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July 14 - July 18, 2025
it started as a hopeful comedy and ended in darkness and regret.
Effort, productivity, and the sacrifice of everything else in life are valorized and fetishized.
numb efficiency ruled by all-consuming self-discipline and self-denial.
Years later, after a few wines at Davos, Sheryl tells me that the punishing scale of work is by design. A choice Facebook’s leaders had made. That staffers should be given too much to do because it’s best if no one has spare time. That’s where the trouble and territoriality start. The fewer employees, the harder they work. The answer to work is more work.
To encourage this, the Facebook offices are overflowing with “perks.” I think this part of Silicon Valley work life is something everyone’s heard about by now. It’s parodied on TV shows. The offices are like a never-ending kid’s birthday party. All meals are provided, endless free snacks, game arcades. Bring your laundry to work and someone will do it for you. They’ll pay for transport if you can’t access Facebook’s free transportation. I feel deeply conflicted about these perks, simultaneously eye-rolly and loving it.
Our philosophy on perks is that we want to provide services that are utilitarian and help people with things they need in order to help them focus on our long-term goals. Everyone needs to eat. Everyone needs to do laundry. Everyone needs health services. Everyone needs to get to work. If we can make these parts of our lives easier, then it helps us focus on what we’re trying to accomplish at work and it makes us all more productive.
Maybe because we’re mostly in our twenties and early thirties, we’re particularly susceptible to the moral and social messages that leadership is indoctrinating us with.
Strict rules, selectively enforced and the baseline of ever-present fear. It ensures we obey in advance.
Parents at work talk about how they don’t allow their teens to have mobile phones, which only underscores how well these executives understand the real damage their product inflicts on young minds.
Mothering in form, not function. They don’t discuss the real secret behind maintaining their work-life balance, mothering as if they don’t have children: it’s undergirded by their multimillion-dollar paychecks.
A tiny enmeshed group of people increasingly responsible for shaping the attention of billions. Their preferences turned into policy.
Surely having a kid and a career is not meant to be like this? I know I’m expected to work as if I don’t have children, but I didn’t expect it would feel like this. There’s a grief to it. I’m still committed to the mission, but it feels like the cost is too high.
“I hope that someone tells her one day how hard you fought for her life and your own.”
I’m struck by the impermanence of importance.
“Sometimes you have to lose something to win the more important thing. If you try and win everything, you end up losing.
Autonomy disturbs a certain kind of powerful person,
Unhappy workplaces are conspiracies of silence.
Nationalism always begins with the claim that you’re on the principled, moral, righteous side of things.
