dadaists confronted a Europe devastated by war and disillusion, Gen Z and others grapple with ecological crises, wealth disparities, and endless streams of digital surveillance. The result is a culture that often responds with layers of irony, nonsense, and forms of expression that deliberately resist stable meaning.

The economic pressures that have recently fueled scams and frauds are part of a larger tapestry of discontent. After the COVID-19 pandemic, hyperinflation and corporate-driven price hikes have left many struggling. Instability, as in the Weimar era, makes people vulnerable to simplistic promises and short-term solutions. Scammers exploit this vulnerability. Hawk Tuah's crypto rug pull can be viewed as the dark mirror of the same forces that push some creators into nonsensical art: both are responses to a system that leaves individuals feeling powerless. One reaction is to exploit, the other is to evade classification through chaos.

FTC Data on investment scams in the last 3 years.

The Joker film reminds us that empathy and horror can coexist. At about 1:15:00 into the movie, we learn that Fleck's entire sense of love and support was a hallucination. Medication withdrawal leaves him with nothing but raw emotion. "I haven't been happy my entire fucking life," he confesses. He can produce laughter, but no conventional jokes. His humor is pure affect, stripped of the social contract that makes jokes intelligible to others. The laughter he offers is not a product, not a performance meant to please. It's an exhalation of psychic pain. In digital spaces, people sometimes produce similarly raw content: screams into the void, nonsensical rants that algorithmic logic cannot fully parse. These are not coherent critiques of neoliberalism, but desperate attempts to exist outside its grasp.

The Joker's chaos inspires imitators, but his final understanding that others "wouldn't get it" highlights how resistance is neutralized once it is understood. In a digital world where everything can be monitored and commodified, the challenge is to remain uncategorizable, to constantly shift and disrupt attempts at classification. Neither Fleck's unsettling laughter nor TikTok's absurd memes offer a coherent ideology; they defy easy interpretation and thus resist being neatly packaged as products. Even phenomena like Hawk Tuah's brief authenticity can be swiftly turned into scams, showing how easily subversion becomes merchandise. Yet by embracing confusion, nonsense, and the refusal to "make sense," we carve out small spaces of freedom, scrambling the signals the system relies upon. This strategy--living in the gap between understanding and confusion--lets us hold on to a form of human expression the system "wouldn't get."

---

References

Reference: Power/Knowledge, Quote

1a. In contrast to the great knowledge of the inquiry organized in the middle of the Middle Ages through the appropriation of the judicial system by the state—consisting in assembling the means to reactualize events through testimony—a new knowledge of a completely different type emerged. It is characterized by supervision and examination, organized around the norm, through the supervisory control of individuals throughout their existence. This examination was the basis of the power, the form of knowledge-power, that gave rise not to the great sciences of observation, but to what we call the "human sciences": psychiatry, psychology, sociology.

Source Essay

Ref. No., Source

1. Arthur Fleck's laughter in the film Joker (2019)
   Cambridge BJPsych Bulletin - Analysing Joker
2. Foucault diagnosed in the modern era
   Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
3. Fleck being laughed at on the bus
   Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Podcast - Joker Analysis
4. Thomas Wayne's contempt for the struggling population
   Clue Chronicles - Joker's Psychological Transformation
5. Power functions like a panopticon
   Foucault, Discipline and Punish
6. Fleck's laughter in our digital zeitgeist
   Stanford Philosophy on Foucault and Benthan's Panopticon
7. Dadaists rejecting rationality
   Art Now Thus - Gen Z and Dadaism
8. TikTok creators channel a similar logic
   New Yorker - Dada Era of Internet Memes
9. Hawk Tuah phenomenon
   BBC - Hawk Tuah Crypto Fraud
10. Authenticity is commodified
    Screen Rant - Mental Illness in Joker
11. Commentators on Hawk Tuah's pivot
    Emily Ann's Critique of Hawk Tuah
12. Economic pressures post-COVID
    AdventHealth - Joker's Mental Health Depiction

Recommended Books

• Discipline and Punished, Foucault

• Capitalist Realism, Fisher

• Our Aesthetic Categories, Ngai

• Alone in Berlin, Beaton

• Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt

The Scattered Mind of Loss: Joan Didion's Grief Architecture

I first read "The Year of Magical Thinking" while sitting in hospital waiting triage, that liminal space where time refuses to behave normally. It seemed fitting. But this re-reflection was inspired by the death of my great uncle last week. When my father called with the news, my mind immediately jumped to a memory from when I was five: my uncle taking me writing on a small boat in China, the gentle rock of the water, the scratch of pencil on paper. It made me re-anchor my notions of grief, the way Joan Didion's masterwork about grief moves the way the mind moves in crisis: in spirals, in fragments, in sudden sharp moments of clarity followed by fog.

What strikes me now, returning to the text months later, is how precisely Didion captures not just grief's emotional landscape but its cognitive one. The way loss literally changes how we think. Her narrative mirrors what neuroscience tells us about the ADHD brain—that tendency toward fractured attention, unexpected connections, time-blindness. But in Didion's hands, these aren't symptoms to be managed. They're literary devices that capture something essential about how loss reconstructs consciousness itself.

Her mind lurches between territories: from clinical medical studies (her attempt to intellectualize what's happening) to the gut-punch sight of John's shoes by their bed. The juxtapositions aren't artistic choices—they're grief's actual terrain. A phone message becomes a portal to panic. A medical form transforms into an existential crisis about the word "widow." This isn't disorganization—it's an exact replication of how loss disrupts our mental architecture.

"Grief has no distance," Didion writes. "Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life." The structure of her sentences mirrors these very waves. The way each thought triggers another, each memory opens a door to ten more rooms of remembering.

Consider how she handles time itself. In one moment, she's wondering about Pacific time zones: "Was there time to go back? Could we have a different ending on Pacific time?" The next, she's lost in memories of "planning meetings" that were really just excuses for lunch at Michael's in Santa Monica. Then suddenly she's citing psychiatric studies about bereavement. The effect is dizzying yet precise—exactly how grief feels.

Her journalist's mind tries to create order through research, through quotations, through medical terminology. Yet these attempts at intellectualization only highlight grief's resistance to rationality. "They live by symbols," she writes of the bereaved, immediately including herself. "They read meaning into the barrage of spam on the unused computer, the delete key that stops working, the imagined abandonment in the decision to replace it." The repetition matters. Everything becomes both mundane and sacred: phone numbers taped by telephones, shoes left by doorways, coffee cups half-finished.

One of the book's most haunting passages comes when Didion discovers she's been mindlessly turning pages in John's dictionary: "When I realized what I had done I was stricken: what word had he last looked up, what had he been thinking?" The moment captures perfectly how grief transforms ordinary objects into relics, how it makes both everything and nothing significant.

This is what makes Didion's fractured narrative so powerful—it's not just telling us about grief, it's showing us how grief actually works in the mind. Not as a clean progression through famous five stages, but as a chaotic reconstruction of reality itself. The answering machine still plays his voice. The dictionary still holds his last query. The shoes still wait by the door. Time refuses to move forward in straight lines.

What's remarkable is how Didion achieves this effect not through experimental typography or avant-garde techniques, but through the careful documentation of how grief actually unfolds in the mind. Her background as a journalist serves not as a shield against emotion but as a lens that magnifies grief's absurdities. The more precisely she observes, the more surreal everything becomes.

"Marriage is memory, marriage is time," she writes. And then immediately complicates it: "Marriage is not only time: it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time." For forty years, she saw herself through John's eyes. She didn't age. This year, for the first time since she was twenty-nine, she saw herself through the eyes of others. The observation is both painfully personal and universally true—how we construct ourselves through the gaze of those we love, how their absence forces a kind of second loss: the loss of the self they helped create.

The rational mind grasps at symbols, at signs, at patterns that might make sense of the senseless. "Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed," she observes. "They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car." Even this observation becomes part of the pattern-seeking, the desperate retroactive attempt to create meaning where there may be none.

I find myself thinking about how we talk about attention disorders—that tendency to notice everything, to be unable to filter signal from noise. In grief, Didion suggests, we all become this way. Every detail takes on potential significance. The mind refuses to perform its usual task of sorting relevant from irrelevant information. A receipt from a shared meal becomes a holy text. A casual comment transforms into prophecy.

"Not only did I not believe that 'bad luck' had killed John and struck Quintana but in fact I believed precisely the opposite: I believed that I should have been able to prevent whatever happened." The sentence itself mirrors the mind's desperate attempt to maintain control through logic, even as it reveals the ultimate futility of such attempts.

This is where Didion's genius lies—in her ability to document not just the facts of grief but its actual cognitive process. When she checks her work for publication, she finds "simple errors of transcription, names and dates wrong." Even her professional competence, her ability to verify facts—the very foundation of her journalistic identity—becomes unreliable.

"Would I ever be right again?" she asks. "Could I ever again trust myself not to be wrong?"

The questions hang in the air, unanswerable.

Writers are supposed to impose order on chaos. Instead, Didion lets the chaos speak. Her scattered narrative ultimately coheres into something more true than any linear telling could achieve. Through her ADHD-like style—the way she follows each thought down its rabbit hole, the way she moves between microscopic focus and vast emptiness, between the weight of a left-behind dictionary and the weightlessness of absence—she captures something essential about loss: how it forces us to live in multiple timeframes simultaneously, how it makes both everything and nothing significant, how it destroys our normal filtering systems while creating new, stranger ones.

Facts dissolve—not as literary device but as lived reality. Time refuses linear progression, instead moving in spirals and sudden drops. I recognized this disorientation from my own moments of loss. Her attention catches on details, snags on memories, ruptures into research, then suddenly coheres into devastating clarity: "Marriage is memory, marriage is time."

Everything means too much. Nothing means enough.

Didion's narrative mirrors this impossible balance, shifting between microscopic focus and vast emptiness. Between the weight of a left-behind dictionary and the weightlessness of absence. Between the precise notation of medical terminology and the imprecise territory of loss that no terminology can adequately map.

"We are imperfect mortal beings," she writes, "aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all."

This is perhaps why the book resonates so deeply—it's not just a memoir of loss but a perfect capture of how consciousness fragments and reforms around absence. Through her scattered attention, her obsessive returns to certain moments, her sudden diversions into research or memory, Didion shows us how grief actually works in the mind. Not as a clean progression through stages, but as a chaotic reconstruction of reality itself.

Some stories can only be told through broken patterns.

The dictionary still holds his last query.

The shoes still wait by the door.

When we talk about attention disorders, we often focus on what's missing—the ability to filter, to stay on task, to maintain what neurotypical minds consider "normal" focus. But what if these different patterns of attention sometimes let us see what others miss? What if, in grief, we all become radical noticers, unable to maintain the comfortable fiction that some details matter more than others?

Didion's innovation isn't just stylistic. By allowing her narrative to mirror grief's cognitive patterns—that tendency toward fractured attention, unexpected connections, time-blindness—she achieves something remarkable. She shows us how loss doesn't just change what we think about, but how we think.

I keep returning to that moment with the dictionary. "What word had he last looked up, what had he been thinking?" The questions themselves reveal how grief transforms us into detectives of the ordinary, obsessive archivists of the everyday. We become collectors of details that meant nothing until suddenly they meant everything.

