Have you ever searched for something you couldn't name? Something ever present but never visible. Something you didn't have the language to describe.

I have. For most of my life.

From the outside, things looked like they were working. Eight years in recruiting. Companies you've heard of. Meta. Okta. Good titles. Good paychecks. The kind of career that makes sense on a LinkedIn profile and satisfies the question at Thanksgiving dinner.

From the inside, I was holding my breath.

Not because the work was bad. I was good at it. I understood people. I could read a conversation, map a candidate to a role, navigate the politics of a hiring committee. Recruiting sits at the intersection of psychology, sales, pattern recognition, and storytelling. On paper, it fit.

But here's the thing about recruiting that almost every recruiter knows and rarely says out loud. Nearly all of us "just fell into it." It's practically a running joke in the industry. Nobody dreams of being a recruiter. You end up there because the system doesn't have a place for people who are interested in everything and specialized in nothing. I once looked at a corporate org chart and couldn't find a single role where I belonged. Not because I wasn't capable. Because the map wasn't drawn for someone shaped like me.

So I did what most people do. I found the best available compromise and built a narrative to make it feel intentional.

I told myself recruiting was the intersection of all the things I loved. People, technology, problem solving, wearing different hats. And that story worked. For a while. It works for most people, in most careers, for most of their lives. We find the compromise. We build the story. We hold our breath and call it a career.

I think most of the world is doing this right now. The gap between the visible life and the felt life. The resume that looks fine. The LinkedIn that looks fine. And underneath it, the quiet, persistent sensation that something essential is missing. Not broken. Missing. Like a frequency you can almost hear but can't quite tune into.

The cracks didn't come all at once. They came slowly, over years, and then all at once.

I spent time at Meta. I'll spare you the full account, but I'll say this. It is perhaps the most optimized extraction vehicle ever devised. A place where narrative matters more than truth. Where the interview process is designed to be hard not because the work demands it, but because difficulty maintains prestige. Where hundreds of thousands of candidates get processed through a system that keeps them warm, hopeful, and waiting for roles that may never materialize. Passed every interview. Aced every loop. And then sat in limbo until an arbitrary clock ran out and they were quietly discarded.

This is not a story about one company. Every system I participated in operated on some version of this logic. Optimize for the institution. Extract from the individual. Package the extraction as opportunity.

Four times I was laid off. Each one hit differently. The first felt like failure. The second felt like bad luck. The third felt like a pattern. The fourth felt like an answer.

After that last one, something happened that I didn't expect. Everyone around me panicked. They updated resumes. They networked frantically. They strategized about how to get back in.

I felt peace.

Not because I had a plan. I had no plan. But something in me recognized that the door I kept trying to force open was the wrong door. That every layoff was the universe tapping me on the shoulder a little harder, saying: this isn't it. Stop swimming upstream. The current is trying to take you somewhere.

So I stopped swimming.

I started building. Not a career. Not even a company, exactly. I had an LLC from a previous attempt at self-employment that didn't work. I kept the shell and started filling it with something different. Tools. AI agents. Writing. Experiments. I didn't have a business plan. I had a direction. I built tools for the recruiting industry I came from. I meditated, as I have for over fifteen years. I let myself be interested in everything again, the way I was as a kid, before the system told me to pick a lane.

And in eight weeks, I'm leaving the country. Selling my furniture. Ending my lease. Packing a bag and traveling through Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Oceania for seven months. Not as a vacation. As a test. Can a life built on honesty and flow actually sustain itself? Can one person, armed with the right tools and the right questions, build something meaningful without the machinery of institutions?

I don't know. That's the honest answer. I don't know if this works.

But I know what doesn't work. The compromise. The narrative. The holding of breath. I know that the search for something I couldn't name was never going to end inside a system that wasn't designed for people like me. Or, I suspect, for people like you.

This newsletter is called 404: Work Not Found. If you've spent time on the internet, you know what a 404 error means. The page you're looking for doesn't exist.

I spent most of my career getting that error. Searching for work that felt true. Searching for a way to be useful that didn't require me to flatten myself into a role that was never built for the way I think. Searching for a version of success that didn't demand I trade my time, my health, and my honesty for a paycheck and a title.

The page was never there. The work I was looking for hadn't been built yet.

So I'm building it. In public. With AI as my infrastructure and curiosity as my compass. This newsletter is the visible output of that search. It will cover recruiting, AI, the future of work, sovereignty, and what it means to live deliberately in a system that rewards automation over autonomy. Some editions will be sharp and tactical. Others will be philosophical. Some will just be honest dispatches from a person trying to live differently and willing to tell you what it actually feels like.

I'm not here to sell you a course or a framework or a seven-step system. I'm here because for most of my life, I wanted someone to say out loud the things I was feeling but couldn't articulate. No one did. So I'm saying them myself.

If you've ever searched for something you couldn't name, you're in the right place.

Welcome to 404.