I've been dismantling my life on a schedule. Canceling subscriptions I forgot I was paying for. Selling furniture to strangers on Facebook Marketplace. Giving things away to friends who accept them with the same look you'd give someone distributing their belongings before a long voyage they might not come back from. Which, to be fair, is more or less what's happening.

Some days I push code and write and feel like I'm building exactly what I'm supposed to be building. Other days I go to the gym, bake bread, read, meditate, and never open my laptop. Other days I can't get off the couch. I'm 26 days from leaving the country with a backpack and no return date, and I genuinely cannot tell which of those days are the productive ones anymore. I don't have this figured out.

I keep thinking about Peter Gibbons.

I'm not hypnotized. But I did stop pretending, and the result looks similar from the outside. I'm a "solopreneur" and "founder," which is what you call yourself when you're unemployed but still have a LinkedIn profile. Eight years in recruiting, watched the industry shift in a direction I couldn't get behind, and now I'm here, building things on my own and trying to figure out if that's a career move or a cope. Honestly some days it feels like both and some days it feels like neither. But I keep coming back to the same scene in that movie. Tom Smykowski, sweating through his interview with the Bobs, trying to explain what he does. "I have people skills!" It's one of the funniest lines in the film. It's a lot less funny if you've ever sat in a meeting and realized that most of the people in the room, yourself included, would struggle to answer the same question: what would you say you do here?

That question used to require two consultants and a conference room. Now it's continuous. Your company probably already has AI usage trackers measuring your output, keystroke monitoring logging your activity, and performance analytics scoring your work before your manager even reads it. The Bobs were in the office for a week and then they left. The new version runs in the background, never takes a day off, and never tells you it's watching.

Remember Peter's eight bosses? Eight different people, and every single one of them stopped by to remind him about the cover sheet on his TPS report. The same trivial piece of paperwork, eight layers of oversight. Today you might have one boss you rarely see, but you answer to eight automated systems instead. OKR trackers, sprint boards, standup notes, status dashboards, retrospective docs. The TPS reports didn't go away. You just do twenty of them now because the tools made it faster, and faster somehow always means more instead of better.

And here's the thing nobody on the earnings calls wants to say out loud. If AI makes everyone do the same work faster, the work gets cheaper. If the work gets cheaper, the person doing it gets easier to replace. The reward for being the most productive person in the room is being the last one automated. Most people would rather not run that math. Understandably.

What I keep noticing, from out here where the view is uncomfortably clear, is the performance. Not just at work but everywhere. Online, people get louder the more threatened they feel. In professional communities, everyone is aggressively pleasant, like if they're just collegial enough the disruption will politely skip them. On Zoom calls, everyone nods. The slide deck gets approved. The quarterly roadmap advances. And underneath all of it there's a hum that nobody will name, because naming it would mean admitting that a lot of the work we do exists to justify its own existence, and that the tools we adopted to make the work meaningful are mostly making it faster to produce things that don't matter.

Office Space understood this 27 years ago. The entire movie is about that hum. Peter heard it, and his answer was to stop playing along. The movie didn't have to account for AI, but the feeling it captured hasn't changed. If anything it's gotten louder, because now the gap between what you do all day and what you know you could be doing isn't just wide. It's being automated.

So here's the only thing I think is actually worth saying.

Go make something.

Not for your job. Not for your portfolio. Not to post about. Build something that has no business case. Write something that scares you a little. Not because creating things is some romantic alternative to the grind, but because it's the one act that resists being turned into a TPS report. When you make something for no reason other than to make it, you remember what it feels like to do work that matters to you, and that memory is harder to overwrite than you'd think.

Peter Gibbons ends up at a construction site. Sun on his face. Building something real with his hands. The film barely lingers on it because it's played as a punchline, but it might be the most important scene in the movie. Nobody asks Peter what he does there. He doesn't have to explain it. The work is obvious, it's right in front of him, and for the first time in the entire film, the question doesn't apply.

If I'm wrong about all of this, I'll see you at the construction site on Monday.