This is perhaps why "The Year of Magical Thinking" feels so essential now, in our era of constant documentation. We live in a world where every moment can be preserved, every conversation saved, every photo tagged and stored. Yet Didion's narrative suggests that memory—especially memory shaped by loss—follows its own strange logic. No archive can capture what she calls "the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself."

Yet through her fractured attention, her willingness to let the narrative spiral and double back and chase down seemingly random connections, Didion creates something more true than any straightforward account could achieve. She shows us how grief makes poets of us all—not in the sense of crafting beautiful language, but in that more fundamental way: seeing connections others miss, finding meaning in the seemingly meaningless, reading omens in ordinary things.

The book ends where it began, with time refusing to behave normally. But we've learned to read differently. We understand now why the narrative had to scatter, had to spiral, had to resist traditional chronology. We see how those broken patterns create their own kind of sense.

In the end, what Didion gives us isn't just a memoir of loss but a new way of seeing. Through her scattered attention, she reveals how grief changes not just what we notice, but the very mechanics of noticing itself. She shows us how loss makes strangers of us in our own minds, even as it sharpens our attention to life's smallest details.

The shoes still wait by the door. The dictionary still holds its secrets. The answering machine still carries his voice through time.

But now we understand why these details matter. We see how grief transforms the ordinary world into a landscape of symbols, how loss makes hyperrealists of us all. Through Didion's fractured lens, we learn to read absence itself.

Some stories can only be told through broken patterns. Some truths can only be seen through scattered light.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Read Along: Infinite Jest, P. 8 - 13

Today’s notes!

TLDR: Hal takes us back, sort of, and talks for for a min before everyone freaked out as thought he turned into a monster or something

Loc 296 | Highlight

"funny what you don't recall."

Ideas:

1. When Hal think back to when he was maybe 5 years old, it prefixes the following setup. Sets up memory as unreliable - both in terms of what we forget and what we "remember" that might not be true. Later I call this as Anti Proustian, where Proust is clear, here it is a mess.

2. Meta-commentary on how we interpret past memories through present understanding. I had a hand written note: "example of our interpretations", how interpretations dictate existence.

3. First layer of narrative unreliability - opening scene reliability now questionable

Loc 299 | Highlight

"gas-driven thing that roared and snorted and bucked and he remembers seemed to propel the Moms rather than vice versa,"

Ideas:

1. Grammar shifts signal altered states/memory distortion (handwritten note: "diff grammer")

2. Machine description mirrors communication breakdown from opening scene

3. Power dynamics reversed (machine controlling mother) - hints at larger theme of control/lack of control

Loc 303 | Highlight

"He says I was around five and crying and was vividly red in the cold spring air."

Ideas:

1. Proustian memory inversion - triggered by decay rather than pleasure (handwritten: proustian inversion! )

2. Shift to third person suggests dissociation from memory, really primes the reader to be aware of when to change perspectives and even point of view.

3. "vividly red" works as both physical and emotional state descriptor

Loc 316 | Highlight

"I had stopped crying, he remembers, and simply stood there, the size and shape of a hydrant, in red PJ's with attached feet, holding out the mold, seriously, like the report of some kind of audit."

Ideas:

1. Anxiety's effect on memory formation/suppression

2. Child performing adult behavior ("audit") while in childish clothing (pjs with attached feets, Boss Baby)

3. Mold as symbol of decay/corruption juxtaposed with childhood innocence

Loc 319 | Highlight

"she yells in Orin's second and more fleshed-out recollection,"

Ideas:

1. Multiple versions of truth - "fleshed-out" suggests artificial construction

2. Memory as collaborative/competitive narrative between family members

3. "Second" recollection implies constructed rather than authentic memory

Loc 321 | Highlight

"while O. gaped at his first real sight of adult hysteria."

Ideas:

1. Loss of parental infallibility moment (handwritten note: what were some of your first hysteria or extreme memories. )

2. "Real" suggesting previous encounters with hysteria weren't authentic

3. Moment of childhood innocence breaking down

Loc 324 | Highlight

"her footprints Native-American-straight,"

Ideas:

1. Cultural stereotype used as precision marker (handwritten note: "weird flex")

2. Mother's controlled response vs. previous hysteria

3. Linear thinking vs. emotional chaos

Loc 340 | Highlight

""DeLint at the big man’s arm: ‘Stop it!’ ‘I am not what you see and hear.’ Distant sirens. A crude half nelson. Forms at the door. A young Hispanic woman holds her palm against her mouth, looking. ‘I’m not,’ I say."

Ideas:

1. I have no idea what is going on, is he having a panic attack? Is he a Lovecraftian monster?!

2. Once again another tone shift, and it reminds me of Halloween 1978, when they revealed that it was a kid in a mask that did that. I'm not saying Hal is a monster, I'm saying it has that same level of surprise.

3. So far, very fun.

---

---

Highlights

Loc 324 | Highlight

"her footprints Native-American-straight,"

Note: weird flex wallace

Loc 321 | Highlight

"while O. gaped at his first real sight of adult hysteria."

Note: what is your earliest memories of a hysteria

Loc 319 | Highlight

"she yells in Orin's second and more fleshed-out recollection,"

Note: same or diff recollsctions

Loc 316 | Highlight

"I had stopped crying, he remembers, and simply stood there, the size and shape of a hydrant, in red PJ's with attached feet, holding out the mold, seriously, like the report of some kind of audit. O. says his memory diverges at this point, probably as a result of anxiety."

Note: anxiety causes memory suropression. psychology ref

Loc 309 | Highlight

"and in that most maternal of reflexes she, who feared and loathed more than anything spoilage and filth, reached to take whatever her baby held out — as in how many used heavy Kleenex, spit-back candies, wads of chewed-out gum in how many theaters, airports, backseats, tournament lounges?"

Note: intense maternal instinct detail

Loc 303 | Highlight

"He says I was around five and crying and was vividly red in the cold spring air."

Note: inverted proustian recollesction thats why popsicle reference

Loc 303 | Highlight

"I was saying something over and over; he couldn't make it out until our mother saw me and shut down the tiller, ears ringing, and came over to see what I was holding out. This turned out to have been a large patch of mold"

Note: communication breakdown again

Loc 299 | Highlight

"gas-driven thing that roared and snorted and bucked and he remembers seemed to propel the Moms rather than vice versa,"

Note: diff grammer as an altered state description

Loc 298 | Highlight

"The garden's area was a rough rectangle laid out with Popsicle sticks and twine."

Note: childhood memory details

Loc 297 | Highlight

"eldest brother Orin"

Note: first brother mention

Loc 296 | Highlight

"Our first home, in the suburb of Weston, which I barely remember —"

Note: memory setup

Loc 296 | Highlight

"funny what you don't recall."

Note: this is why this paragraph is funky. its an example of our interpretations of our memories in the past

Loc 293 | Highlight Continued

what lmao .

disconnect between hal and narration

Loc 293 | Highlight

"I cannot make myself understood. 'I am not just a jock,' I say slowly. Distinctly. 'My transcript for the last year might have been dickied a bit, maybe, but that was to get me over a rough spot. The grades prior to that are de moi.' My eyes are closed; the room is silent. 'I cannot make myself understood, now.' I am speaking slowly and distinctly. 'Call it something I ate.'"

Note: first time hearing hal talk. hmm. the narration is very different.

Loc 290 | Highlight

"Mr. Incandenza, Hal, please just explain to me why we couldn't be accused of using you, son. Why nobody could come and say to us, why, look here, University of Arizona, here you are using a boy for just his body, a boy so shy and withdrawn he won't speak up for himself, a jock with doctored marks and a store-bought application."

Note: ironic.

Loc 288 | Highlight

"The yellow Dean has leaned so far forward that his tie is going to have a horizontal dent from the table-edge, his face sallow and kindly and no-shit-whatever:"

Note: physical description shows power dynamic

Loc 283 | Highlight

"The sort of all-defensive game Schtitt used to have me play: the best defense:"

Note: first mention of tennis coach/style

Loc 277 | Highlight

"... a bright,"

Note: cutoff dialogue technique

Loc 273 | Highlight

"Alpha of the pack here and way more effeminate than he'd seemed at first, standing hip-shot with a hand on his waist, walking with a roll to his shoulders, jingling change as he pulls up his pants as he slides into the chair still warm from C.T.'s bottom, crossing his legs in a way that inclines him well into my personal space, so that I can see multiple eyebrow-tics and capillary webs in the oysters below his eyes and smell fabric-softener and the remains of a breath-mint turned sour."

Note: salesmen

Loc 270 | Highlight

"but they are mine; de moi."

Note: french flex

Loc 270 | Highlight

"not quite on the application's instructed subject of Most Meaningful Educational Experience Ever."

Note: more academic bs

Loc 266 | Highlight

"— that we've known in processing several prior applications through Coach White's office that the Enfield School is operated, however impressively, by close relations of first your brother, who I can still remember the way White's predecessor Maury Klamkin wooed that kid, so that grades' objectivity can be all too easily called into question —"

Note: narration keeps interrupting the head with hals monologues. missing what the admin said . but nothing matters at the end

Read Along: Infinite Jest, P. 3 - 8 ….

1. Introduction to Hal and Initial Observations

- Quote: “You are Harold Incandenza, eighteen, date of secondary-school graduation approximately one month from now, attending the Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, Massachusetts, a boarding school, where you reside.”

- Thoughts:

- Sets a formal, almost detached tone.

- Hal’s identity is defined by external labels—his school, age, status — sounds like Stewie Griffen. Lmao

- Reflects the weight of expectations and pressures he faces, particularly in academia and sports.

2. Meta-Irony in Reading Hal’s Perspective

- Quote: “The issues my office faces with the application materials on file from you, Hal, involve some test scores!… The Admissions staff is looking at standardized test scores from you that are, as I’m sure you know and can explain, are, shall we say… subnormal.?”

- Thoughts:

- Hal’s analysis traps both him and the reader in loops of self-reflection.

- Wallace uses this “meta” style to make us overthink the process of reading, almost poking fun at it.

- Creates a shared experience with Hal—our own “trap” of trying to over-interpret every layer. I need to start counting the traps, it’s at least one to two per page so far.

3. Academic Satire and Hyper-Specialized Essays

- Quote: “The monograph’s length application is just extra essays that they don’t need, such as our neoclassical assumption and contemporary prescriptive grammar, the implications of post-Fourier transformation for a holographically mimetic cinema, the emergence of heroic stasis of broadcast entertainment.”

- Thoughts:

- Ridicules academia’s tendency toward jargon and intellectual posturing, while also being astute and acuity aware of ivory tower absurdity

- Satire on how academia often values complexity and exclusivity over clarity or purpose.

- Wallace points out the absurdity in trying too hard to sound intelligent or exclusive.

4. Dean’s Authority vs Hal’s Vulnerability

- Quote: “The dean with the flat yellow face has leaned forward, his lips drawn back from his teeth in what I see as concern.”

- Thoughts:

- Illustrates the power imbalance between Hal and the dean—a closed, authoritative figure vs. Hal’s fragile self.

- Hal feels exposed and scrutinized, echoing his larger struggle with self-doubt.

- Captures the intense, often dehumanizing pressure of institutional judgment.

5. Deadpan Humor and Exaggerated Normalcy

- Quote: “C.I. has crossed his arms casually; their triceps’ flesh is webbed with mottle in the air-conditioned sunlight.”

