Open to Opportunities

I added “Open to opportunities” the second my pay rise didn’t match inflation—and you should too. I don’t mean that as some LinkedIn thought-leader koan where I’ve gamified my personal brand into a funnel. I mean it descriptively, almost taxonomically: the moment my compensation stopped being compensation and started being a quiet little actuarial bet that I wouldn’t notice, I flagged myself as available. Not disloyal. Available. The distinction matters because loyalty hasn’t been on the menu since the late 1970s, when some McKinsey ghoul realized you could juice a quarterly earnings call by treating labor as a friction cost rather than an asset. Since then, the pretense that business is personal—that your “work family” will protect you—has curdled into something between gaslighting and emotional fraud.

Business isn’t personal. It never was. What it is, increasingly, is adversarial. Not just between firms scrapping over market share—that’s at least honest in a Hobbesian sort of way—but between the firm and its own employees, and between the firm and its own customers. Every year we accelerate further into a fuck-or-be-fucked economy where the executive class has decided that labor is a hostile nation-state and the customer is a resource to be strip-mined. You see it in the language: “human capital,” “revenue extraction,” “churn.” You see it in the architecture of the thing I actually get paid to build, identity access management, where the genuine security concern of verifying a human being mutates imperceptibly into a surveillance apparatus that tracks bathroom breaks and flags “productivity anomalies” for a manager whose entire emotional repertoire is the smug certainty of a man who’s never had an original thought but whose mommy and daddy bought a library in exchange for a legacy’s university education. That guy—and it’s almost always a guy—sits in a glass-walled office and utters phrases like “doing more with less” as if he’s discovered a new principle of thermodynamics rather than stolen it from a 1994 Jack Welch earnings call. He’s not even malicious. He’s just the end product of a system that selects for the smooth-brained confidence of inherited capital and calls it leadership. I don’t hate people. I hate watching a nepo-baby fuck whose primary intellectual achievement is remembering which fork goes first lecture a room full of actual engineers about “velocity” while he can’t format a pivot table. That’s the politics I mean when I say corporate politics. The performative intelligence of the unqualified. The theatrical earnestness of people who’ve never built anything except a narrative about why they deserve more than you.

And look, I’m acutely aware that I’m saying this from a position that used to require a decade of masking just to keep a cubicle. I’m ASD-1—what the DSM used to pathologize as Asperger’s until the neurodiversity movement made it briefly fashionable to admit you’re not neurotypical, right around the time corporations realized “autism hiring initiatives” were cheaper than fixing their broken management structures. For the first ten years of my career I hid it. I learned to perform eye contact like a foreign language, to modulate my tone so I didn’t sound like a robot dissecting your logical fallacies in real time, to pretend I gave a shit about the company picnic. And then, for about five golden years, it felt like maybe the mask could come off a little. Suddenly big tech wanted “cognitive diversity,” which meant they’d tolerate my flat affect as long as my pull requests were clean and I didn’t ask why we were burning hundreds of millions on a rebranding exercise. I could be the “eccentric architect” instead of the weird guy who doesn’t blink. But now? 2024 happened, the Trump administration brought hatred back like a limited-time nostalgic entrée, and suddenly neurodivergent, LGBTQ, minority—anyone who isn’t the factory-default human—we’re all supposed to slip back into hiding. Be grateful you have a job. Don’t make waves. Smile at the Christmas party. Fuck that. I refuse to perform gratitude for a paycheck that doesn’t keep pace with the inflation their own goddamn monetary policy caused.

Let me be clear about who I hold in contempt, because I’m not an equal-opportunity misanthrope. I hold zero punches for elected officials, corporate executives, bankers, and any other person in a position of power who exploits labor. I don’t mean the middle manager who’s just as trapped as I am; I mean the people who design the trap. The six conservative ghouls on the Supreme Court who decided that corporations are people and money is speech, then spent their summer vacations on the yachts of billionaires who don’t want to pay taxes. The only liberal justices I tolerate with any enthusiasm are the ones who occasionally write a dissent that reads like a philosopher-king roasting a room full of village idiots, and even then, my patience is thin—except for KBJ. That woman’s footnotes are savage AF.¹ She writes a dissent like she’s filing a legal brief with a shiv hidden in the citations. I’d read a thousand pages of her laying waste to originalist logic with the cool precision of someone who knows the canon better than the men claiming to interpret it. She reminds me of what I loved about my Oxford tutorial education—the brutal, quiet dismantling of a bad argument by someone who’s actually read the sources.

