There's a stranger from Chicago who climbed Acatenango with me last week and now knows my entire resume, and I'm not sure he understood what he was looking at.

It's an overnight trek. You haul yourself up one volcano to spend the night watching the next one, Fuego, erupt across the valley in the dark. The kind of thing that ropes you into a group of strangers for two days and lets the altitude handle the small talk. Over those two days it came out in pieces, the way these things do. I'd been a carpenter's apprentice. A house painter. A bartender. A law clerk at my dad's firm, which is a generous word for nepotism with a desk. A walking-tour guide in Rome. And most recently, a senior technical recruiter.

He turned to me on the way up, somewhere in the thin air, and said it the way people do, half impressed and half trying to file me somewhere: "Man, you've done everything."

"Everything," I said, "but climb the corporate ladder."

A few people chuckled. Fitting, I thought, to land that one on the side of a volcano. A long way from the building.

What none of them caught, what I only half-caught myself, is that the line was true in a way that wasn't a joke. The list really doesn't ladder. Six jobs and not one of them stacks on the last to build toward anything you could point at. They sprawl sideways. And the single shape the world actually recognizes as progress, the one rung that would have made the whole thing legible, is the exact one missing. I said it like a confession. I meant it like a brag. The chuckle was a few people half-sensing the disguise.

Here's the part I've stopped pretending is a coincidence. The guy whose own working life refuses to make sense was, for eight years, the person paid to decide whether other people's lives made sense.

That's what recruiting is, underneath the LinkedIn varnish. You take a human being and you convert them into something an institution can see. Title, level, comp band, trajectory. You learn to read a resume for coherence, to clock the gap, to ask why this followed that. You become a professional assessor of whether a career ladders properly. I was good at it. And I was, by the exact standard I applied to everyone who crossed my desk, completely incoherent.

I don't think that's irony. I think it's the whole thing. You can spend your days installing other people into boxes and still be the one nobody can find a box for. In fact it might be a prerequisite. It's hard to take the boxes that seriously once you've spent enough time building them by hand.

I should tell you it didn't start in June, when I left. It started around fourteen.

I was a decent student. A few AP classes, mostly A-minus, nothing that would've made anyone call me gifted. And the grades held everywhere except the classes that ran on grunt work. Not hard work. Grunt work. The assignments that existed to prove you'd comply, not to teach you anything. My worst grades in college were always the big projects I couldn't make myself start, the ones I could tell were busywork wearing the costume of rigor. People read that as a discipline problem. I've come to read it as the earliest version of the same instinct that eventually walked me out of a building, showing up decades early without a vocabulary for itself. I wasn't failing to do the meaningless thing. I was declining to, before I had any idea that declining was an option.

So when I tell you I left the game, the more honest version is that I was never fully in it. The trip didn't change me. It just let the outside finally match something that had been true on the inside the whole time.

Which raises the obvious question. If I was always like this, what was I doing at Meta?

The honest answer is that for a long time, "this is the only way the world works" felt true. Not a story. A law. And if I had to make the sacrifice anyway, my reasoning went, I should at least make the payment large. Maximize the earnings, pick something hard, something that fed a little intellectual curiosity, something I could do without handing over the soul they kept asking for. Recruiting is brutal and thankless and the soul-sale is a standing line item, but I found ways to keep mine. The pay was real. The work was a fight, which I liked.

And then the law turned out to be a story.

The actual sequence doesn't ladder any better than the job list did. SpotHero let me go a few months into the pandemic. Then Okta, laid off again. I started Talmark, my own thing. About a year and a half later Okta came back calling, a six-to-twelve-month contract on the same team at much better money, and I took it; it lasted five. Back to Talmark, where I watched AI walk into the marketing business and leave me feeling like a middleman with a shrinking reason to exist. Then Meta reached out.

Not the dream company. Everyone else's dream company. To me a soulless place that does more harm than good, which I knew going in. But the money was the money and the independent thing still hadn't caught, so I took a twelve-month contract sold as the kind that becomes multi-year, at a company that was laying people off the entire time I was there.

They bait-and-switched the role at the offer stage. Senior recruiter on the way in. "Sourcer" on the paper. Not senior sourcer. Sourcer. The demotion built right into the handshake, before I'd even started.