- Thoughts:

- Hal’s deadpan observation makes an ordinary moment feel absurdly serious.

- Highlights Wallace’s humor in turning trivial details into sources of exaggerated tension.

- Shows the contrast between how characters perceive small actions and the overblown significance Hal assigns them.

6. Over-Analysis Trap and Meta-Reflection

- Quote: “The coach, in a slight accent neither British nor Australian, is telling C.T. that the whole application-interface process, while usually just a pleasant formality, is probably best accentuated by letting the applicant speak up for himself.”

- Thoughts:

- Wallace plays with word choice to make readers overthink (“accentuate” vs. “facilitate”). While constantly superimposing super formal speech with flourishes.

- Satire on how easily we can fall into obsessive interpretation, even over single words. What I talked about traps above.

- Reflects Hal’s (and perhaps my) inability to simply accept things at face value.

7. Quadrivium-Trivium Model and Academic Prestige

- Quote: “It’s focused on the total needs of the player and student, founded by a towering intellectual figure whom I hardly need name, here, and based by him on the rigorous Oxbridge Quadriv-ium-Trivium curricular model.”

- Thoughts:

- Wallace mocks academia’s obsession with tradition and prestige.

- Shows the emptiness behind “important-sounding” concepts when they are used merely to appear sophisticated.

- Highlights the irony of academic elitism—the institution’s prestige feels almost absurdly exaggerated.

8. Coach’s Interjection to Break Over-Analysis

- Quote: “DeLint is moving toward the tennis coach, who is shaking his head.”

- Thoughts:

- A humorous break in the over-analysis, with the coach’s head shake as if telling us to lighten up.

- Wallace might be hinting that we should enjoy the story without needing to dissect every detail.

- Adds a human touch, gently reminding us to find humor and ease, even in a dense narrative.

---

And I’m only 8 pages in…. Here are more quotes that made me giggle or has fun tools of the trade.

Opening Scene Quotes

[Location 137]

"Three faces have resolved into place above summer-weight sportcoats and half-Windsors across a polished pine conference table shiny with the spidered light of an Arizona noon."

[Location 138]

"three Deans — of Admissions, Academic Affairs, Athletic Affairs."

[Location 139]

"I believe I appear neutral, maybe even pleasant, though I've been coached to err on the side of neutrality and not attempt what would feel to me like a pleasant expression or smile."

[Location 142]

"My fingers are mated into a mirrored series of what manifests, to me, as the letter X."

[Location 144]

"The tennis coach jingles pocket-change. There is something vaguely digestive about the room's odor."

[Location 150-151]

"Harold Incandenza, eighteen, [...] His reading glasses are rectangular, court-shaped, the sidelines at top and bottom. 'You are, according to Coach White and Dean [unintelligible], a regionally, nationally, and continentally ranked junior tennis player, a potential O.N.A.N.C.A.A. athlete of substantial promise, recruited by Coach White via correspondence with Dr. Tavis here commencing… February of this year.' [...] 'You have been in residence at the Enfield Tennis Academy since age seven.'"

[Location 156]

"'Coach White informs our offices that he holds the Enfield Tennis Academy's program and achievements in high regard, that the University of Arizona tennis squad has profited from the prior matriculation of several former E.T.A. alumni, one of whom was one Mr. Aubrey F. deLint, who appears also to be with you here today. Coach White and his staff have given us —'"

[Location 168]

"'I've been asked to add that Hal here is seeded third, Boys' 18-and-Under Singles, in the prestigious WhataBurger Southwest Junior Invitational out at the Randolph Tennis Center —' says what I infer is Athletic Affairs, his cocked head showing a freckled scalp."

[Location 174]

"believe scheduled for 0830"

[Location 178-179]

"C.T. has crossed his arms casually; their triceps' flesh is webbed with mottle in the air-conditioned sunlight. 'You sure did. Bill.' He smiles. The two halves of his mustache never quite match. [...] let me say if I may that Hal's excited, excited to be invited for the third year running to the Invitational again, to be back here in a community he has real affection for, to visit with your alumni and coaching staff, to have already justified his high seed in this week's not unstiff competition, to as they say still be in it without the fat woman in the Viking hat having sung, so to speak, but of course most of all to have a chance to meet you gentlemen and have a look at the facilities here."

[Location 189]

"'Is Hal all right, Chuck?' Athletic Affairs asks. 'Hal just seemed to… well, grimace. Is he in pain? Are you in pain, son?'"

[Location 198-199]

"while usually just a pleasant formality, is probably best accentuated by letting the applicant speak up for himself. [...] I presume it's probably facilitate that the tennis coach mistook for accentuate, though accelerate, while clunkier than facilitate, is from a phonetic perspective more sensible, as a mistake."

[Location 202-203]

"His own fingers look like they mate as my own four-X series dissolves and I hold tight to the sides of my chair. [...] need candidly to chat re potential problems with my application, they and I, he is beginning to say. He makes a reference to candor and its value. 'The issues my office faces with the application materials on file from you, Hal, involve some test scores.' [...] 'The Admissions staff is looking at standardized test scores from you that are, as I'm sure you know and can explain, are, shall we say… subnormal.'"

[Location 208-209]

"And surely the little aviarian figure at right is Athletics, [...] an I'm-eating-something-that-makes-me-really-appreciate-the-presence-of-whatever-I'm-drinking-along-with-it look that spells professionally Academic reservations."

[Location 211]

"The incongruity between Admissions's hand- and face-color is almost wild. '— verbal scores that are just quite a bit closer to zero than we're comfortable with,'"

[Location 219-220]

"the appearance of incongruity if not out-right shenanigans.' [...] 'Surely by incredible you meant very very very impressive.

Essential Wei Reading List: Foundations to Practice

Affiliate Disclosure

Please note: This reading list contains affiliate links to Bookshop.org. As an affiliate, I may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases made through these links at no additional cost to you. I only recommend books I genuinely believe will add value to your journey, and your support through these links helps sustain this educational resource while supporting independent bookstores. Thank you!

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Core Foundation Texts (Start Here)

1. Understanding Media - Marshall McLuhan
Crucial for understanding how media affects messages and our perceptions.
2. Against Interpretation - Susan Sontag
Key ideas for cultural criticism and analysis.
3. Discipline and Punish - Michel Foucault
Important for exploring power structures and institutions.
4. Being and Time - Martin Heidegger
Foundational work on existence and meaning.

Cultural Analysis & Identity

5. Notes of a Native Son - James Baldwin
Insightful look at identity, race, and culture.
6. The Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan
Important view on Chinese-American identity and culture.
7. Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates
Modern discussion of race, identity, and society.
8. The Chinese in America - Iris Chang
Thorough history of the Chinese-American experience.

Content Creation & Style Development

9. On Writing Well - William Zinsser
Key text for clear and effective writing.
10. Show Your Work! - Austin Kleon
Guide for sharing creative work and engaging an audience.
11. Bird by Bird - Anne Lamott
Essential for finding your unique voice and practicing consistently

Critical Theory & Analysis

12. Ways of Seeing - John Berger
Essentials of visual culture and perception
13. A Thousand Plateaus - Deleuze and Guattari
Framework for cross-disciplinary thinking
14. The Culture of Critique - Kevin MacDonald
In-depth look at cultural criticism

Humor & Engagement

15. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again - David Foster Wallace
Combines humor with deep thought
16. Born a Crime - Trevor Noah
Uses humor to address serious issues

Community & Connection

17. The Art of Community - Charles Vogl
Guide to creating strong communities
18. Bowling Alone - Robert Putnam
Study of community and social ties

Strategic Growth

19. Range - David Epstein
Benefits of broad knowledge
20. Antifragile - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
How to thrive in uncertainty

Digital Age & Evolution

21. The Shallows - Nicholas Carr
Impact of digital media
22. The Content Trap - Bharat Anand
Strategy for digital contenT

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Reading Order Recommendations

First Month

1. Understanding Media
2. On Writing Well
3. Show Your Work!
4. The Art of Community

Second Month

1. Against Interpretation
2. Ways of Seeing
3. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
4. The Content Trap

Third Month

1. Notes of a Native Son
2. The Joy Luck Club
3. Between the World and Me
4. Born a Crime

Advanced Phase

1. Discipline and Punish
2. Being and Time
3. A Thousand Plateaus
4. The Culture of Critique

Study Tips

1. Read Actively

• Take good notes

• Highlight main ideas

• Write short summaries in the margins

2. Practice Integration

• Link ideas from different books

• Use insights in your work

• Experiment with concepts in your content

3. Review Cycle

• Read the introduction carefully

• Skim the content first

• Read deeply

• Review and summarize

4. Implementation Strategy

• Create content from each book

• Test ideas with your audience

• Improve understanding through practice

Note-Taking Framework

• Main Ideas

• Practical Uses

• Content Ideas

• Notable Quotes

• Connection Points

Remember: This is more than a reading list; it's a development program. Each text builds a deeper understanding of content creation, cultural analysis, and community building.

Phaedo, Plato, and James Baldwin: Rebirth

On Threads, my friend posted a quote by Baldwin:

“It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.”

Reading Baldwin’s reflection reminded me of a Platonic dialogue, where they mentioned the river Styx.

---

In Phaedo:

“when the dead arrive at the place to which the genius of each severally conveys them, first of all they have sentence passed upon them, as they have lived well and piously or not. And those who appear to have lived neither well nor ill, go to the river Acheron, and mount such conveyances as they can get, and are carried in them to the lake, and there they dwell and are purified of their evil deeds, and suffer the penalty of the wrongs which they have done to others, and are absolved, and receive the rewards of their good deeds according to their deserts.”

---

Baldwin describes a visceral process of unlearning, the painful shedding of internalized racism and homophobia. This isn't mere self-improvement but a fundamental transformation, a reclaiming of humanity from the weight of imposed beliefs.

His words echo an ancient metaphor found in Plato's Phaedo, where souls journey across the River Styx. In the dialogue, Plato writes: "when the dead arrive at the place to which the genius of each severally conveys them... there they dwell and are purified of their evil deeds, and suffer the penalty of the wrongs which they have done to others, and are absolved." This crossing represents transformation - a shedding of earthly impurities for renewal.

Charon carries souls across the river Styx by Alexander Dmitrievich Litovchenko.

Where Plato wrestles with philosophical questions of the soul, Baldwin confronts the lived reality of racism, homophobia, and systemic oppression. His metaphor of "vomiting up all the filth" grounds abstract ideas of purification in embodied experience. The "filth" represents societal beliefs aimed at dehumanization, and his liberation comes through their violent rejection.

Both describe a necessary death of false knowledge. Plato's souls achieve understanding through divine purification. Baldwin reclaims his identity through the expulsion of internalized oppression. But while Plato seeks transcendence, Baldwin fights for his right to exist fully within this world.

Baldwin's metaphor reaches beyond personal transformation to critique the systems perpetuating racism and homophobia. His act of self-liberation becomes a challenge to power structures that shape identity. The mythological crossing of the Styx transforms into a story of resistance and reclamation.

"Walking on earth as though I had a right to be here"

James Baldwin at his home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, southern France, in 1979. Image Credit: Ralph Gatti/AFP via Getty Images

Baldwin's words remind us that true liberation demands we confront uncomfortable truths. Only by rejecting beliefs can we claim our place in the world as complete and authentic beings. His "vomiting up all the filth" becomes more than metaphor, it's an urgent call to shed the poisonous ideas society forces us to swallow, and through that violent rejection, find our way home to ourselves.

