Why I Left — The Honest Answer

Yesterday I doxed myself on X.

Three weeks ago I quit working for someone else.

Here is the honest answer to why.

Every job I've ever had came with a task someone handed me.

As I got more senior I expected that to change. It didn't.

The person above me was handed a task too, and the person above them, and no matter how far up the ladder you go, it is fear all the way up, dressed in better clothes.

"Business value", "KPIs", "we are helping people". It's all just like candy dangled in front of a child. You are not in control at any stage of the funnel.

The lens you are given is that you are lucky to even have this job, and you are, because other people beside you are still looking for jobs after the last round of redundancies.

Gratitude makes the trap harder to see. You can spend years thanking the thing that is quietly eating you.

The irony is that the same personal growth that led me into more senior roles is also the thing that pushed me out of them completely. The more I understood how the game worked, the harder it became to keep playing it.

I pushed through every flavour of discomfort this job had to offer. The kind that signals growth, not the kind that just wears you down. There was only one flavour I hadn't touched, which was actually leaving.

That was the signal. At some point most of my attention had drifted into planning the exit. That's where I'm up to now.

There is another thing I cannot unsee. One side of the divide is buying bunkers that cost hundreds of millions, with fleets of cruise ships to serve their cruise ships.

The other side is trying to survive on salaries five times less than mine, with multiple kids.

If this is what survival looks like at my level, with the choices most people don't have, how is everyone else actually living?

We should not have to live like this, and it is not sustainable. There is a tipping point and you can already see it if you look close at the detail.

I know where this road leads if I do nothing.

More redundancies, every bit of energy and time squeezed out of you, the world dissipating into chaos while you tell yourself you are lucky to still have a seat.

It is already happening, and the question is whether you sit and watch, or do something about it.

Not everyone is me. I worked hard to get to where I am, and I am not saying wealth should just be redistributed. I don't believe that.

What I cannot accept is a world where control is concentrated in a very small minority that is not representative of the public. Education shaped by that minority, social media farming your attention, every dollar quietly extracted from you, no long-term planning for the people living underneath any of it.

This is me trying to do something about it.

The last reason is the only experiment I couldn't run from inside a company.

What happens when I control all the objectives, all my time, where my attention goes? No one setting up a meeting, no one needing my hours because of something that has nothing to do with the value coming back to me, other than the pay check keeping me alive.

You cannot answer that from inside the cogwheel. The whole thing exists so you never get to.

There are real challenges on the other side of "freedom".

Unlimited time pulls you toward low-effort dopamine as hard as it pulls you toward the work.

TikTok, games, infinite scroll. These are things built to farm your attention, give you a short dopamine hit, and return zero long-term value back to you.

Three days in and I can already feel how easy it is to drift. The freedom is also the trap, because nothing is imposing any shape on your attention anymore, so you have to build that shape yourself.

I am figuring out what to build and who to build it for.

Not everyone at once, and not some abstract audience. People around me, physical networks.

That is the only thing that gives me real value back, and in time it might be the only way to steer any of this into my realm of control. I cannot help everyone, but I can help the people near me.

Yesterday I set up my first automation for someone other than me, a booking bot for my brother.

Small, but it's the first time the thing I have been building serves anyone outside my own problem set. Day three of the experiment.

I am going to detail every bit of learning as I go along, as raw and unfiltered as possible. The good, the bad, and the ugly.

None of this is me saying that having a job is bad. Most people have one, I had one for two decades, and it's the right thing for a lot of people a lot of the time.

What I want to do is share my story and learnings.

I've collated years of learnings, recordings, notes of my own journey. Things that I think would be of value to others to give others perhaps a different perspective to life.

The things that worked, the things that didn't, the parts you'd otherwise have to live through yourself to understand.

If you think any of that may be of use to you, I invite you to follow along so we can learn together.