What is that smell?
When I was seventeen, I got a job at a law office for the summer. Every weekday morning, I ironed and pulled on the khaki trousers and button-down dress shirt I had bought at Ross Dress for Less. I unlocked the small office, disabled the alarm and got to work pulling files, filling forms and answering calls. When I locked the office at 5:15pm, I walked through that lobby like a man who knew things, did things—the kinds of things that people who attended college, ate at restaurants and drove BMWs knew and did.
But when I passed back through those doors, I heard the braap of my dad’s rusted brown 1982 Saab. When I opened the passenger door, the shriek of the hinges announced that I was leaving more than the office. As I ducked into the passenger seat and pulled the reluctant door closed, the smell of stale soda and beer turned my stomach.
My father drove to the recycling center where he deposited the cans and bottles he had collected during his day of work. As I sat in the passenger seat, the fetid puddle of beer and soda that had seeped out of the empties onto the back seat during the day evaporated into the air around me. After my dad collected his $20 or $30, we stopped at a gas station where he handed me a Dr. Pepper and a Hostess Cupcake. I took them, and we ate and drank the sugar in silence.
I spent twenty years trying to get out of that car. The smell followed me through college, through my job as a research analyst at a think tank in Washington DC, through grad school at the University of Oxford, through my first job in tech at a buzzy startup, through my office hours at YCombinator. Ah, but when the software company I founded was acquired, surely the smell was gone by then?
Reader, how I wished it were so. How I demanded that it was so.
A little respect
At last, I had my moment of triumph, a smug conviction that I had finally, irrevocably won the respect game that my father had so painfully lost.
Then, one year after my company was acquired, my inner fire died. Situations that had motivated me now produced disgust. Meetings induced nausea. When I looked at LinkedIn, I thought I would throw up in my mouth.
One day when a meeting ended at the company that had acquired mine, now my employer, I did not get up. I sat staring at the wall. Then in a matter-of-fact voice I said out loud, “Everyone here is dead inside.”
The SVP of communications, the only person who remained in the room, was about to become a good friend. She stopped typing, looked up at me and said, “Maybe you are dead inside.”
She made a good point. I was disgusted by the headlong pursuit of a big win that drives many of us in work. I had obeyed this impulse without question for two decades. Now I found myself wearing a strange pair of glasses: everywhere around me I saw greed and fear turning people into imitators of what they thought they wanted to become, avoiding what they did not want to become, producing hollow words and empty faces.
In other words, I saw the last twenty years of my own life.
And I began to wonder, like Siddhartha did when he left the palace a few thousand years ago, like innumerable others have after seeing the terrible truth that more winning will not get us anywhere: “What will get rid of this smell?”
I was in for a ride.
new gods 