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Book recommendations

1. “The Fire Next Time” by James Baldwin
2. “Notes of a Native Son” by James Baldwin
3. “Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin
4. “Phaedo” by Plato
5. “The Souls of Black Folk” by W.E.B. Du Bois
6. “Black Skin, White Masks” by Frantz Fanon
7. “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Paulo Freire

Out of Office Highlights

NOTES FROM

Out of Office

Anne Helen Petersen

October 23, 2024

Between 1979 and 1996, more than forty-three million jobs were eliminated from the U.S. economy. In the 1980s, the composite of laid-off workers tilted more heavily toward manufacturing and other “lower skilled” jobs, whose pay averaged under $50,000 a year.5 Between 1990 and 1996, that number shifted: the majority of people who lost their jobs were “white collar,” and they lost them at nearly double the rate that they had in the 1980s. Over that same period,

October 23, 2024

“There’s an entropy associated with meetings,” Eric Porres, who runs the company MeetingScience, told us. “They take on a life of their own. We’ve been trained and conditioned to schedule meetings for half an hour to an hour. When we look at a company and they have all of their meetings in thirty-, sixty-, ninety-minute chunks, we say, wow, you have a big problem. You don’t have any time to process. And when do you actually get any work done?” MeetingScience gathers the wealth of information available through a company’s digital calendars and analyzes it alongside a thirteen-question anonymized survey, sent to individuals after every meeting, about what just happened. Was there an agenda? Did you know what was expected of you? Were there clear next steps? Was the meeting satisfying? Was it important for me to be there? Did it start on time, or did it start late?

October 23, 2024

The tech company Hugo, which bundles meeting scheduling and notes, tracks the number of meetings per week among its clients. As you’d expect, the numbers over the course of the pandemic were telling: Between January and May, the average number of meetings climbed from 12 to around 15, before dipping to around 14.5 for most of the summer. But in early September, the number started climbing again; by November, users were averaging 16.5 meetings per week: more than 3 meetings a day, every day of the week. (Microsoft Teams data shows that this meeting surge was global: between February 2020 and February 2021, average Teams meeting time rose from thirty-five minutes to forty-five minutes.)17 Hugo’s users began meeting more when they hit remote, and then spiked again right as kids went back to school: the more stressed we became, the more meeting we called. In our heads, meetings are usually drawn up in an attempt at having more control over a project or a particular decision.

October 23, 2024

Overanalysis and optimization always risk squeezing the vibrancy and serendipity out of work. Which is why you don’t necessarily need a company to help you, but you do need perspective. Regular meetings should be held up to the light and examined, even the ones that have been on the books for years. It’s not just figuring out the meeting’s goal. It’s figuring out whether a meeting is the best way to achieve it in the first place. Many companies have become so reliant on meetings as their primary mode of accomplishment—and demonstration of busyness—that it’s hard to imagine alternatives. Or, if they do, they feel too technically advanced for broad-scale adoption. You’d be surprised, though, just how old-fashioned some of these fixes feel.

October 23, 2024

This isn’t an advertisement for a specific piece of technology, but it is a full-throated endorsement for non-text-based conversations (especially ones where you don’t also have to stare at yourself in a small box in the corner). Video can convey tone in a way that no number of emojis quite can. Our brains, after all, use visual and audio cues like facial expressions to add context to words. Visuals can clear up confusion, demonstrate seriousness, and, most important, help set our minds at ease. According to Roderick M. Kramer, who studies organizational behavior, their absence while working from home can exacerbate uncertainty about status, which can lead to overprocessing information.18 In short, we get paranoid about whether we’re doing good work, about to be fired, annoying our managers, and so on. But

October 23, 2024

And yet productivity went up; employees felt as productive as during the five-day schedule, if not more so, and employee stress levels improved. And this included developers and engineers: actual coding days went down (3.4 to 2.7 for product; 3.2 to 2.9 for mobile and infrastructure), but “productive impact,” a.k.a. how much they were actually getting done, increased significantly and in the case of infrastructure and mobile doubled.21 Buffer opted to extend the trial another six months, to see if it was sustainable, and in February 2021 decided to officially adopt the schedule moving forward.

October 23, 2024

Perry started thinking about what an equitable, flexible, simple, and intuitive system for leave and benefits would look like. It would have to be transparent but also have tolerance for error and even, theoretically, misuse. He called it “universal design for work-life balance.” “Universal design” is the term for the movement to create spaces, tools, and lived environments that are accessible to all, regardless of age or ability. The thing about universal design is that its benefits are not simply for those who need it most. A curb cut in the sidewalk, for example, makes the sidewalk accessible for wheelchair users, but it also makes navigating the space infinitely easier for people on bikes or pushing strollers.

October 23, 2024

As a corporate strategy, “flexibility” transformed so many workplaces into sites of anxiety where productivity-obsessed workers lived in anticipation of the next massive layoff. At the same time, it was repackaged, often to those same workers, as the future: we laid you off, but we’ll give you your job back, as a “flexible” subcontractor, only with fewer benefits and less stability, and you’ll have little choice but to take it.

October 23, 2024

Productivity bibles like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People functioned, in Gregg’s words, as “a form of training through which workers become capable of the ever more daring acts of solitude and ruthlessness necessary to produce career competence.”11 But the other thing they taught was satisfaction, or at least a demeanor that approximated it. Life at a flexible company might be unstable, with ever-shifting demands, goals, and expectations for future pay and benefits. But successful workers were the ones who could roll with it: make themselves flexible and remain mostly upbeat. The

October 23, 2024

The “burdens” of flexibility “have been unequally distributed,” the tech employment scholar Carrie M. Lane writes. “Employees are expected to become infinitely mutable while employers become increasingly rigid, demanding that workers ask nothing more than a paycheck—no benefits, no training, no personal accommodations, no promise of security or upward mobility.”15 Even the bare minimum employer responsibility (for example, paying workers for their labor) has been recast as a form of benevolence. Workers should not feel entitled to wages: they should, instead, be grateful.

October 23, 2024

Consider just how much work you’ve had to do, how disciplined you’ve had to remain, year in and year out, in order to achieve and maintain that ideal. There’s no true allowance for sickness, or sadness, or caregiving. And, if you take time off, it’s often just an opportunity for someone to prove they’re more flexible—and thus more valuable—than you.

October 23, 2024

But instead of making us work efficiently—and, by extension, less—all of this tech has mostly just made us work more. With time, that amount of output isn’t considered above and beyond. Spending an extra two hours on work at home isn’t a way to distinguish yourself. It’s just the norm. It’s keeping up. It’s treading water. But it’s also, in the vast majority of cases, uncompensated labor.

October 23, 2024

But they’re one of the main things that people say they miss about the office: unanticipated, organic interactions. But what people are actually missing is twofold. Some actually crave disruption and dynamism in their days, a symptom that they probably actually don’t need to be in the office, in one place, as much as they are. But most want generative, collaborative conversations, the sort that make the work you’re doing feel, well, alive. It’s not the drive-by meeting itself that’s essential. It’s the space for authentic idea generation and human interaction. And that can be found in any number of places, if we actually allow ourselves to let go of our limited ideas of where it can happen.

October 23, 2024

When Perpetual Guardian first implemented the program, some workers took off Mondays, some Fridays, others loved a day off in the middle of the workweek, but everyone took it, from the newest hires to the most senior managers. The effect was startling: at the end of a two-month trial, productivity had risen 20 percent, and “work-life” balance scores rose from 54 percent to 78 percent. After the change was made permanent, overall revenue went up 6 percent, and profitability rose 12.5 percent. Other experiments have yielded similarly astounding results: at Microsoft Japan, a four-day workweek led to 40 percent gains in productivity; a 2019 study of 250 British companies with four-day weeks found that companies had saved an estimated £92 million, and 62 percent of companies reported that employees took fewer sick days.19

October 23, 2024

For the Microsoft Japan trial, all meetings were thirty minutes or less and limited to five people—the logic being that if more than five people needed to be there, it should be an announcement, not a meeting.

October 23, 2024

The real innovation of the four-day week, like other flexible, intentional schedules, is the conscious exchange of faux productivity for genuine, organization-wide, collaborative work. For the four-day companies, that strategy was so effective that it opened up an entire day. For your company, that exchange might open up the mornings, or the middle of the day, or anytime after 2:00, depending on the rhythms of your business and your employees’ lives. If that sounds like magic, it’s not because it’s actually mystical, or make-believe; it’s a sign of how thoroughly you’ve internalized a rigid understanding of how work works.

October 23, 2024

The reality of working from home—at least during a pandemic—has disabused them of that fantasy. But what they haven’t learned is that working from home is a discrete, defined skill. “If you’re going to give PowerPoint presentations, or draw blueprints, you see that as a skill, something you have to learn and apprentice at, get feedback on, and continue to learn,” Dowling said. “But no one has really thought about working from home as a skill: it’s not taught; it’s not addressed. It’s just sort of like, ‘Be on your laptop at home.’ And that’s just not sufficient.”

October 23, 2024

One answer is completing delegated tasks with accuracy and submitting them on time. But that’s too straightforward for a frazzled, anxious, pandemic brain. Instead, our stress makes it difficult to concentrate, and that difficulty is exacerbated by the growing number of meetings and emails and messages that other people’s frazzled, anxious, pandemic brains are sending us. You feel as if you were not getting enough done, and compensate by working more hours, even if they’re scattered, made inefficient by fatigue, alcohol, and other forms of distraction. It’s so incredibly easy to enter the fugue state where you always feel as if you are half working, half not.

October 23, 2024

Reading Ferriss’s book can feel cathartic, especially if you find yourself burned out or frustrated by your work situation. When he suggests strategically withholding productivity so that you get more done on days where you propose a “trial” work-from-home situation, it’s easy to smile at the puckish manipulation. But you can achieve Ferriss’s level of productivity only by ruthlessly off-loading tasks onto others (Ferriss has a whole section about outsourcing menial tasks to cheap virtual personal assistants based overseas) and constantly toeing the line of appropriate behavior—a strategy almost exclusively available to white men.

October 23, 2024

They’re simply not a sustainable option for the vast majority of workers, especially those who aren’t in senior positions, who are women, who are people of color, or who are disabled. For those groups, attempting to maintain them can lead to an office reputation as difficult, aloof, unresponsive, or the dreaded “such a millennial” or “not a team player.” It might mean getting passed over for promotions or, eventually, getting fired. You

October 23, 2024

When it became clear that emails and digital contact were hopping over those guardrails, leaders recognized that they could not depend on individual companies—or the individuals within them—to accomplish what was, in truth, a national goal. Legislation can slow the inertia of capitalist growth, but it cannot counteract it entirely. If you’re an “executive,” you’re allowed to violate the thirty-five-hour weekly cap. And non-executives break it all the time: a 2016 study found that 71.6 percent of French employees worked more than thirty-five hours a week.26

October 23, 2024

Respect for others’ time demands care, knowledge, and thoughtful implementation of policies and practices. Many team status meetings were set years ago, by someone who might not even be your manager anymore, often at a somewhat arbitrary time. Maybe it worked for everyone on the team then. But it has little relation to the needs of your team now, or when people’s schedules become even more flexible.

