The Machine You're Running On

(Things I'm pondering about for my upcoming book)

“Being well adjusted in a profoundly sick society is no measure of health.“

-Jiddu Krishnamurti

Hi.

I’m deep into trying to finish my manuscript to hand it off to my editor on May 15th. For now, here’s something from my current draft. I’ll finish it next week. Let me know if this resonates in the comments.

When Work Lost Its Soul

When Ann called me, she was one print click away from becoming a gardener.¹ After twenty years at Whole Foods, supporting an HR department for more than 700 employees, she was staring at a job application for a landscaping company pulled up on her screen. Her finger froze over “Submit.” One click, and she’d be out, trading spreadsheets for soil.

“How do I stop making work my entire world and still survive?” she asked.

Ann built her career believing hard work would earn the system’s loyalty. She’s in her forties, fit, short brown hair, a smile that lights up a room. On the outside, she looked fine. But I heard it in her voice—the kind of tired that settles in your bones and makes you question everything.

When Amazon bought Whole Foods, the soul left the building. Mission became metrics. The folks who used to geek out over organic tomatoes and farmers’ markets were now glued to computer screens with delivery stats. “Do more with less” became the new gospel. One by one, Ann watched as her co-workers started cracking. She felt herself cracking too. Her chest tightened daily. She wondered if it was a sign of a heart attack or just how Millennial life in corporate America feels these days.

Ann was running. Running from the grind. Running in circles. Running but getting nowhere. Running from that hollow, hopeless emptiness.²

Ann’s not alone. Millions of people are one click away from quitting to move to a farm and grow tomatoes. Or being forced out. First, we called it Quiet Quitting. Now it’s Quiet Cracking.³ What if we stopped being so damn quiet about it? The causes are systemic: economic uncertainty, increased workload, poor leadership, company restructuring, massive layoffs, crappy pay, robots taking over. But the feeling? That’s personal. You know it when you’re in it. Ann knew. She was living it every day.

“I hate this grind,” she told me. “I need a different way.”

What made it worse is that she’d tried everything already. Therapy. The Harvard Happiness Program. Yale’s Science of Well-Being. Podcasts. TED Talks. Her nightstand was a graveyard of self-help books. She could teach a masterclass on emotional intelligence and conscious capitalism. She wanted to talk to her bosses about building a good-for-humans workplace. But she couldn’t even recalibrate her own life.

The knowledge was there. The willpower was there.

She wanted to spread her energy around, not just pour it all into work. She wanted more joy. More of that “mind flow” she talked about. More harmony. But every option seemed to mean giving up everything she’d built or winning the lottery. Old student loans and credit card debt haunted every decision, freezing her with fear. That’s the default path, paved with good intentions and bad incentives. The desire path only shows up when the road you’re on stops taking you where you actually want to go.

“I want to go back to being human,” she said. “I want to liberate my life.”

I knew exactly what she meant. I’d been there. Trapped. Tired of hustling. Pretending everything was fine while the gap between my real life and the life I wanted kept getting wider. Maybe you’re living it right now.

Ann struggled because the promised payoff for her decades of work never materialized. The goalposts kept moving. That’s the hidden tax of modern work: you can do everything right and still end up exhausted, in debt, and wondering what it was all for while the regrets, missed opportunities, and life slip silently away. The default world was designed to extract maximum output without regard for your well-being. To understand why, you have to understand who built it.

How We Got Here

The grind didn’t just appear out of nowhere. Once you see who built it, you can’t unsee it.

“What do you do?” is the first question strangers ask. Not “What brings you joy?” Not “What are you curious about these days?” Not “Where have you traveled to lately?” Your job. As if your profession is your identity. Our worth and identity are so tethered to our job that without it, we don’t know who we are. That’s the problem with the Worth Equation: most of us are running on it. This identity equation isn’t universal. In some countries, like France, asking about someone’s job first is considered rude. In Mexico, I’ve met people and gotten to know them for years before I found out what they do for a living. But in America, we’ve inherited something deeper than manners. We’ve inherited the belief that work is our identity and our only salvation. That belief didn’t arrive accidentally. It was installed. The Protestant work ethic taught us that exhaustion equals righteousness. We’re still living the same lie: that busy equals worthy. We’ve built a culture where self-destruction is proof of commitment.

The Hundred-Year Trap

Someone built the machine you’re running on. His name was Frederick Winslow Taylor. He had a stopwatch and a theory. The theory was that human beings are components. The stopwatch was how he proved it. Dr. Caroline Elkins, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Harvard, calls it “the cult of efficiency.” And it’s been running the show for over a century.

