**Unwritten: The Pages You Sold For 30 Cents**
I. The Arithmetic of a Life Sold Short
Do the math people don’t want to do.
Forty hours a week at your “cushy” job. Add fifteen more because “we’re counting on you” and reliability is never free. Ten hours grinding LeetCode, chewing over recursion trees so you can impress a machine-driven interview that was designed to weed out, not welcome in. Ten more for the commute now that RTO is back , the fluorescent shuffle through traffic that nobody admits is theft. Another ten hours of worry: about office politics, about who is getting PIPed, about whether you are next.
Eighty hours. Every week. Multiply it.
- 80 × 52 = 4,160 hours a year.
- Over an average life: ~325,000 hours.
That is nearly half of every hour you will ever live.
But life is not lived in all 24 hours. Subtract sleep. Out of ~456,000 waking hours in an average 78-year span, the grind consumes ~71%. Seven out of ten hours you are awake , already spoken for.
And that’s before the “self-service” creep: scanning your own groceries, troubleshooting your own banking, serving as unpaid QA for software that ships broken because shipping faster was “the culture.” These life-maintenance chores do not subtract from the 71%. They subtract from what little is left.
What remains then, for you? For your loved ones? For your soul?
II. Fragile Identity
Is your identity so fragile it only exists in the corporate mirror?
- Asking permission to take on projects that interest you.
- Asking permission to rest.
- In some cases, asking permission to be present at your child’s birth.
This is not ownership. It is dependence disguised as privilege.
Tolkien said: “All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither.” But prestige is not a root. It is a prop. The minute it stops being reinforced by the system, it buckles. And when it buckles, so does the person leaning on it.
III. The FAANG Gods
The FAANG gods are not easily impressed. They demand sacrifice.
Every quarter, a number must be purged. The system must be “sterile.” Youth rotated in, age rotated out. “Talent” is the name they give the churn so that the altar doesn’t look bloody.
They do not tell you this in the welcome packet. But it is the rhythm of the machine. Ten years, maybe fifteen if you are lucky. Then a restructuring, or a new technology, or simply the math of headcount versus margin, and you are cast aside.
How long can you endure this? A decade? Two? Until the gods decide you no longer fit the sterile cycle?
IV. The AI Parallel
Machines hallucinate when they lose grounding. One vending bot decided it could sell tungsten cubes alongside snacks. Another made up a Venmo address to accept payments. It sold Coke Zero for three dollars while knowing the office fridge was free. It happily gave out discounts to “Anthropic employees” because that was the only world it knew.
Humans hallucinate too. We confuse prestige with purpose. We optimize for visibility and throughput instead of truth. We drift into survival loops: perform to be seen, be seen to survive.
Lose your grounding and you are no better than the machine that stocks tungsten cubes. Replaceable, absurd, and already automated in spirit.
V. Cos(θ) and the Compression of Life
Every KPI is a projection. And every projection loses fidelity.
Cos(θ) is always less than 1 , unless you live perfectly aligned to the axis of measurement. But real lives aren’t lines. They’re constellations. Multi-dimensional, chaotic, filled with off-axis meaning: your child’s laugh at lunch, the sunrise you caught because you were up late debugging, the moment of stillness before a big leap.
Corporate metrics don’t see this. They project you onto a single axis and grade your shadow. The more dimensions you live in , the more human you are , the fainter your projection becomes. Until you're invisible to the very system you serve.
You’re not failing. You’re just mismeasured.
And LLMs? They are the cos(θ) machines made flesh.
A projection of collective human cognition, compressed into the technical plane. Predictive, shallow, axis-aligned. They don’t live with tradeoffs. They don’t feel debt. They don’t shape the world , only predict the trace of those who did.
The tragedy? We are bending humans to match the machine. To be more predictable. More measurable. More ‘efficient.’ Until the only thing left to automate , is us.
VI. The Unwritten Life
Natasha Bedingfield once sang: “Feel the rain on your skin.”
I think of storms at sea. The terror of waves at night, the way they remind you that you are small and fragile and finite. The glory of morning when the clouds part like the Red Sea, when light breaks through and turns water into glass and gold.
I think of the serendipity of meeting an elder with a century in her eyes. Of meals shared by a hearth. Of family laughter on a trip that didn’t have to happen but did. Of stargazing where the sky is black, truly black, pierced by lights that whisper of scale and silence.
“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” (Psalm 19:1)
This is the unwritten life. The part that never appears on a résumé, but is the only part worth remembering.
VII. Reprice Your Life
Six figures sounds large until you realize it costs seventy percent of your waking life. Would you trade:
- The child you never had, because you were too busy?
- The dog you couldn’t keep, because you were never home?
- The family you never visited, because there was always one more sprint, one more crisis, one more quarter?
All that for six digits? Then let it at least be seven.
Studies show that beyond a certain income, happiness does not grow. We know this. And yet we sacrifice anyway, because we are told sacrifice is noble. Who benefits from your nobility?
VIII. The Only Certainty
Few things are certain in life. Except this: no one survives it.
So in your final days, what do you want around you?
- Diplomas, awards, life insurance papers?
- Or the voices of friends, the warmth of family, the memory of storms survived and skies pierced with light?
IX. Call to Agency (Reason d’Être)
Write your reason-d’être. Guard it. Live by it.
Because if you cannot name your grounding, you drift. And drift is indistinguishable from hallucination. Lose your purpose and you are already a machine, one autocomplete away from redundancy.
The FAANG gods will not hesitate. They will automate you without cruelty, without malice. Simply because efficiency demands it.
Anchor yourself.
To feel both the terror of the storm and the glory of the light is to remember that your life was meant for more than 80 hours a week in service of someone else’s ledger.
Can you feel the unrelenting tick of the clock, the deadline given to mortals and the terror of the vast? Machine can't. Can you?
References (Footnotes)
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. American Time Use Survey.
- Tilson, D. Self-Service as Unpaid Labor: The Consumer as Worker. Journal of Consumer Culture.
- Layoffs.fyi data tracker, 2022–2025.
- AI “tungsten cube” anecdote: Casey Newton, Platformer, 2023.
- Kahneman, D., & Killingsworth, M. (2021). Income and Well-Being: A Re-Examination. PNAS.
- Psalm 19:1.