October 23, 2024

Exercising respect means continual consideration of a meeting’s utility, its place in the day, and its form. Same for email: Does this need to be an email? Do I need to send it now? How would I feel if I received this email right now? How can I make it so that it arrives in my colleague’s in-box at a time that will be more respectful of their time?

October 23, 2024

Front allows users to integrate workflows, chat, and “next steps” into email; in companies dealing with tens of thousands of customer service emails, for example, it allows workers to delegate responsibility, action, and follow-up on each one.

October 23, 2024

But so much of that mindset is simply a long-running coping mechanism for workplace precarity. To be essential, at least in this office job capacity, is to build a protective shell around yourself during times of economic insecurity. It’s a survival strategy, built on fear and desperation. And it makes everyone miserable, no one more so than yourself. Front’s real utility is its ability to transform email from a personal burden into a collective, collaborative task. To do that, however, you have to actually trust your colleagues and be less precious about your own essential role in the process.

October 23, 2024

Say an entire company adopts a force-field approach to email. A culture begins to develop around time off. Those taking time off will be more aware of who will pick up their work burden. They’ll be more appreciative—and ideally more respectful—of others’ time. There might be more coordination, more care, and more respect involved in handing over responsibilities. More important, colleagues in a force-field situation might be more mindful that their requests will fall to others. At its best, it could trigger others to inventory their demands on others’ time.

October 23, 2024

If someone tries to work during a break, chiding them and letting it happen just further normalizes the behavior. When an employee takes time off, not working becomes their job. So how can your team actively set expectations to take that job as seriously as their everyday one? Whatever the policies are, they have to be more than mealymouthed “suggestions” and arrive in collaboration with workers themselves.

October 23, 2024

With time, she grew accustomed to the daily cadences of her job. But she still felt like a stranger in her own company, whose remote policies were haphazard at best. To send chats, employees used an outdated version of Skype; in Zoom meetings, almost all co-workers left their cameras off. Months into her job, she could identify co-workers only by their chat avatars and voices. At one point, she says, she began “obsessively stalking” her company’s Glassdoor reviews, just to try to get a sense of the company culture. She was, by her own admission, unmoored, totally unmentored, and insecure, with no way to learn from her colleagues. It’s one thing to start a new job remotely. It’s another to start your entire career that way.

October 23, 2024

For Kiersten, who has never set foot in her office, her professional life has come to feel like an abstraction—to the point that she’s sometimes not even sure if she’s employed (she is). Worse, her job feels almost completely transactional, with her conversations limited, in her words, to “exchanging information in pursuit of an immediate, work-related goal.”

October 23, 2024

Small talk, passing conversations, even just observing your manager’s pathways through the office, may seem trivial, but in the aggregate they’re far more valuable than any form of company handbook. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be translated into the remote or flexible work environment.

October 23, 2024

We asked early career workers what resources they wished they could have had during those early pandemic months, and the responses were full of helpful ideas for any company. Most important, they wanted a clearly delineated mentor who—crucially—was not also their supervisor or in charge of evaluating their performance. One suggested a dual mentor program that paired new employees with a co-worker in a similar position in the company who could offer advice on more quotidian concerns, as well as a more senior employee who could provide longer-term career advice.

October 23, 2024

For organizations with a hybrid approach, where employees split time between home and the office, some of these problems may quickly abate. A few days in the office won’t fix these larger issues. But intentional design could. Truly flexible work may seem breezy and carefree, but it’s actually the product of careful planning and clear communication. It requires peering around corners and attempting to identify needs and problems before they fester. It may seem onerous at first, especially when “let’s just go back to the way things were before” seems like such a clear option

October 23, 2024

But it’s not. We’ve moved past that point. If we’re serious about building a sustainable future of work, we can’t leave a whole swath of employees behind. They’ll just develop bad habits and waste endless hours trying to piece together the rules of the game when someone could’ve just told them.

October 23, 2024

You can temporarily and authentically lower productivity expectations. Or you hire slightly more than enough people, thereby building in the expectation that a percentage of your workforce could be taking time off at any moment, and it wouldn’t overload the system. Many companies are theoretically set up this way: an average employee’s baseline of assigned tasks should take up, say, 80–85 percent of their day, leaving them available to take on 15 to 20 percent more work when a colleague is sick, on vacation, or on leave. As many of our survey respondents confessed, they usually do their core work over a short period of time anyhow.

October 23, 2024

As will become clear in the next chapter, companies spend millions of dollars on consultants every year trying to hit that sweet spot, and historically it usually means cutting middle management and support staff. The end result: employees are increasingly forced to self-manage and do the essential support work of those who were let go, often quite poorly, instead of what they were actually hired to do. Cue: ever-expanding work hours, and the message that if you’re not getting your work done during traditional hours, the failure, again, is yours, for poor prioritizing.

October 23, 2024

That NCR has such a durable corporate culture that it can survive literal airstrikes? Or is it that NCR’s employees are so dedicated that amid unspeakable death and destruction they feel the need—not to be with or tend to family—but to help rebuild a factory? Deal and Kennedy seem to acknowledge the outlandishness of the anecdote. But that doesn’t keep them from arguing that it remains one of the pantheon of “myths and legends of American business.”

October 23, 2024

But starting in the early 1970s, a wave of recessions and economic stagnation shook even the strongest of those companies’ foundations. Behemoths of respective industries entered the decade fat and happy and naive—characteristics that, under the unforgiving eye of a slumping economy, quickly morphed into bloated, occasionally lazy, and flat-footed in the race to compete globally. Their solution, as we noted in the last chapter, was cuts. In the first eight years of the 1980s, Fortune 500 companies cut more than 300 million jobs, many of them the stable, middle-management positions that had not only helped expand the modern middle class but functioned as the organizational sentries of culture.

October 23, 2024

s tendency to treat management as an “add-on”—as opposed to an actual job, requiring a refined skill set—is, as the Nightingales found, rampant in start-ups, both new and long solidified. But it’s also common in cash-strapped nonprofits, in academic departments (see department chairs), and in “legacy” companies that overcorrected the sprawling, management-heavy org charts of the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, people often dealt with bad management by expanding the org chart with even more badly trained managers. Now we deal with it by ignoring it. Many of these companies view middle management as bloat, waste, what David Graeber would call a “bullshit job.” But that’s because bad managing is waste; you’re paying someone more money to essentially annoy everyone around them. And the more people experience that sort of bad management, and think of it as “just the way it is,” the less they’re going to value management in general. The key, then, is to think of how to treat management as a discrete, valuable skill: a deliverable that contributes to the overall value and resiliency of your organization. Otherwise, managers will continue to feel like deadweight, no matter how flexible an[…]

October 23, 2024

They found that remote managers they surveyed had an average of about 4.87 direct reports. That might not sound like much, but it was overwhelming most managers as they attempted to deal with 5 different emotionally complex human beings, all under stress and with their own needs and demands. Worse yet, 21.5 percent of the remote managers they spoke with had less than one year of management experience when mandatory working from home began. They’d stumbled on the same problem as the Nightingales had: managers were under-trained, under-experienced, overworked, and forced into a stressful new reality. As a result, everyone was suffering. “To be a good manager, you need to be emotionally intelligent,” Pandiya told us. “It’s our whole company thesis: the emotional intelligence of the managers is what makes a company’s culture miserable or excellent.

October 23, 2024

The secret to good culture and even good management isn’t some weekend off-site or even a fancy piece of technology. As Tan put it, “There’s no way to Ping-Pong table or happy hour your way out of it.” Analytics won’t magically turn you into a better manager. You can use them to inform and transform your own behavior, but only if you actually have a vested interest in managing with more empathy and intentionality. We’re all figuring out what our jobs are going to look like in this new reality, and if we do it on our own, remote work will continue to look like the anxious, endless jumble of the pandemic year. The process is going to require a significant amount of experimentation and grace, communication and transparency.

October 23, 2024

Kill the Monoculture In 2020, 92.6 percent of CEOs on the Fortune 500 were white.36 A survey conducted that same year of more than forty thousand workers at 317 companies found that while white men make up just 35 percent of the entry-level workforce, they compose 66 percent of the C-suite.37 For every one hundred men who were promoted to manager, only fifty-eight black women and seventy-one Latina women were promoted. Only 38 percent of respondents in entry-level management positions were women of any race. You’ve heard these statistics, or something approximating them, before. No matter how many diversity, equity, and inclusion workshops your organization requires, if your leaders and managers aren’t truly diverse, then the monoculture will prevail.

October 23, 2024

Left to its own devices, monoculture will self-sow and replicate itself endlessly. The things that a white male, for example, might understand as the hallmarks of “good leadership” and “good management” are the things that feel like good leadership and management to him—characteristics that can manifest themselves in everything from standards of professionalism to tone of voice. He will naturally promote, elevate, or otherwise privilege workers with those attributes and marginalize or ignore those without them. Frequently, those perpetuating the monoculture aren’t even aware they’re doing it. But this is how monoculture persists: people endlessly promoting people like them for the rest of time

October 23, 2024

Olson’s solution almost feels like a cheat code. Her organization, We Are Rosie, works as a twenty-first-century version of a long- and short-term temp firm, connecting more than six thousand workers in the marketing field with companies and agencies across the world. Some of these “Rosies,” as employees are called, work for a few weeks on a “pop-up” project at an organization. Some work on political campaigns. Others become long-term placements at legacy organizations, from Bloomberg to Procter & Gamble. But We Are Rosie is not a traditional subcontractor. It takes the reality of the existing fissured workplace and attempts to stabilize it for its employees. Rosies can be remote and work from wherever they want. They can find actual part-time work that still pays well. They have a robust online support community. And if a company tries to cut corners on their contract, treat them poorly, or change the parameters of the project they’ve been hired to complete, they have an external advocate whose primary interest is retaining the Rosies, not the client. The result: a workforce that’s more than 90 percent remote, more than 40 percent Black, indigenous, and people of color[…]

October 23, 2024

Steven Aquino has been covering the technology industry from California for the last eight years. Before that, he was a preschool teacher, but his cerebral palsy made it difficult to meet the physical needs of his students, day in and day out. He looked for something he could do, ideally from home, that would be less physically taxing. He found it in writing and reporting. That shift to working from home “really changed who I am,” Aquino said. “I’m not always so tired anymore. Because I’m not so exhausted, and hurting, and thinking about it all the time, I’ve been able to concentrate on doing work I enjoy and take pride in.” Working from home also helped with Aquino’s social anxiety, which was exacerbated by his stutter. Still, the rhetoric of the current moment and the opportunities of flexible work have felt, in his words, disorienting. “We’re in a society where diversity and inclusion is a big subject right now,” he said. “And it’s inspiring to see. But it isn’t evenly distributed. We talk about inclusion, and then people like me are always off to the side, way over there.”

October 23, 2024

Forced into formalized, factory-like arrangements, laborers viewed six-hour workdays as onerous and perhaps only temporary until desired productivity had been achieved. Attendance was poor. Something had to be done to condition the workforce to perform strenuous labor on behalf of others. Owners began to impose fines and strict oversight because, as the social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff points out, “workers submitted to the physical rigors of factory discipline only when other alternatives had been exhausted.”3 Early factory designs were modeled after workhouses and prisons.4 Positive reinforcement was attempted, but the carrot was usually abandoned for the stick, even when it came to the children who increasingly filled the workforce.