In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management, and everything changed.⁴ Taylor was an engineer obsessed with one question: How do we make workers more productive? He studied factory workers with a stopwatch, breaking down every movement, every task, calculating the most efficient way to perform each action. He turned human beings into components in a machine, each one tuned for maximum output.

Harvard Business School, and every business school that followed, was built on these principles. Scientific management became the operating system of modern capitalism. These days, companies use surveillance cameras to track keystrokes, app usage, browser history, to ensure people are sitting at their desks, which Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella calls “productivity paranoia.”⁵

And things are only getting worse as AI agents create the Great Productivity Panic. AI is the culmination of a century-long obsession with doing more, faster, cheaper. And we’re about to repeat the mistake Taylor’s disciples made, only at a scale that would have been unimaginable in 1911.

Taylor’s disciples didn’t anticipate that the cult of efficiency would metastasize into every aspect of human life. Today, we have step counters tracking our daily movement, apps optimizing our sleep schedules, productivity systems gamifying our to-do lists, biohacks optimizing our mitochondria. Everything is measured, quantified, and optimized.

The forty-hour workweek has its own origin story.

On May 1, 1926, Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company, reduced his company’s workweek to 40 hours. His motives were economic and self-serving: to reduce turnover and increase productivity, and to give workers more leisure time to enjoy the cars they purchase with the money they make. A hundred years later, that same 40-hour week remains the (theoretical) baseline, even if the work we do has drastically changed. The Industrial “Revolution” (I should say “Devolution”) has sold us all a bill of goods, wholesale and en masse, without regard to the human side of the equation. It built the cage.

We measure success by material metrics and busyness rather than by whole-life well-being and happiness. There’s a better instrument. I call it Life Wealth (time, health, relationships, meaningful work, and experiences). It’s not a new idea. Psychologist William James observed the damage of overwork on Americans living “excitedly and hurriedly,” breaking down under the pressure, predicting that the “relaxed and easy worker” would achieve more. But that’s not how the machine operates.

Hustle culture doesn’t just demand overwork—it makes you want it. Platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube became digital coliseums where hustle was not only practiced but also celebrated through carefully curated highlight reels of productivity and success. I remember watching Gary Vaynerchuk insisting that “hustle is the most important word… ever.”

“9 to 6 is not enough.” “Your talent isn’t enough.” “Hustle your face off 15 hour a day,” - says Gary Vee.

I disagree.

I watched entrepreneurs on Instagram post about their 4 a.m. wake-ups, their 80-hour weeks, their “no days off” mentality.

I followed them. I believed them. If they could do it, why couldn’t I?

The message still comes from everywhere: business leaders demanding “long hours and high intensity”; tech founders calling 60-hour weeks “the sweet spot”; influencers glamorizing late-night work sessions and posting their “rise and grind” morning routines.⁶

We stopped calling it what it is: exploitation. We started calling it ambition. Hustle Culture transformed into a performance art, creating an endless cycle of work glorification. Unlike addiction to alcohol or drugs, work addiction is celebrated. It’s considered noble, even essential.

Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, coined the phrase hustle porn to describe the glorification of overwork. “Hustle porn,” he said, “is one of the most toxic, dangerous things in tech right now.”⁷ But tech isn’t the only sector grinding people down: health care, manufacturing, real estate, marketing, finance & consulting, retail & food service, hospitality, education, the Gig economy are all suffering from grind culture. We are feeling the cumulative effects of the Hustle Hangover: burnout, loneliness, disengagement. Seventy percent of Americans say the idea that hard work pays off doesn’t hold true anymore, or maybe never did. (The Wall Street Journal, 2025)⁸

The default path isn’t working anymore. The old worls is duying. And that opens the way for the desire path.

Urban planners call desire paths the diagonal trail across the park lawn where the concrete sidewalk curves the long way around. The worn dirt through the snow where the designed route went nowhere useful. Enough people make the same cut and the grass gives up. A new path appears. Not because people wanted to break the rules. Because they still wanted to get somewhere but more direct. They just stopped pretending the official road (the default path) was going to take them there in the best way possible. (Cultural futurist Jasmine Bina talked about it in her speech ay Carnegie Mellon and Pilar Suquilvide wrote about it.)

Desire paths are often shorter. More direct. They cut through to where people actually wanted to go.