I signed it anyway. I want to be clear about that, because it's the least flattering part and it matters. I knew the floor was already tilting, I had no illusions about the place, and I stepped on it on purpose, because the alternative wasn't ready yet. That's not the height of any ladder. That's the moment the ladder openly stopped pretending to be one, and I climbed on regardless, eyes open, because the rent was real.

The pattern taught me the rest. Cut, rehired, cut, churned through a company I didn't even admire while it shed people around me by the thousand. The system couldn't keep its own end of the bargain even when I held up mine. Compliance, the right logo, the right answers, and it still shorted the title, shorted the contract, and moved on. The deal everyone's grinding toward doesn't pay out reliably even when you do everything right. I didn't lose faith in it as a leap. It got falsified one round at a time, with receipts.

Now the building still calls. Requests for interviews, three to six months, a fraction of what I used to make, for roles I can read from the inside because I used to staff them. I know exactly how those jobs work you. I was the one on the other side of them in my agency days, filling exactly that kind of seat. So when I decline, it isn't some naive passing-up of honest work. It's the most informed no I'm capable of. I've seen the engine with the cover off.

And here is the thing I keep waiting to feel and don't: bitterness. Self-pity. The wound. A decade of getting churned through the corporate machine, capped by a bait-and-switch at a company I didn't even respect, and instead of grief I get something closer to a kick. A genuine private amusement. I got to work at the place people fantasize about and found it as hollow as I'd guessed, and I could not possibly care less. You can't mourn a prize you were never actually holding. The joke at my own expense doesn't cost me anything, because the expense is denominated in a currency I quietly stopped accepting a long time ago.

That's the same kid, by the way. He didn't rage against the busywork. He just shrugged and took the hit. All these years later the shrug is a punchline delivered on a volcano. Same gesture. Never quite able to take the scoreboard seriously enough to be hurt by losing on it.

I won't pretend it's all settled out here. I've made significant progress, on the writing, on the thing I'm building, and I've made exactly zero dollars from any of it. The people I meet who tell me to keep going mean it kindly, but kindness without stakes lands a little like "I wish you well." Encouragement that floats. And I can't fully tell, yet, whether they're seeing something real or whether I'm the one who can't see clearly. The not-knowing is honest. I'm filing this from the uncertain middle, not the far side.

When someone asks what I do, I give a wry smile and usually some non-answer, and I'll admit the satisfaction grows the more bewildered they look. Just this week: a 23-year-old medical student who speaks three languages. A finance guy at Westminster. The chief growth officer of a Latin American fintech. Three clean, legible, enviable answers to the question. I felt the tinge for about a second, and then the second passed, because I'm not in that game and I never really was. If that had been the goal, I'd have hit it by now. I had the capacity for the legible win. I declined it. The envy can't get a grip on a scoreboard you've put down.

But I'll be honest about the wry smile too, because otherwise this whole thing curdles into exactly the smugness it's circling. The satisfaction I get from their confusion is its own quiet scoreboard. The old game was: be the most legible, win the title. My new game might just be: be the least fileable, win the bewildered look. Both are games. Both keep score. The difference is that almost nobody else is competing for mine, which makes it very easy to feel like I'm winning. I don't fully trust that feeling. I'm not sure it's freedom and not just a quieter vanity wearing better clothes.

The looks vary, depending on how close the person is to the center of it. Some are envious and curious, the I-wish-I-could-do-that from people who've made no move to. Some go superior, filing me as a sad case, a loser who fell off. Some light up like they're reaching for the same door. And some give me a knowing smile right back, the smile of someone who stood exactly here once, before they climbed on toward whatever the end goal turned out to be. That last one is the one I can't dismiss. It leaves the door open that I'm not ahead of anyone. That I'm just earlier on a road that loops back inside, and I won't know which until later.

So I don't have a tidy place to leave this. Carpenter, painter, bartender, nepo clerk, tour guide, recruiter. Everything but the ladder. No title, no income to prove the experiment, a string of layoffs in the rearview, and somehow the lightest I've felt standing on a mountain with a group of strangers who can't quite figure out what I am.

I couldn't figure it out either. That was the funny part. That's still the funny part.