October 23, 2024

Frederick Winslow Taylor. As an employee for Bethlehem Steel, Taylor lamented that workers were naturally lazy, and in order to counter their slovenly attitudes, he began to closely study their movements. He realized that coal shovelers with standardized shovel sizes could haul more weight without getting tired quickly. He timed others’ movements on the factory floor with a stopwatch, looking for extraneous movements to shave off their routines.

October 23, 2024

As office work began to expand over the course of the twentieth century, workers were sold on promises of comfort and satisfaction. Instead of toiling on a factory room floor, welding the same joint over and over again, you could sit in an office, filing the same report over and over again. Your collar, as Upton Sinclair famously put it, would be white; your work, at least in the vast majority of cases, would be salaried and steady.

October 23, 2024

The goal was to keep your head down, do what was expected of you (but nothing more!), and encourage others to do the same. Workers conformed, but they did so, according to Whyte, with a placid smile: they were undergirded by real support, whether in the form of their salary, their pension, or their enduring job security. “It is not the evils of organization life that puzzle him, but its very beneficence,” Whyte explained. “He is imprisoned in brotherhood.”

October 23, 2024

imprisonment extended to the home, where the ethos of organization man culture was instrumental in shaping the structures of (white) middle-class life. Early suburbs were quite literally built to accommodate and incubate organization men, their families, and their social lives, which became appendages of the company. Social status was cemented through perks like local country-club memberships, while the organization man’s family, especially his wife, became a form of corporate asset, valued for her ability to host and socialize. Employees were expected to leverage their family life to woo clients and executives alike. “Actually, it’s hard to tell where the workday ends and the ‘pleasure’ begins,” one manager told Whyte. “If you count all the time required for cocktails, dinners, conferences, and conventions, there is no end to work.

October 23, 2024

interests,” Bennett writes. “Dozens of managers stayed with their companies in the face of disastrous situations, working, and working hard. These were the loyal soldiers, staying at their posts no matter what.”17 These middle managers might have felt like loyal soldiers at the time, but they were blinded by loyalty and perks and a workplace “family” that didn’t allow them to see that their battalion had been moved to the front lines in order to be sacrificed.

October 23, 2024

Bennett described the ramifications of downsizing as “the same as suffering a divorce or a death in the family.”18 For the downsized, losing a job wasn’t just losing financial stability but expulsion from one’s social life. Losing the physical space of the office meant disconnection from their daily rhythms and the hundreds of seemingly inconsequential actions that defined their lives. Many had been with their companies for decades and had no idea how to begin to search for new jobs.

October 23, 2024

First, there’s the sheer number of hours we’re working. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average American works more hours than the average laborer in any peer nation. But unlike many Western nations, where increased productivity and wealth tend to lead to more leisure time, Americans continue to overwork themselves despite productivity gains. The OECD found that “the US works 269 more hours than its enormously wealthy economy would predict—making it by this measure the second-most overworked country in the world.”27

October 23, 2024

When the journalist Chika Ekemezie first began interviewing women of color who had made the shift to working from home during the pandemic, she was interested in the ways that remote work liberated black women workers from (white) standards of professionalism in their offices. “I’ve long been a believer that professionalism is just a synonym for obedience,” she wrote. “The less social capital you have, the more you are tethered to professionalism. It’s why Mark Zuckerberg can wear the same T-shirt to work while Black women are punished for wearing braids.”

October 23, 2024

Surveys conducted during the first ten months of the pandemic illustrate the complex relationship that some BIPOC employees have to remote work. Data collected by Slack’s Future Forum showed that black employees were working longer hours and experiencing higher stress around pressure to perform—a sign of a lack of mutual trust between the employees and the managers. But overall, black employees expressed a 29 percent increase in feelings of satisfaction and belonging working remotely, compared with being primarily in the office. One reason for this, respondents said, was that working from home meant less code switching or pressure to modulate their behavior for a boss or co-worker.

October 23, 2024

workers’ “offices” moved into their homes, though, some began to feel standards of professionalism extend to judgments about personal spaces.42 What do my books, my art, my clutter communicate about my competence as a worker? Who’s able to “professionalize” their home spaces for remote appearances, and who’s trying to angle the camera so that colleagues can’t tell they’re Zooming from their bedroom? Which employees feel empowered to say, “Screw it, I don’t care what my background is,” and who is spending outsize time thinking about it?

October 23, 2024

you already have a family, chosen or otherwise. And when a company uses that rhetoric, it is reframing a transactional relationship as an emotional one. It might feel enticing, but it is deeply manipulative and, more often than not, a means to narrativize paying people less to do more work. Family evokes not just a closeness but a devotion and a lasting bond, infused with sacrifice: family comes first.

October 23, 2024

Treating your organization as a family, no matter how altruistic its goals, is a means of breaking down boundaries between work and life, between paid labor and the personal. When you’re assaulted by powerful feelings of familial obligations from all sides—your actual family, but also your manager and your colleagues—it’s all the more difficult to prioritize. And in these situations, your actual family, which is often more forgiving, more malleable, and more attuned to your needs, will always suffer.

October 23, 2024

In reality, Taber argues, family farms are just as hierarchical, patriarchal, and exploitative of workers. She points to the historian Caitlin Rosenthal’s book, Accounting for Slavery, which traces how early slave plantation farms developed many of the management and accounting practices that still structure corporate life. The early agrarian economy was ruthless. It was also a family business, and the abolition of slavery didn’t magically destroy the power imbalances present in agriculture, even on family farms. “Working on a family farm means working in somebody’s home,” she argues. “There are tremendous gaps in wealth and status and power.”

October 23, 2024

they were also mentally miserable. Shoshana Zuboff spent hours interviewing workers in industrial settings for In the Age of the Smart Machine, but she also spent significant time with clerical workers. Like their blue-collar counterparts, the people she interviewed were adrift as the result of the fast technological changes of their jobs. Dentist office employees and insurance claims workers both saw their jobs, which were once social in nature, turn into glorified data entry positions. Cubicles visually walled them off from their colleagues, turning co-workers into an annoying buzz of wafting voices and telephone rings and keyboard clacks. As the job increasingly tethered them to their desks, they became more estranged from their managers, who in turn began to view them as drones. “We used to be able to see each other

October 23, 2024

from this fact: just group them in inviting environments that fit the company’s projected cultural values of “dynamism” and “community.” The office, in other words, as city—or, even better yet, as campus. Back in the 1970s, midwestern corporate giants like 3M and Caterpillar had designed sprawling, bucolic office parks for their thousands of employees, and early Silicon Valley companies like Xerox famously embraced the campus layout in the 1970s. These early campus environments made economic sense: they allowed companies to abandon costly urban real estate, and their location was easier to sell to prospective employees who planned to make their homes in the suburbs. But as William Whyte, author of

October 23, 2024

This is the nightmare scenario for Christie and the focus of much of Twitter’s early hybrid work planning. The solution? Destroy the FOMO and level the playing field by making the office less appealing. “You need to eliminate the idea that you’ll miss out if you’re not in the office,” she told us. Which is why they’re attempting to figure out ways to actively disincentivize people from coming back to the office full-time. “For a long time we’ve rallied around office perks and keeping people around and in the building,” she said. “Tech companies have celebrated and mastered it: come to the office, and you get fed, you get cared for.” That whole well-fed, well-cared-for campus philosophy has to change, Christie says. And it starts with the way the office is arranged and the expectations for people within those spaces. At Twitter, everyone inside the conference room will be asked to have an open laptop and dial into the meeting to make sure that remote participants can see all faces clearly and hear those who, in a different configuration, might have traditionally been far away from the conference microphone. The company plans to get rid[…]

October 23, 2024

That intentionality especially applies to groups that are usually left out of the design process. For leaders in the disability community, the remote work shift can feel fraught. Flexible work—an accommodation people with disabilities have been asking for, and denied, for decades—is more available than ever before. But there’s also a very real concern that the ability to work from home could end up making actual office spaces less inclusive. “What I don’t want to see is all employees who have disabilities relegated to working from home because newly designed spaces are even less accessible than they are now,” Maria Town, the president and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities, told us. It’s far too easy to imagine companies offering hybrid work but treating their disabled workers as fixed remote employees, thereby reinforcing the segregation of disabled people in the workforce.

October 23, 2024

Despite the miraculous technological affordances in our life, few of them have liberated us as advertised. And nowhere is that truer than our working lives, where today’s office tech has absorbed all of the formalities, anxieties, and oppressive mundanity of corporate life and ported them into every corner of our lives. The magical ability to see your co-workers face-to-face from anywhere in the world morphs into Zoom fatigue. The lively, collaborative instant messaging app gives way to an always-on surveillance tool that lives on company servers forever. A shared digital calendar evolves into a way for others to demand our time and attention until there’s none left for ourselves. The more efficient we become, the more overwhelmed we feel.

October 23, 2024

But almost all have unintended consequences, even when they’re not digital. From the open office plan to the Aeron chair, new ideas about the physical design of the office have reshaped not only our work environment but also our relationship to work. Innovations that were supposed to make the office more humane get co-opted, put through cost-efficiency calculators, and end up making the workplace feel even more like an overdesigned cage.

October 23, 2024

In 1981, while working on a book about the future of work, a young Harvard business professor named Shoshana Zuboff visited an old pulp mill. The mill’s bleach plant had recently been redesigned and outfitted with state-of-the-art technology, including digital sensors and monitors that fed signals to a shiny, new centralized control room, stocked with computers whirring away on brand-new microprocessors. To an outsider, it was all very impressive. But, as Zuboff quickly learned, the workers despised it.

October 23, 2024

Across the office world, workers were promised that these new technologies would make their lives easier. And yes, it was great not to have to type the same letter in triplicate. But many of the machines were situated in spaces that simply weren’t designed for them: mimeographs in rooms without ventilation, word processors in spaces without proper lighting. Thousands of workers reported migraines, severe eyestrain, cataracts, bronchitis, and allergies.16 Automation was literally making office workers sick.

October 23, 2024

As workers, we’ve always been assisted by technologies in some form. Those tools have become more sophisticated with time, but as their users we remain stubbornly human, and there are limits to the productivity that any body or mind can sustain. In the early 1980s, workers began to brush up against those limits but were driven into survival mode by the continued volatility of the American economy. It didn’t matter if the office sucked, if it made you feel ill, if it made you resent your co-workers. Attempts to organize, like those led by Nussbaum and Working Women, ran headfirst into a massive wave of antilabor sentiment and legislation. It felt as if there were no recourse, no way to push back. And so a whole generation of employees internalized their employers’ quest for productivity as their own, settled for less pay and less stability, and got back to work.

October 23, 2024

Reflecting today, Wilkinson’s less sure of that vision. Over the last two decades, his brilliant, innovative designs have rippled through the architecture world, as large-scale tech companies and smaller start-ups alike have cribbed elements of his team’s dynamic workplaces for their spaces. And Wilkinson’s increasingly aware of the insidious nature of those same perks. “Making the work environment more residential and domestic is, I think, dangerous,” he told us in late 2020. “It’s clever, seductive, and dangerous. It’s pandering to employees by saying we’ll give you everything you like, as if this was your home, and the danger is that it blurs the difference between home and office.”

