In 2025, the operating system I had relied on for a decade stopped working.

For years, my default mode was simple: move fast, think sharply, execute well. It wasn’t just a belief; it was a proven causal loop. At places like Facebook and Waymo, the environment reinforced this. If you solved hard problems and took on complexity, the system responded.

Effort and outcome weren't perfectly aligned, but the relationship was legible.

Then, the legibility broke. What followed wasn’t a single crisis, but a slow-rolling realization that the rules of the game had changed. It unfolded in two phases: first, a mismatch of values, and second, a discovery of a new dimension of work entirely—the tension between Delivery and Narrative.

When the Feedback Loop Breaks

The break happened at Roblox. I stayed only a year—unusually short for me.

It wasn't a lack of effort. It was a failure of translation. For the first time, my standard toolkit for success—execution and problem-solving—didn't map to the culture. Success there depended less on output and more on positioning, politics and context.

It was a shock to the system. It left behind something closer to trauma than disappointment, not because the job was hard, but because it shattered my assumption that the world was a meritocracy of execution. I realized how conditional my confidence had always been.

The Matrix: Delivery vs. Narrative

I started to map this friction onto a simple 2x2 matrix:

Delivery: The work that compounds through execution. Systems that run, things that ship, feedback that doesn’t lie.
Narrative: The work of shared understanding. Why something matters, how pieces fit together, and where we are going.

For a long time, Waymo (The Safety Team) sat in a specific quadrant: High Delivery, Low Narrative Cost. The story of "why safety matters" was settled. We didn't have to re-litigate the mission every day. Progress was slow, but concrete.

But eventually, that phase ended. The narrative became unstable, the cost of alignment spiked, and the legibility vanished. That shift—from legible execution to high-narrative ambiguity—is actually where I burnt out. I left because I didn't yet possess the tools to operate when the story became the work.

OpenAI sits natively in that volatile quadrant: Uneven Delivery, High Narrative Cost. AI is structurally uncertain. Narratives are formed, contested, and revised in real-time. Because the boundaries of what we are shipping aren't always explicit, the narrative expands to compensate.

The difference this time is that I recognize the game. The exhaustion I feel isn't burnout; it's the learning curve of a new skill. In previous roles, I tried to brute-force narrative problems with execution. Here, I am learning to toggle between narrative-heavy alignment and execution-heavy building, sometimes within the same hour. I am learning to survive the instability that used to break me.

Narrative Debt

This matrix explained a deeper fatigue I’d been carrying.

It wasn’t just about one job. I noticed a recurring pattern across the industry: ambitious narratives are put forward, energy is mobilized, and then the distance between the promise and the delivery quietly grows.

When results fall short, the system often responds with more narrative rather than more substance.

I hadn’t lost interest in technology. I had lost patience for stories that never cash out. I was suffering from narrative debt—tired of systems that demand belief survive without evidence.

The Control Case

During this period, I poured energy into cycling—training, data, maintenance.

In hindsight, this wasn’t escapism. It was a control case. Cycling responds to physics, not politics. It is always execution. There is no narrative. You just keep executing. If I put in the watts, I went faster.

It proved to me that I hadn’t lost the ability to commit or endure. What had stopped responding was the professional world I was investing in.

The Architecture of Drive

This year forced me to distinguish between two different engines of work.

Engine 1: Intelligence fueled by Interest. This is the "Mercenary" mode. It asks: Is this problem hard? Is it novel? Can I solve it fast? Interest provides the dopamine; Intelligence provides the speed. This works beautifully when the feedback loop is tight. But Interest is volatile—it evaporates when the work becomes political, vague, or slow.

Engine 2: Wisdom fueled by Purpose. This is the "Steward" mode. It asks: Is this outcome worth the suffering? Does it align with who I vowed to be? Purpose is not motivation. Motivation pushes you forward; Purpose is the anchor that holds you back from quitting when the "fun" is gone. It recruits Wisdom—the judgment to exercise restraint, to wait, and to navigate friction without needing immediate validation.

I realized my crisis was simple: I was trying to navigate a high-friction environment using only my "Interest" engine. When the fun stopped, I stalled. I hadn't yet built the "Purpose" engine required to survive the mess.

A friend gave me a framework for finding that Purpose that stuck. It defines purpose not as a goal to reach, but as a structure shaped by three specific forces:

The Wound: The specific pain or sensitivity you carry that makes you care when others don't.
The Vow: The promise you make to yourself about what you will never become or repeat.
The Witness: The specific people—real or imagined—whose understanding actually validates your work.

I haven't fully filled in those blanks yet, but just asking the questions shifted the weight. It moved me from asking "Am I winning?" to asking "Am I honoring my vow?" It re-centers the work on internal alignment rather than external capture.

The Record

I’m writing this not to offer a solution, but to mark the transition.

The anxiety I feel around work isn’t a sign of failure. It’s the residue of an old survival strategy—one that relied on vigilance to stay safe in systems that demanded constant proof. That strategy worked for a long time. But I’m no longer willing to live inside it.

I used to think the goal was to find a place where the 'narrative' and 'delivery' perfectly overlapped—a world as legible as cycling. But that world is rare.

The real work now is not to escape the messiness of narrative, but to survive it without losing the thread of reality. To use the 'Purpose' engine to withstand the noise. To stand in the gap between what is promised and what is built, and—even when it is difficult—to be the one who remembers the difference.

State of my 2025