The Slippers
The guy took his shoes off at work. Not because he was comfortable — because he’d given up. Twelve hours a day, six days a week, in a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco’s Dogpatch, and at some point the formal pretense of footwear seemed like one lie too many.
I used to sort mail at the post office. Eight hours, sometimes ten if someone called in sick or drunk or both. We wore shoes because the floor was filthy and because there was a union and because nobody pretended we were building the future. We were moving paper from one pile to another. The pay was bad, the supervisors were worse, and at five o’clock you walked out the door and the building didn’t follow you home.
These kids in San Francisco — and they are kids, mostly, twenties and early thirties with college debt and startup equity that might be worth something someday or might be worth the same as my marriage certificate — they don’t walk out. They DoorDash dinner to their desk and code until three in the morning and break only to smoke cigarettes on the sidewalk, which is the one honest thing left in the whole operation. At least nicotine doesn’t pretend to be disrupting anything.
They call it grind culture. Before that it was hustle culture. Before that it was just exploitation, but that word doesn’t look good on a pitch deck.
The Guardian has a guy named Lokuhitige who moved to San Francisco in November and works seven days a week, twelve hours a day, minus a few “carefully selected social events” where he can network. Carefully selected social events. That’s what they call talking to other human beings now. You have to schedule it. You have to make sure it’s strategically optimal. You can’t just sit at a bar and talk to whoever sits down next to you, because that person might not be in your industry vertical, and then what was the point?
I knew a man at the post office named Wendell who ate lunch at the same bench every day for fourteen years. Ham sandwich, bag of chips, a Pepsi. He didn’t network. He didn’t optimize. He watched pigeons and told the same three jokes and went home to a wife who tolerated him. He was probably the happiest person I’ve ever met. He died of a heart attack at fifty-eight, which is how happiness usually ends, but at least he had it.
These startup founders are living in the apartments where they work. Sleeping where they code. One place — a two-bedroom where the founders live and work from nine in the morning until three AM, leaving only for cigarettes and food deliveries. That’s not a startup. That’s a halfway house with better Wi-Fi. I’ve lived in places like that. The difference was I knew I was in trouble. These guys think they’re winning.
The beautiful part is they’re building the machines that will replace them. The head of Anthropic, one of the big AI labs, has suggested AI could eliminate about half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. The IMF says sixty percent of jobs in advanced economies will be eliminated or transformed, “like a tsunami hitting the labour market.” And the people pulling sixteen-hour days to make that tsunami happen are the same people who can’t get hired without five years of experience anymore, because junior developer jobs have already started disappearing.
They’re digging their own graves with incredible enthusiasm. I’ve seen this before. Not in tech — in the factories. Guys who’d work doubles and triples when the bosses said the plant might close, running themselves ragged to prove they were indispensable, and then one Tuesday the plant closed anyway and the boss drove off in a car that cost more than their house.
An executive coach named Robbins used to get hired to talk about burnout and wellbeing and belonging. Companies stopped asking for that. Now they want talks about change, disruption, and uncertainty in the workplace. Robbins used to tell people to bring their whole selves to work. Now the whole self is there whether you want it or not — sleeping on a mattress next to the server rack, eating pad thai out of a paper bag at midnight.
The slippers are the detail that gets me. Taking your shoes off at work because you’re there so long that comfort outweighs dignity. I think about Wendell and his ham sandwich and his pigeons and his three jokes. I think about these kids in their socks, staring at screens at two in the morning, building something that might make them rich or might make them irrelevant, and I wonder if any of them have three jokes. I wonder if any of them have a bench.
A guy named Garry Tan — runs some famous accelerator — bragged about staying up nineteen hours playing with an AI tool. Nineteen hours. I’ve stayed up nineteen hours. It was because I was drunk and the jukebox was good and a woman named Rita was telling me about her dead husband and I didn’t want to be the one who walked away first. That was worth nineteen hours.
The Uber drivers in San Francisco are competing with self-driving cars now. The baristas are competing with robot coffee bars. The engineers are competing with the tools they built last quarter. It goes all the way up and all the way down and nobody’s wearing shoes anymore.
When I left the post office, I walked out into the sunlight and lit a cigarette and didn’t think about mail for the rest of the day. These kids don’t have that. The work follows them into bed, into their phones, into their carefully selected social events. They are the work. They’ve merged with it so completely that when the machine finally learns to do what they do, there won’t be anyone left underneath. Just a pair of slippers and a DoorDash receipt and the faint smell of cigarettes from the sidewalk below.
Source: 12-hour days, no weekends: the anxiety driving AI’s brutal work culture is a warning for all of us