October 23, 2024

The new campus design had a profound impact on company culture. Some of that impact was undeniably positive: he created work spaces where people genuinely want to be. But that desire becomes a gravitational pull, tethering the worker to the office for longer and longer, and warping previous perceptions of social norms.

October 23, 2024

With time, your colleagues become your closest friends and, with even more time, your only friends. It’s easier to hang out and have a social life at work, because everyone’s just already there. Life feels streamlined, more efficient. Even fun! Sometimes you’re just goofing off, killing time, kinda like back in the dorm room in college. Other times you’re working together, like those endless nights back in the library. Sometimes it’s a hazy hybrid of both, but it’s generative nonetheless. It’s the new organization-man-style company devotion, only the country club’s moved on campus.

October 23, 2024

When we moved away from New York, however, we came to realize how work friendships had functioned as Trojan horses for work to infiltrate and then engulf our lives. These relationships didn’t make work-life balance more difficult. Instead, they eclipsed the idea of balance altogether, because work and life had become so thoroughly intertwined that spending most of our waking moments with some extension of our corporation didn’t seem remotely odd or problematic. It was just . . . life.

October 23, 2024

In 2012, McKinsey was on the hunt for just such a solution: something, anything, that could decrease the email burden on workers and boost productivity among its clients. In a report from that year, its analysts found that the average knowledge worker spent 28 percent of their workweek managing email, and nearly 20 percent looking for internal information, or simply tracking down colleagues who could help with specific tasks. They believed some sort of collaborative chat—or “social technology”—had the potential to raise the productivity of knowledge workers by between 20 and 25 percent.31

October 23, 2024

Many companies own or lease their office space on long-term contracts. And when the space is there, sitting on the company’s expenses, it’s likely that management is going to incentivize employees to use it. And after we’ve been trapped in our homes hiding from a deadly virus for well over a year, we’re starved for social interaction. Many of our former commuting and workplace annoyances now sound like tiny luxuries. Some of us miss our colleagues. Others are just sick of their homes and apartments and, yes, even their partners and kids. The only question is, how?

October 23, 2024

To be clear, there’s no quick technological fix to what ails our workplace. What works best for Mills and his team of young, extremely online employees likely won’t work for Linda or Mark in accounting at a regional auto parts company. What Branch does best, however, is clarify what the office actually means to you. Because what a lot of us actually miss about the office—apart from not being in our claustrophobic homes—isn’t anything that practical. You might miss what tech executive and essayist Paul Ford calls its “secret, essential geography”: knowing the best place to cry, or find privacy, or use the bathroom.40 But what you really miss is a feeling. In some offices, that feeling is playfulness. In others, it’s siloed concentration. For Mills, it’s an empathic, ambient presence. “You can create connection just by being present, even if you’re not saying anything,” he told us. “People know if they do talk, somebody is there to listen.”

October 23, 2024

LARPing is a virulent pathogen, but there is an antidote. It’s just trust: cultivating it, communicating it, propagating more of it. When you don’t feel as though your manager trusts you—or, more specifically, how you make use of your time—you feel the need to underline just how much of it you’re dedicating to work. You update, you check in, you sneak in casual mentions of how late you worked on something. Maybe your manager actually does trust you but is incredibly bad at communicating it. Maybe they’ve never told you to update this way but have never told you to stop, either. What matters is that the distrust hangs in the virtual air, goading you to spend more time evidencing your work than actually working.

October 23, 2024

Microsoft found that between February 2020 and February 2021 the average Teams user was sending 45 percent more chats after hours and 50 percent of Teams users responded to chats within five minutes or less.42 More and more, we find ourselves in a fun-house mirror of performance anxiety that distorts our understanding of what work even is.

October 23, 2024

But one of the companies that has managed to do so has a lesson for the aspirationally flexible office. That company is GitLab, a software platform that helps web developers build and share open-source code. If you’ve read about remote work before, chances are you’ve seen it mentioned as an example. That’s because, even pre-pandemic, it had built its company on the premise of truly reimagining work. It doesn’t have any offices and its employees live everywhere, across many time zones. It’s fully distributed, fully remote, and fully asynchronous and it embraces a radical form of transparency.

October 23, 2024

Because employees are working at different hours in all parts of the world, the company relies on meticulous documentation. Employees take extensive notes on calls, meetings, memos, brainstorming sessions, you name it. Almost all of it, including many of the company’s internal deliberations and operations, is posted publicly. In practice, that means someone outside the company can get an idea of how its employees are building the product they might ultimately buy. Internally, it means that an employee in the marketing department can go into GitLab’s system and follow what the legal, comms, finance, and engineering teams are doing. They can read the team’s notes, monitor their objectives and reports, and follow along with colleagues as they work.

October 23, 2024

And that was before the pandemic. If financial firms don’t get on board with flexible work, Poleg predicts, that shift toward tech will only continue. This principle applies far beyond the world of finance. “Executives have had flex forever,” Michael Colacino, the head of the commercial real estate firm SquareFoot, told us. “I’ve been able to work from home on Friday since 1992. People always say that the future is here, it just hasn’t been evenly distributed. And that’s true: flexibility has just been segregated off into the C-suite and slightly downstream. So what you have happening now is that no one’s going to accept the five-days-in-the-office mentality. Now that they’ve tasted the forbidden fruit, there’s no going back. If you say to a millennial, come back 9:00 to 5:00, five days a week, people are just going to quit.” Finance execs know they should be figuring out new ways to work, but those who rose through the ranks one way, and endured a particular form of suffering and overwork, are reluctant to change their ways, no matter how much evidence is presented of the benefits of abandoning them. It’s irrational, it’s[…]

All Excerpts From

Anne Helen Petersen. “Out of Office.” Scribe Publications Pty Ltd, 2022-01-05. Apple Books.
This material may be protected by copyright.

It 2017

1. Beginning (First Few Minutes):

• Quote: “HOLY SHIT HE BIT OFF THE KID’S ARM.”

• Comment: You reacted strongly to the opening scene where Pennywise bites off Georgie’s arm, setting the tone for the horror you remembered but hadn’t experienced fully in previous viewings.

2. 23 Minutes In:

• Quote: “Not too scary.”

• Comment: You noted supernatural events involving a black kid and a Jewish pastor’s child but found it more eerie than terrifying, observing that it wasn’t as scary yet.

3. Library Scene:

• Quote: “The kid in the library got chased by a headless Penny.”

• Comment: You noted the chase scene with the headless figure and were surprised by how violent the movie was, particularly when one kid’s stomach was cut with a name.

4. Humor and Gross Moments:

• Quote: “It’s basically piss and shit LMAO.”

• Comment: You commented on the gross sewer water scene with humor, balancing the horror with lighter moments.

5. Eddie’s Mom and Themes of Control:

• Quote: “Like a lot of parents think they have the power to enforce but for a lot of the teenage kids they’ve already grown beyond that.”

• Comment: You analyzed Eddie’s mom and how the dynamic between parents and kids represents a broader theme of control and the kids’ growing independence.

6. The Bathroom Scene (52-55 Minutes):

• Quote: “There’s been a trope… the blood on the bathroom. Reminds me of The Shining.”

• Comment: You connected the bathroom blood scene with The Shining and interpreted the blood as a metaphor for the girl’s puberty, deepening the personal horror.

7. Georgie’s Discovery:

• Quote: “Ayyyy they found Georgie. But he’s still missing an arm.”

• Comment: You noted the unsettling moment when the kids find Georgie, but he’s still injured, which added a mix of relief and continued horror.

8. Final Fight Against Pennywise:

• Quote: “When they stop fearing, Pennywise gets weaker… When the kids fought back, he got hurt.”

• Comment: You observed the theme that Pennywise weakens when the kids let go of their fear, emphasizing the movie’s deeper message about the power of bravery.

9. End of Movie:

• Quote: “Oh wow. They were able to make the clown go away. Impressive!!!”

• Comment: You were impressed by the kids’ victory over Pennywise, appreciating the way they made him disappear through their unity and courage.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue: A Meditation on Memory, Identity, and the Weight of Time

"What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!'

"Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.' If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, 'Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?' would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?" - Nietzsche

There’s this moment in V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue that’s burned into my mind—Addie, standing in a world that refuses to remember her, her gaze heavy with the centuries she’s lived yet never truly existed. Similar to the days during Covid quarantine when daily choirs became an anchor point in our lives. It’s more than a tale about a deal with the devil; it’s an unraveling into what it means to live, to be seen, to leave a mark that endures. Schwab doesn’t just play with fantasy tropes here, she strips them down and uses them to ask the messiest questions about identity and the human need for connection.

It reminds me of Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence, this idea that we live the same life over and over, caught in a loop of both the beautiful and the tragic. But for Addie, it’s not just about living the same moments repeatedly; it’s about the ache of erasure. Her curse forces her to stare into Nietzsche’s abyss, where everything meaningful slips away. Her existence becomes a mirror to that void, a life of infinite days that no one remembers.

What hits hardest is that the real battle in Addie’s life isn’t with the devil who tricked her or even the people who forget her, it’s with herself. It’s the breakdown of identity when there’s no one around to reflect you back to yourself. Schwab peels away the layers of Addie’s soul, asking how much of who we are is defined by the people we interact with, by the memories they hold of us, by the marks we leave on their lives. When all of that is taken away, what’s left? Who are we when there’s no proof that we ever existed?

Addie’s transformation from a rebellious young woman in 18th-century France to this ageless wanderer feels like a Kafkaesque journey (like Rick Grimes in The Walking Dead), lost in an unending maze of choices that all seem wrong. Every decision she makes pushes her further into this gray area where morality blurs and selfhood feels like a losing game. You can see her sense of self fracturing under the weight of her own invisibility, and it makes you wonder: how much of yourself would you give up just to keep existing, even if no one else ever knew?

And that’s what The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue does so well. It refuses to give us easy answers. Schwab doesn’t let us settle into the comfort of right or wrong, good or evil. Instead, she plunges us into Sartre-like existential uncertainty, where existence precedes essence, and Addie has to recreate herself from scratch every day. In a world that forgets her as soon as she leaves a room, she becomes her own myth, constantly redefining what it means to be alive.

What I love about this novel is how it plays with the concepts of memory and identity in a way that feels almost subversive. Addie’s world forces us to reconsider what it means to connect with others when the very fabric of identity is ripped away. She evolves not because time ages her, but because she’s always in flux, reinventing herself in a society that doesn’t offer her a solid place to stand. It’s a radical meditation on how we define ourselves when all the usual anchors—family, history, relationships—are gone.

And then there’s Henry, the one who remembers her. His fear of being insignificant, of living a life that goes unnoticed, stands in sharp contrast to Addie’s endless anonymity. They’re two sides of the same existential coin, one cursed to never be remembered, the other desperate to be known. Their relationship doesn’t just spark because he sees her; it’s because they’re both haunted by this terror of not mattering in a world that measures worth in permanence.

Luc, the devil in Addie’s bargain, serves as a twisted reflection of immortality and memory. He’s this eternal being who remembers everything, whose presence is always grounded in history, while Addie drifts through centuries with nothing to hold onto. Their dynamic isn’t just a classic battle of wills; it’s a philosophical debate on whether immortality without meaning is any better than mortality with memory. Luc’s stability against Addie’s constant flux forces us to confront what it really means to live a life stretched thin over centuries.