Desire path. Alan Stanton, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Work, the way we know it, is freefalling. We are seeing the death of the 9-to-5 job, the collapse of the stable career, massive layoffs, portfolio careers, side-hustles and Gen Z rethinking the whole relationship between meaning and work, while AI is slowly taking over tasks, jobs, and entire professions.

Most people I know are worried about their jobs. When Oracle cuts 30,000 jobs by email, then hands its new CFO a $30 million package while posting record revenue, you understand why no one feels safe anymore. The system rewards companies and their executives who make them leaner and more profitable. The idea of the stable 9-to-5 job or secure career is gone. Seventy percent of Americans say the idea that hard work pays off no longer holds, or maybe never did. (The Wall Street Journal, 2025)⁹

The default path is cracking. We need a new path forward. That’s the desire path.

In 1932, British philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote an essay called “In Praise of Idleness,” warning about what the efficiency cult was doing to factory workers.¹⁰ He watched as gains in productivity didn’t create more leisure time—they just created pressure for more production. The workers got faster, so management raised quotas. The treadmill accelerated.

Fifteen years after Russell’s essay, another philosopher picked up the same thread. Josef Pieper, with the rubble of World War II still underfoot in 1947, published Leisure: The Basis of Culture.¹¹ Germany was rebuilding its bridges and factories, but also its moral and spiritual core. Pieper asked hard questions that feel uncomfortably current: Where do we go after a time of crisis? How do we rebuild a society damaged by its own excesses—humanely and humanly, “in conformity with our human essence”?

His answer was audacious then and feels radical now. Culture is renewed not by more toil, but by leisure. Pieper had a term for what we’re living through now. “Total work“ is a culture that collapses our worth into our usefulness and our usefulness into our wages. In such a culture, effort becomes the only register. Leisure becomes suspicious, a luxury at best and a moral failing at worst. But leisure, Pieper argued, was the basis of culture, not because it produced outputs that could be priced, but because it produced humans who could perceive the good. The point, Pieper reminds us, is not to stop working. It’s to stop being reduced to a mere worker.

The original meaning of schola—the Greek root of our word “school”—is leisure. The Greeks understood what we’ve forgotten: education happens in free time. Learning requires space. Culture requires contemplation. You cannot optimize your way to wisdom. But we’ve spent a century doing exactly that.

I’ll tell you more next week.

Milena

1. Real name and some details have been changed to protect privacy.

2. Running from the hopeless emptiness of this life” is a quote from the 2008 film Revolutionary Road, directed by Sam Mendes. It encapsulates the main characters’, Frank and April Wheeler, desire to escape their mundane 1950s suburban existence, reflecting themes of existential dread, conformism, and failed ambitions.

3. A report shows 54% of the workforce is quietly cracking. Quiet Cracking: a persistent feeling of workplace unhappiness that leads to disengagement, poor performance, and an increased desire to quit. TalentLMS. 2025. “Quiet Cracking: The Hidden Crisis Silently Reshaping Work.” https://www.talentlms.com/research/quiet-cracking-workplace-survey.

4. Taylor, F. W. (1911). The Principles of Scientific Management. Harper & Brothers.

5. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella coined the term "productivity paranoia" in September 2022 to describe a disconnect where leaders fear lost productivity in hybrid work models, despite data showing employees are productive.

6. Decades of psychological and workplace research challenge the assumption that more hours inherently equal more productivity, especially in knowledge-based roles, and that the sweet spot of productivity is closer to 36 hours/week. (Proven by now by the 4-day workweek experiments and global initiatives).

7. Yahoo. 2018. “Reddit's Alexis Ohanian warns 'hustle porn' is 'most toxic, dangerous thing' in tech industry.” (Nov). https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/reddits-alexis-ohanian-warns-hustle-porn-toxic-dangerous-thing-tech-industry-140033929.html.

8. The Wall Street Journal. 2025. “Exclusive | Faith in the American Dream Is Fading as Economic Pessimism Grips the Nation, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds - WSJ.” The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/economy/wsj-norc-economic-poll-73bce003.

9. The Wall Street Journal. 2025. “Exclusive | Faith in the American Dream Is Fading as Economic Pessimism Grips the Nation, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds - WSJ.” The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/economy/wsj-norc-economic-poll-73bce003.

10. Historical Essay: 3. Russell, B. (1932). “In Praise of Idleness.” Harper’s Magazine (October 1932).

11. Pieper, J. (1952). Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1947 as Musse und Kult)