I’ll admit, the last year has felt like a lot of effort for very little payoff. I’ve been unmoored, caught in the shallows in more ways than one: professionally, creatively, spiritually. It’s tempting to trace this malaise back to my heart attack, just over a year ago, but I know that’s not the root cause. That was at most a physical manifestation of what turns out to be a greater psychic disconnect between me and the world. Traveling the way I have been I’m always a bit out of sync, always slightly off balance and tumbling into my next destination. Maybe I’ve slowed enough that it’s finally managed to run me down. I can’t seem to catch my breath. That was never a problem before.

It’s a little odd to discover you’re the ghost tormenting your own house. I’ve been avoiding the kind of grand voyages which used to form the backbone of my travel — Antarctica was the last, and that was booked years ago — in favor of revisiting old haunts. I could probably keep hopping around Europe forever. But a lot of mundane concerns have gotten in the way of the sort of trips I used to take on the regular. I need to get my gallbladder extracted, I need to learn Portuguese, I need to find a job that doesn’t make me feel like a handmaiden to the apocalypse. That’s felt a little more urgent than visiting Japan or Egypt or Chile.

So I’ve been rattling around the bits of Europe that I’ve already seen, hoping for a future which is largely out of my hands to arrive, and slowly figuring out how to get there from here. I’ve made progress. There’s still a ways to go. And if the last year has felt like I’m groping my way through a labyrinth, at least I can take comfort in knowing there’s no minotaur locked in with me. I’m on my own. And the main thing keeping me from the exit is that I haven’t fully decided where that ought to lead, yet.

I left my job in April. There were a lot of reasons, but the primary one was I had nearly completely burned out. It was consulting work and it wasn’t going well — the client was difficult and I wasn’t getting the support I needed from my company — and after six years the work had gotten a little stale and repetitive. Something had to change.

I build websites. My resume describes me as a “backend Python developer with both full-stack experience and an emphasis on DevOps and CI/CD pipelines.” My career is a lot more messy than that implies; I’ve got experience with databases both SQL and NoSQL, I’ve done a fair amount of work in parallelization with Docker and I’ve been dabbling in Dart and Kotlin for mobile applications. The truth is a good programmer can pick up any language in a week or two. The job’s all about adapting to new technologies. I’m surprisingly good at it.

But after a few months looking for a new job, I was demoralized and exhausted. A third of the jobs in my specialty on LinkedIn are for artificial intelligence. About another third are for cryptocurrency and blockchain integration. I regard both those technologies as 90% scam and the tiny subset which aren’t are actively destroying the world. So right off the bat I found myself wading through a lagoon of shit to find the jobs I’d be comfortable working.

In the three months I was actively searching I applied to 500 jobs. According to LinkedIn, most of those positions had between 1,000 and 2,000 applicants. Most of those are bots, which means the companies are all using AI to filter out the vast majority of it. The recommendation, if you’re applying, is to use AI yourself to customize your resume for each and every position you apply to, in the hope you get past the almost-certainly-brain-dead bot who doesn’t realize that Typescript is a variant of Javascript and if you know one you almost certainly know the other, or could pick it up in an afternoon.

Even then I didn’t do too badly. I probably got a call for every ten positions I applied for. I made it through three or four rounds of interviews at least ten times, where I’d talk to a couple of managers and several members of the coding team and did several hours of technical assessments and coding challenges. They just didn’t pan out. A lot of them I lost out to a candidate who was further along in the process than I was. Some of the positions got scrapped due to a surprise reorg. A lot of companies just ghosted me.

All this might have gone smoother if I had been willing to move somewhere and go into an office twice a week, but the thought of moving back to the United States and getting a house and commuting to work fills me with dread. I understand why corporate managers like people working on site, since it replicates a model of feudal serfdom and what’s the point of owning a plantation if you can’t watch people working in the fields?

But I won’t go back to commuting for an office job, not without a very compelling reason to. And I quickly realized my heart wasn’t in the whole process of looking for work in the first place. I put the job search on hiatus while I figured out what I was doing now and what I really wanted to be doing for the remainder of my life. I’ve got enough cash saved up that I can afford to coast for a while. It just felt like if I were going to jump back in to the working world I should probably figure out why the thought of it was making me nauseous.