I got that education because I was a weird kid who read too much and because the system, for all its faults, had a scholarship pathway that occasionally let someone like me slip through. Math and Philosophy, with minors in History and Biblical Studies, in a tutorial system that forces you to defend every premise out loud while a don who’s been doing this since before you were born stares at you like you’re an insect that wandered onto his notes. I read a ton of the classics. I fell in love with Shakespeare—the tragedies, the histories, the bleak unsparing shit where everybody dies and nobody learns anything, not the comedies where mistaken identity somehow leads to marriage. You want to understand corporate dysfunction? Read Coriolanus, a man too proud to perform humility for the mob, destroyed by the tribunes who weaponize his authenticity against him. Or King Lear, where the one daughter who refuses to flatter gets exiled and it turns out the whole kingdom is built on a lie. I love the philosophers who told the truth about power: Hobbes, who saw life as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short—and then got hired to justify a monarch. Hume, who punctured causality and religion so gently that nobody noticed the Enlightenment had already detonated. Descartes, who tried to think his way to God and accidentally invented solipsism. Heidegger, who was a Nazi piece of shit but also the only person who correctly observed that modern technology treats the world—and by extension human beings—as “standing-reserve,” raw material to be ordered and optimized. Arendt, who watched Eichmann’s trial and didn’t see a monster, just a bureaucrat who made evil banal. Durkheim, who diagnosed anomie, the dislocation of a society that’s lost its normative structure, which is exactly what you feel when your company announces a return-to-office mandate in a town hall where the CEO dials in from his beach house. And Jacques Maritain, the Catholic personalist who argued that the human person is not a mere individual unit of economic function but a whole, incommunicable self oriented toward the common good—a notion so antithetical to modern capitalism that reading him feels like archaeology, unearthing a civilization that believed in something other than the quarterly report.

Since college I’ve spent hundreds of hours listening to The Great Courses—Economics, AI, Game Theory, Machine Learning, Trade, Macro-econ, the Econ of Uncertainty, Early European Philosophy, Early American History—because my mind doesn’t stop. The ASD-1 means I absorb information like a sponge in a flood and I don’t get to choose what sticks. The result is that I’m a nihilist who can’t stop caring. I’m a software architect at a 5,000-person enterprise SaaS company specializing in identity and access management, which means I spend my days building systems that decide who gets to enter the kingdom. It’s philosophically rich work if you’re a certain kind of deranged, because identity is a construct, access is a proxy for trust, and management is a euphemism for control. I watch us slowly, methodically replace human agents with AI bots not because the bots are better—they’re not, they hallucinate, they amplify bias, they turn edge cases into disasters—but because bots don’t unionize, don’t demand raises, don’t ask uncomfortable questions about equity. The company says “augmentation.” The company says “efficiency.” The company says “freeing up your time for higher-value work,” which is a lie so transparent it’s almost endearing. What they mean is: you are a cost center and we’re going to automate you out of existence the moment the math works, and in the meantime we’re going to monitor your keystrokes so we can train the replacement model on your own labor. It’s a kind of automated grave-robbing.

And the customer? Oh, the customer is also the enemy now. We’re monopolizing every goddamn market so that customers never get the chance to go elsewhere. We acquire competitors not to integrate their technology but to euthanize it. We make cancellation require a notarized blood oath. We raise prices not because costs have gone up but because the algorithm says you’ll pay it. The relationship between a business and its customers used to be mediated by some thin but real notion of reputation; now it’s mediated by a terms-of-service document nobody reads and an arbitration clause that strips you of your right to sue. Companies built by labor and paid for by customers are internally hostile to both. The hatred is structural, embedded in the logic of late-stage capitalism the way Heidegger’s enframing embeds in technology: it’s not a choice someone makes, it’s the water in which we swim. The CEO doesn’t wake up and say “how can I be more adversarial today?” He wakes up, looks at the dashboard, and asks “how can I reduce unit labor cost by 5% and increase customer lifetime value by 7%?” and the answer is always: treat labor like an expense to be minimized and customers like a vein to be tapped.

