Uncanny Valley

by Anna Wiener

My desires were generic. I wanted to find my place in the world, and be independent, useful, and good. I wanted to make money, because I wanted to feel affirmed, confident, and valued. I wanted to be taken seriously. Mostly, I didn’t want anyone to worry about me.

The CEO did not acknowledge that the reason millennials might be interested in experiences—like the experience of renting things they could never own—was related to student loan debt, or the recession, or the plummeting market value of cultural products in an age of digital distribution. There were no crises in this vision of the future. There were only opportunities.

The mark of a hustler, a true entrepreneurial spirit, was creating the job that you wanted and making it look indispensable, even if it was institutionally unnecessary.

It was easier, in any case, to fabricate a romantic narrative than admit that I was ambitious—that I wanted my life to pick up momentum, go faster.

The city, trapped in nostalgia for its own mythology, stuck in a hallucination of a halcyon past, had not quite caught up to the newfound momentum of tech’s dark triad: capital, power, and a bland, overcorrected, heterosexual masculinity.

This concentration of public pain was new to me, unsettling. I had never seen such a shameful juxtaposition of blatant suffering and affluent idealism. It was a well-publicized disparity, but one I had underestimated. As a New Yorker, I had thought I was prepared. I thought I’d seen it all. I felt humbled and naïve—and guilty, all the time.

Research showed little correlation between productivity and extended working hours, but the tech industry thrived on the idea of its own exceptionalism; the data did not apply to us.

Warm laundry, radio, waiting for the bus. I could get frustrated, overextended, overwhelmed, uncomfortable. Sometimes I ran late. But these banal inefficiencies—I thought they were luxuries, the mark of the unencumbered. Time to do nothing, to let my mind run anywhere, to be in the world. At the very least, they made me feel human.

The fetishized life without friction: What was it like? An unending shuttle between meetings and bodily needs? A continuous, productive loop? Charts and data sets. It wasn’t, to me, an aspiration. It was not a prize.

I understood my blind faith in ambitious, aggressive, arrogant young men from America’s soft suburbs as a personal pathology, but it wasn’t personal at all. It had become a global affliction.

The platforms, designed to accommodate and harvest infinite data, inspired an infinite scroll. They encouraged a cultural impulse to fill all spare time with someone else’s thoughts.

The internet was a collective howl, an outlet for everyone to prove that they mattered. The full spectrum of human emotion infused social platforms. Grief, joy, anxiety, mundanity flowed. People were saying nothing, and saying it all the time.

Everything was simultaneously happening in real time and preserved for posterity, in perpetuity.

My brain had become a trash vortex, representations upon representations.

I felt rising frustration and resentment. I was frustrated because I felt stuck, and I was resentful because I was stuck in an industry that was chipping away at so many things I cared about.

Why did it feel so taboo, I asked, to approach work the way most people did, as a trade of my time and labor for money? Why did we have to pretend it was all so fun?

Homogeneity was a small price to pay for the erasure of decision fatigue. It liberated our minds to pursue other endeavors, like work.

Technology was gnawing into relationships, community, identity, the commons. Maybe nostalgia was just an instinctual response to the sense that materiality was disappearing from the world.

Pay no attention to that ad tech behind the curtain: social would make people kinder, fairer, more empathetic.

I still clung to the belief that I could find meaning and fulfillment in work—the result of over two decades of educational affirmation, parental encouragement, socioeconomic privilege, and generational mythology.

I liked feeling right; I loved feeling right. Unfortunately, I also wanted to feel good. I wanted to find a way, while I could, to engage with my own life.

I was always looking for the emotional narrative, the psychological explanation, the personal history. Some exculpatory story on which to train my sympathy.

I wanted to believe that as generations turned over, those coming into economic and political power would build a different, better, more expansive world, and not just for people like themselves.

We were too old to use innocence as an excuse. Hubris, maybe. Indifference, preoccupation. Idealism. A certain complacency endemic to people for whom things had, in recent years, turned out okay. We had assumed it would all blow over. We had just been so busy with work, lately.

“There are no adults in the White House,” he said, with a trace of a smile. “We’re the government now.”

could have stayed in my job forever, which was how I knew it was time to go. The money and the ease of the lifestyle weren’t enough to mitigate the emotional drag of the work: the burnout, the repetition, the intermittent toxicity. The days did not feel distinct. I felt a widening emptiness, rattling around my studio every morning, rotating in my desk chair. I had the luxury, if not the courage, to do something about it.