As usual, when I feel like things are going seriously wrong with the world I look for books to help me figure it out. Just this year Dan Davies published The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions — and How the World Lost Its Mind and it provides a compelling diagnosis of why things got so off-track. The Unaccountability Machine is about cybernetics. You might think cybernetics has something to do with electronic implants or prosthetics — I certainly did — but it turns out the term was coined in 1947 to describe the study of feedback systems. The people who studied it back then got really into information theory and a bunch of them jumped into computer science when computers were invented, so cyber ended up in the public consciousness as meaning something vaguely computer related.

The study of feedback systems turns out to have been extremely valuable in the ’50s and ’60s because the complexity of the world shot way up in the wake of World War II and people needed some way to make sense of it. Cybernetics offered a way of dealing with that complexity. The key insight was that you could no longer understand how something like a corporation operated by examining each element in isolation and figuring out how they all worked together; the world had gotten too big and complicated for that. But you could break something down into interconnected systems, and having done that you could treat each system as a black box. You no longer needed to understand how each system functioned. You just needed to know what inputs it required and what outputs it generated, and having done that you could manage the inputs and outputs, which is a vastly easier task.

Management cybernetics defines five kinds of systems. Healthy organizations need all five. The first three are kind of obvious: operations (which do stuff), regulatory (which make sure operations has what they need, and they don’t clash with each other), and optimization (which make decisions like which operations get access to scarce resources or how to resolve conflicts). The last two are higher orders: intelligence (which need to make predictions about the future and react to changing conditions) and philosophy (which are ultimately in charge of the entirety of the system, and need to decide what its purpose is). Intelligence might be responsible for opening or closing new locations based on market forecasts, while philosophy should be thinking about shutting down product lines or pivoting into new lines of manufacturing.

All this was incredibly influential up until about the ’70s. But in 1970 Milton Friedman published an essay called A Friedman Doctrine. Dan Davies makes clear that Friedman was a symptom of the problem, not the cause — if Friedman hadn’t formulated neoliberalism someone else would have — but Friedman got there first and became the face of it. The subtitle of A Friedman Doctrine is The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits and that pretty much sums it up. Managers were no longer in charge. Shareholders were.

Corporations started believing their only duty was to raise their share price. And if the share price is all that matters, you no longer needed to design in all those expensive feedback loops or hire all those middle managers to make decisions based on it. From a cybernetics perspective they slashed all intelligence and philosophy systems, cutting all the the upper level decision making in favor of ad hoc management from the executive suite. They decapitated themselves, in other words.

Management gets pretty simple if you only worry about the numbers that show up on a balance sheet. But a single-minded devotion to stock price throws away every other potentially useful signal. That’s how you end up with Boeing designing planes that crash and CrowdStrike taking down 8.5 million mission critical systems because of a single buggy driver update. Robust testing and QA don’t boost your bottom line. The same goes for carbon capture initiatives or wetlands restoration or community jobs programs. It’s not like these programs aren’t popular, even among the people who make up the corporations. It’s that the corporations aren’t structured so they can respond to those incentives. The feedback loops have all been disabled.

None of this is intentional. None of it’s even irrational. Everyone in the system is responding intelligently to the incentives they’ve been given. But the sum total of all of it is this monstrous mess that poisons the environment and destroys the atmosphere and impoverishes the working class. It’s what the system was built to do. Not by design. But as Stafford Beer, a cyberneticist, put it: the purpose of a system is what it does. And this is the purpose of late-stage capitalism.

So you can understand why I’m a little reluctant to find another corporate job fiddling with shopping carts or integrating a login system with Microsoft or Facebook. For most of my career I’ve had an increasing feeling of being a palace eunuch, tending the gardens or serving as cup-bearer while a crazed emperor wages war against the world. In that time I’ve seen the computer industry go from this incredible marketplace of new ideas and technologies to an oppressive environment where massive transnational tech companies smother anything genuinely disruptive. I don’t want to sign up for another tour of duty mopping the floors of the Death Star.

My residency visa in Portugal was finally approved, three and a half years after I first submitted my application. I’m still waiting for the card to be issued; once that’s done I can start on the next steps, mostly registering for health care and enrolling in language courses. These things should feel like milestones, but the bureaucracy surrounding each of the steps has been so screwed up it’s mostly been a miserable slog.

When COVID hit I didn’t have any place to go. The expectation seemed to be that everyone would return home, but I had given mine up when I first left the United States, and the thought of going back — particularly given the news out of New York City — was terrifying. I eventually waited things out in Ireland, but it would have been a struggle to go anywhere else in the EU; the borders were closed to me. It wasn’t like I wanted to travel. But getting locked out was disturbing.