I used to be an ambitious asshole. I was in fight-to-survive mode for a decade, scraping upward because the alternative was falling. I did things I’m not proud of—steamrolled colleagues, played the political games I now despise, pretended to respect people who hadn’t earned it—because I thought the system was a meritocracy and I just hadn’t proven myself yet. It took me years to realize the system is a hereditary aristocracy with a PR problem. The turning point was when I looked around and realized I’d become one of the people I loathed: high title, high comp, no debt, no family, completely free to say whatever I wanted but also completely hollow. And I had this moment—call it a philosophical conversion, call it burnout, call it the sudden recollection of Maritain’s insistence that a person is not a function—where I understood that the only meaningful thing left to do with this privilege was to burn it as fuel for people who don’t have it.

So now I’m one of the most no-bullshit, anti-corporate, pro-family people in my company, despite not having any family of my own. Because I’m free. I don’t have major debts. My mortgage is manageable. My lifestyle is modest—books, coffee, a good ergonomic chair. I can afford to tell the SVP of Product that his “AI-first strategy” is a hallucinating garbage fire and that the three engineers who actually understand the auth pipeline are about to quit if he doesn’t approve their retention bonuses. I champion everyone to prioritize their own lives over the corporate grind. I tell junior devs, explicitly, in one-on-ones: “You are not your job. Your title is a rental. The company will post your role before your obituary runs. Go to your kid’s recital. Take the mental health day. Document everything in writing, because HR is not your friend, and when the time comes to negotiate, remember that the company is betting you’ll be too afraid to leave. Make them wrong.” I mentor people from underrepresented backgrounds, I fight for them in calibration meetings, I teach them how to decode the doublespeak—because “we’re a family” means “we expect you to sacrifice without compensation,” and “we value work-life balance” means “you can have balance as long as the work is done, and the work is never done.” Part of this is shame. I wasn’t always like this. I did real damage to people in my climb. Part of it is that I’m a nihilist who has concluded that if nothing has inherent meaning, then the only meaning is what we choose to create, and I choose to make the lives of the powerful slightly more uncomfortable on behalf of the people they’re grinding into dust.

And part of it is that I’m watching the hatred accelerate with no clear idea of where it ends. The same companies that spent 2020 posting black squares on Instagram and sponsoring Pride floats are now quietly defunding DEI initiatives and waiting for the EEOC to be gutted. The same executives who talked about “mental health” during the pandemic are now demanding a full return to the panopticon because their commercial real estate portfolios are underwater. The same politicians who wax poetic about the dignity of work are passing laws to make it harder to quit without cause. I see the AI bots coming for my own field—identity access management, for Christ’s sake, as if you want a stochastic parrot making authorization decisions—and I know that the playbook isn’t about making things better. It’s about reducing the number of humans who have any leverage at all. The goal is a labor market so desperate that you’ll take a pay cut and be grateful for the privilege of being exploited. The goal is a customer base so locked in that you’ll pay a subscription fee for heated seats in a car you already own. The goal is to make exit so costly that nobody exits, not the employee, not the customer, not the citizen. And when exit is foreclosed, the only thing left is voice, which they’re also working hard to suppress.

So what do you do, if you’re a person and not a function? You make yourself exit-ready. The “Open to opportunities” banner on LinkedIn isn’t a statement of disloyalty; it’s a statement of existence. It’s the quiet signal—Hobbes would call it a natural right—that you reserve the power to walk away when the compact is broken. Inflation ate my raise, so I flipped the switch. Not because I’m definitely leaving, but because I want the algorithm to know that I can. I want the internal recruiters who monitor attrition risk dashboards to see that little green ring around my profile photo and feel a tremor of anxiety. Because the only language they understand is cost. The moment your departure becomes more expensive than your raise, they’ll find the money. The moment enough people flip that switch, the cost equation shifts. It’s not a union, but it’s a start. It’s Durkheim’s anomie met with agency: a refusal to let the normlessness of the market dictate your entire inner life.