Schwab’s narrative leans heavily into existentialist thought, digging into themes of authenticity, freedom, and the absurdity of creating meaning in a world that offers none. Without the ability to leave a lasting mark or form stable connections, Addie has to find value in the moment itself. It’s this terrifying kind of freedom that demands she build her own meaning from scratch every single day. The novel makes us ask: without external validation or a lasting impact, what makes a life truly worth living?

Time in this story isn’t just a linear progression; it’s a fog that wraps itself around Addie’s existence, making years blur together while each day brings a fresh struggle to survive. It’s reminiscent of Heidegger’s concept of being-toward-death, where the awareness of our mortality shapes how we live. But for Addie, that awareness is twisted into something unrecognizable—her life stretches out into infinity, where time itself loses meaning, and every moment feels like a desperate act to hold onto something real.

What The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue captures so brilliantly is the tension between being and being known. It’s a study in what happens when every trace of your existence is erased, yet you keep fighting to make those fleeting moments count. Even though Addie can’t create anything that lasts, she becomes a muse—a whisper in the ear of artists, a shadow in the margins of their work. Her influence is invisible but undeniable, like ripples spreading out long after the stone has sunk.

Schwab’s prose is like a spell—it lingers in the mind, each word heavy with the weight of forgotten moments. She paints Addie’s centuries of life with such detail that you feel every brushstroke, every memory slipping through her fingers. It’s this slow accumulation of small, vivid experiences that shows how a life can still be rich and full, even if it’s destined to disappear without a trace.

The novel’s exploration of love is just as layered. For Addie, love has to be reinvented every day, stripped of the comfort that comes with shared history. It asks whether love can truly exist in the present moment, untethered from the past or future. Schwab pushes us to rethink what connection means when you can’t rely on familiarity, when each encounter is a chance to build something entirely new, even if it’s gone by morning.

As I closed the final pages of Addie’s story, I found myself wrestling with my own questions. What would be left of me if all the markers of my identity disappeared? How much of my sense of self relies on being seen, remembered, reflected back by others? If I knew I would be forgotten, would I love differently, live differently? The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue doesn’t answer these questions—it just holds up a mirror and makes us stare at the reflection we might not want to see.

Ultimately, this novel isn’t just about a girl who made a deal with the devil; it’s a philosophical inquiry into what it means to exist when everything that defines you is stripped away. It’s about legacy, memory, and the small acts of resistance we engage in just to prove we were here. Addie’s life, filled with centuries of anonymity, forces us to confront our own fears of being forgotten and our desperate desire to leave a mark, however small, on the world.

As I let Addie’s story settle in, I found a deep appreciation for the tiny moments of connection we create every day, the ways we leave pieces of ourselves in the lives we touch. In a world that often feels too fast, too transient, Addie’s journey is a reminder to inhabit each moment fully, to let the simple act of remembering become an act of defiance against the inevitability of forgetting.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is more than a novel; it’s an insight to the resilience of the human spirit and the power of reinvention. It’s a story about the “invisible” threads that bind us, the marks we leave even when no one sees them, and the beauty of living a life that refuses to be defined by its limitations.

The Walking Dead: A Journey into the Abyss of Human Nature

Outline

1. Introduction
2. Walkers as Symbols
3. Rick Grimes’ Change
4. Rise of New Communities
5. Survival and Morality Challenges
6. Changes in Characters
7. Villains and Leadership Styles
8. Philosophical Ideas
9. Negan’s Power and Control
10. Conclusion

There’s a moment from The Walking Dead that stays with me: Rick Grimes standing in the ruins of a world that once made sense, his face etched with the weight of leadership, his eyes reflecting the uncertainty of everything that remains. This moment isn’t just about surviving the undead, it’s also a confrontation with the depths of human nature when the comforts of civilization are stripped away. The Walking Dead isn’t just a dystopian nightmare. It’s ann exploration of humanity’s fragile psyche and the moral decay that comes when societal norms collapse. It feels like a call into the Nietzschen abyss and confront what stares back.

The walkers themselves become almost peripheral, less antagonists and more like haunting symbols of decay. They’re external manifestations of the characters’ internal conflicts, the fears, regrets, and primal instincts that rise to the surface when the rules no longer apply. Much like the ocean in Lem’s Solaris, which materializes the deepest recesses of the protagonists’ minds, the apocalypse here serves as a canvas for exploring the raw, uncharted territories of the human condition. The true conflict isn’t the external threat of the walkers. It’s what happens inside the survivors as they’re forced to face their own moral ambiguities.

Rick’s transformation from law-abiding sheriff to someone who makes unimaginable choices is a Kafkaesque journey in itself, reminiscent of individuals lost within incomprehensible systems. His path is a labyrinth of ethical quandaries, each decision eroding his sense of right and wrong. You can feel the tension as his old world crumbles, and with it, his moral foundation. It’s a raw portrayal of what happens when the weight of responsibility threatens to crush the very humanity he’s fighting to preserve. His journey, like Didion’s reflections on grief, becomes one of survival in a world that no longer follows the rules he once knew.

As the series progresses, the communities that emerge: Woodbury, Terminus, Alexandria. They become microcosms of political ideologies in a post-collapse world. These settlements reflect the desperate attempts to rebuild society, but also the compromises and ethical trade-offs that come with power. The Governor’s authoritarian grip on Woodbury presents a veneer of normalcy, while underneath lies a chilling control that reveals the dangers of unchecked power. Terminus, on the other hand, pushes utilitarianism to its extreme, where survival justifies even the most horrifying actions. And then there’s Alexandria, a fragile attempt at democracy, offering hope, but always teetering on the edge of collapse.

What draws me to The Walking Dead is how it doesn’t give us clean answers. It’s not about finding the right path. It’s about grappling with the complexity of survival, morality, and leadership in a world that no longer has clear rules. This series doesn’t just ask what it takes to survive. It asks what we’re willing to become in the process. It reminds me of Peter Watts’ Blindsight, probing the limits of human understanding and forcing us to confront the parts of ourselves we’d rather not face.

In this redefined world, characters undergo profound transformations. Carol, once vulnerable and underestimated, becomes a symbol of resilience. Her journey is one of survival and reinvention, raising questions about identity and the lengths we’ll go to protect the ones we love. It’s a theme that resonates deeply, how loss, like grief in Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, reshapes our understanding of who we are and what we can endure.

Michonne’s arc is equally powerful. Initially a solitary cool samurai figure, hardened by the brutality of the world, she evolves into someone who allows herself to reconnect, to trust, and to find humanity again amidst the chaos. Her relationships, especially with Rick and their group, become a testament to the importance of community, even when everything around them is crumbling.

And then there are the antagonists like the Governor and Negan, who embody different visions of leadership in the apocalypse. The Governor’s descent into madness reflects the corrupting influence of power, while Negan, with his brutal code, represents a twisted utilitarianism, sacrificing the few for what he sees as the greater good. Both characters force us to question the nature of power, morality, and control when there are no longer systems of accountability in place.

Drawing from Nietzsche, the series delves into the concept of the Übermensch and the necessity of reevaluating values when the traditional moral frameworks disintegrate. Characters like Rick, Carol, and Michonne are left to construct their own ethical codes, leading to moments of ethical relativism where survival often outweighs conventional morality. The abyss Nietzsche speaks of, the one that stares back, becomes a metaphor for the psychological toll of living in constant proximity to death and moral compromise.

“I Am Negan”

Foucault’s ideas on power and discipline resonate throughout The Walking Dead. The show illustrates how, when conventional systems of power collapse, new structures emerge from the ruins. These new power dynamics are often based on fear, surveillance, and the control of bodies and behavior. Foucault’s vision of power as pervasive, not limited to formal institutions, is made real in the struggle for dominance in the post-apocalyptic world. The Governor and Negan, with their oppressive regimes, are examples of how power morphs into something darker when it is untethered from accountability. Their rule isn’t just about survival; it’s about control over the physical and psychological lives of their people, referencing Foucault’s notion of biopower.

Negan’s rule in the later seasons, particularly the “I am Negan” philosophy, presents a different take on power compared to the Governor’s more isolated, authoritarian control. Where the Governor ruled through fear and spectacle in Woodbury, Negan creates a decentralized system of biopower, where surveillance is not just top-down but embedded within the community itself. Every individual in the Saviors becomes part of the surveillance network, monitoring each other and reinforcing Negan’s control. By having his followers declare “I am Negan,” he extends his power through them, dissolving individual identities into a collective where everyone is an enforcer of the system.

This structure of surveillance and control is more insidious than the Governor’s overt authoritarianism. Instead of ruling through sheer terror, Negan’s system functions by creating a network of loyalty, fear, and complicity. His lieutenants, the workers in his compound, and even the communities under his thumb all operate within this network, constantly being watched and watching others. It’s a more subtle form of biopower, where Negan’s influence permeates every level of the organization, making rebellion almost impossible. The power isn’t just concentrated in Negan himself but dispersed across the people who identify with him and enforce his rules.

Foucault’s ideas on surveillance as a mechanism of control are clearly at play here. The omnipresence of Negan’s network mirrors Foucault’s notion of the panopticon, where the possibility of being watched keeps people in line, even if they aren’t being actively observed. In this way, Negan’s “I am everywhere” mentality is an evolution of the Governor’s rule. While the Governor relied on fear and intimidation, Negan creates a self-sustaining system where the people he controls actively reinforce his power.

In summary

The Walking Dead is a powerful commentary on the fragility of civilization and the psychological burden of survival. It asks uncomfortable questions about who we become when the world we know is gone and forces us to confront the darker parts of ourselves. Like Didion’s reflections on grief, it holds a mirror up to our vulnerabilities, our capacity for resilience, and our need for connection, even when everything around us is falling apart.

In a playfield of political theories, The Walking Dead isn’t just about the apocalypse. It’s about the human condition, the capacity for both cruelty and compassion, the struggle to maintain our sense of self when the world is unrecognizable, and the deep, existential question of what it means to be human in the face of unrelenting adversity.

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Book Recommendations

1. “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” by Friedrich Nietzsche
Examines the idea of the Übermensch and questions traditional morals, similar to how characters in The Walking Dead shift their ethics in a collapsed society.

2. “Discipline and Punish” by Michel Foucault
Studies power, surveillance, and control in society, reflecting the new power structures in the post-apocalyptic world of the series.

3. “The Trial” by Franz Kafka
A story about someone lost in a confusing system, paralleling Rick’s unsettling journey through a world of unclear rules.

4. “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion
A deep look at grief and loss, relating to how characters change and cope with ongoing hardship.

5. “Solaris” by Stanisław Lem
Science fiction that explores human consciousness and inner conflict, like how walkers represent the characters’ deepest fears.

6. “Blindsight” by Peter Watts
A novel that challenges our understanding and self-awareness, reflecting the show’s investigation of humanity under stress.

7. “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
Looks at the collapse of social order and the fall into savagery, mirroring the moral dilemmas faced by survivors.

8. “1984” by George Orwell
Discusses totalitarianism and control, similar to the oppressive leaders like the Governor and Negan.

9. “Station Eleven” by Emily St. John Mandel
Follows survivors after a pandemic, highlighting art, memory, and rebuilding society.