If I’m lukewarm about returning to the United States, I need a legal way to stay in Europe. Portugal is my attempt at fixing that. The first step is a residency visa. The next step is applying for permanent residency. And after that — this is why the language classes are critical — I can apply for citizenship. And with that I gain the right to live and work anywhere in the EU.

It’s still a long way off; I haven’t even gotten the residency card in my hand yet. Then I need to demonstrate proficiency in Portuguese, which I’m just not very good at. I’ll need to wait some number of years before applying for permanent residency and then it typically takes two years for Portugal to process citizenship requests. So this is an eventual goal, not an immediate one.

But it’s happening, at the languid but inexorable speed of the Portuguese bureaucracy. When it comes through I’m thinking of finding a place to land for at least a couple months in Portugal, possibly overlapping with an intensive language course and getting some of my lingering medical issues dealt with. It’s another sign, coupled with the medical mishaps of the past year and my ambivalence towards reentering the workforce, that I’m slowing down.

I doubt this means I’m stopping. Not yet, anyway. Stopping still feels too much like depression for me. I’d sit around all day and watch YouTube videos and order in takeout food. I need something more than that. But I’m looking for a model that’s at least a little more sustainable in the long run.

Right now we’re in the middle of Rosh Hashanah, the two-day Jewish holiday celebrating the New Year. I’m not Jewish but I lived in New York City for long enough that I picked up a lot of the culture. It’s surprising how much of Jewish life has worked its way into the rhythms and cadences of NYC. Tragically, we’re also close to observing the one year anniversary of the October 7 attacks in Israel. The Israeli government continues to conduct the war with the same mix of arrogance, belligerence, and gaslighting that it started with. The official death toll is now above 40,000, almost certainly an undercount given the collapse of medical services in Gaza.

Sometimes I’ll discuss the war with my friends who are Jewish. There’s a lot of different perspectives — “Two Jews, three opinions” as the saying goes — but by and large they’re horrified at the violence being done in their name and are staunchly opposed to the current government of Israel. Granted, I don’t know very many Israelis, but even there public opinion is split with significant majorities wanting a new government, clearer objectives for the fighting, a focus on freeing the hostages, and a well-articulated exit strategy.

In other words, we’re again facing a situation where the system that’s in place is beyond the control of the people who ostensibly run it. It’s making terrible decisions but everyone caught up in it is making perfectly rational ones, given what influence they have. It’s an unmitigated humanitarian disaster for the Palestinians and ends up being a pretty bad deal for the Israelis as well, excepting the violent hard right fringe of settlers who are steadily and relentlessly evicting Palestinians from their land under the banner of Eretz Yisrael.

I don’t know how to live in a world that permits such horrors to occur. I also don’t know what possible use I can be in trying to stop it. That’s really what these systems do; they box us out. It’s hard enough figuring out my own life most days. Anything on a broader scale seems out of reach. But just because I don’t know what to do, it doesn’t mean I’m absolved of the responsibility of trying. Maybe that’s what this funk I’m going through is all about. I’ve learned so much over the last six years of travel, about history and culture and politics and globalism. I see the problems much more clearly than I ever did. Maybe it’s time to start fixing them, in whatever manner I can, at whatever scale I’m capable of.

Traditionally, Rosh Hashanah is when the Book of Life and the Book of the Dead are opened and the fates of the wicked and the righteous are recorded. I tend to think about that during the High Holy Days. I try to live righteously. I like to think I succeed more often than I fail. But there’s a third book opened as well, a record of those who are neither wholly wicked nor wholly righteous, and the names inscribed therein are given an opportunity to repent and become fully righteous. That’s probably where mine would end up, if I’m being honest.

For religious Jews, those whose names are written in the third book have until Yom Kippur to repent. Being neither religious nor Jewish, I’m under no such deadline. But I’m taking the opportunity anyway, to think about what I’ve done and where I’m going, of the ways both big and small I can realign my life to do more and do better than I have in the past. But atonement is nothing without action. On Yom Kippur, we are called both to atone for our sins and to work to repair the damage we have caused. If I may be permitted a prayer as an agnostic, let that be mine. May we all reflect on the harms we have done, may we discover the strength within ourselves to forgive those who have harmed us, and may we find the courage to dismantle the systems we have trapped ourselves in and heal the wounds they have caused. And let me live with that in my heart, not just for the next ten days, but every day for the rest of my life.

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