I’m not naive. I know that an “Open to opportunities” badge won’t stop the AI bot that’s going to come for my job in five years. I know the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court is not going to save us—these are the people who think unlimited corporate spending in elections is the pinnacle of free speech while a woman’s bodily autonomy is a states’-rights experiment. I know the billionaires should be taxed out of existence and instead they’re building bunkers.² I know that the hatred is back on the menu for neurodivergent, LGBTQ, and minority folks, and that the brief window of corporate tolerance has slammed shut with the same speed as a Tesla dealership’s glass door during a protest. I know all of this, and yet.

And yet I keep mentoring the junior engineer who’s terrified his accent will keep him from a promotion. I keep translating the corporate doublespeak into plain English during all-hands meetings. I keep quoting King Lear to anyone who will listen: “The art of our necessities is strange, that can make vile things precious.” The necessity here is survival, and what survival makes precious is solidarity. Not the performative, branded solidarity of a corporate ERG, but the quiet, actual solidarity of telling a coworker what your salary is so they can negotiate theirs. Of refusing to participate in stack-ranking sessions designed to pit you against your peers. Of adding “Open to opportunities” in public view so the new hire sees it and realizes it’s allowed.

Business isn’t personal. But it also is, because it takes up so much of our finite, mortal, irreplaceable lives. The choice isn’t between playing the game and not playing; the choice is whether you play it on their terms or yours. Their terms are: pretend it’s a family, pretend the CEO earned his billions, pretend the AI won’t replace you, pretend the stock buyback is a sign of health, pretend the court is legitimate, pretend the hatred is over. My terms are: this is a transactional arrangement in a decaying late-capitalist hellscape, I owe you nothing beyond my contracted obligations, and if you don’t pay me what I’m worth I will signal to every recruiter within a thousand miles that I’m available, and I’ll do it loudly, and I’ll teach everyone else how to do it too.

That’s not cynicism. Cynicism is thinking nothing matters. I think everything matters, which is why I’m so fucking angry. If I were a true nihilist in the sloppy sense, I’d collect my check and keep my head down. But I’m a nihilist in the precise, rigorous sense: I believe there is no transcendent meaning imposed from outside, which means we are radically responsible for creating whatever meaning we have. And the meaning I’m creating is this: I will be the most inconvenient employee my company has ever failed to fire, because I know exactly what I’m worth and I know exactly how the machinery works. I’ll use my ASD-1 pattern-matching brain to spot the inconsistencies in the quarterly guidance. I’ll use my Oxford training to construct arguments that can’t be dismissed with buzzwords. I’ll use my position as an architect—a builder, someone who actually constructs things—to remind the people who only do spreadsheets that the spreadsheet is not the reality. The reality is the labor, the people, the late nights, the chronic stress, the bodies that keep the system running while the shareholders sleep.

So yeah, I added “Open to opportunities.” And you should too. Not because it’ll fix everything, but because it’s the smallest possible act of self-respect in an economy that desperately wants you to have none. It’s a way of saying, quietly, that you remember you are a person and not standing-reserve. That you’ve read enough history to know that the only thing that ever checks power is organized refusal, and that refusal starts with the internal decision that you are not their property. You are not your job. You are not your title. You are a human being with exactly one life, and you get to decide where you spend it.

Flip the switch. Let them see the green ring. And if they ask you about it in your next one-on-one, look them in the eye—don’t mask, don’t perform, don’t soften—and say, “I’m keeping my options open. I assume the company is doing the same with my position.” Watch the squirm. Enjoy it. That squirm is the sound of power briefly losing its footing, and it’s the only honest sound left in corporate America.

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¹ See, e.g., Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, where she basically calls out the majority’s “race-neutral” fantasy as the jurisprudential equivalent of closing your eyes and insisting the room isn’t on fire. I have a framed excerpt on my desk, next to a post-it that says “Remember: the median net worth of a Black family is about 1/10th of a white family’s. The footnotes know.” It keeps me sane.

² The effective tax rate for billionaires in the U.S. is often lower than what my junior devs pay on their W-2s. I’m not a policy expert, but it seems fucking obvious that if one person has more wealth than the GDP of a mid-sized nation, something has gone structurally wrong with the concept of distribution. We should tax them until they’re merely extremely wealthy and use the money to fund public education, healthcare, and the kind of infrastructure that doesn’t require a subscription.