🎶 Like A Star - Corinne Bailey Rae
The spring semester at Yale has begun! I remember teaching Intellectual Property in the Digital Age (syllabus) for the first time in 2020 and experiencing just the worst imposter syndrome and depression. Now, whenever I start getting down on myself about how my book is going (or not going), my uncertainties navigating social media, or how I “shouldn’t be here,” I like to think back to that time and remind myself that I made it through. Stuff like that is why I’m such a huge fan of multi-year journals like the Some Lines a Day five-year journal. I started one when I gave notice at the firm last year, and I’m really looking forward to passing that one-year mark and being able to see how Year 2 compares. (But I’m already cringing at the sad and depressing entries I know I made in Year 1.)
This week, in light of all the discourse around AI replacing lawyers and the tech layoffs, I want to talk about destabilizing our own shortcuts and schemas that we’ve developed in adult life. There are so many underlying logical assumptions when it comes to labor shocks, such as ChatGPT can generate natural language responses → Legal jobs can be completed by AI and Getting laid off → I suck, that I think it’s important now more than ever to take a step back and defamiliarize these external and internal headlines, including interrogating why it’s so easy for us to buy into these statements in the first place.
simplicity is a black hole.
When I was ten years old, I wanted to be a singer, an actress, and a figure skater. Never mind that it would be exceedingly difficult to make a living doing any one of those things, much less all of them. At that age, the ignorance of youth doesn’t take into account the realities of the world. Because everything is new and everything is changing for a child, they don’t rely on the shortcuts and schemas that characterize adult thinking, because they have no such shortcuts and schemas to rely on (yet).
Now, I’m not knocking shortcuts and schemas—I love a good “life script” (and in fact have a folder in the Notes app with scripts for life ranging from preferred nail technicians to easy anime cosplay outfits). But choice exhaustion is so very real in our era of infinite scroll. The joy of getting to dictate your life for the first time after high school can quickly give way to confusion about which direction to go among the 360° available to you and fatigue over what to wear, how to structure a high-stakes email, which health insurance plan to choose. Some evenings, I find myself browsing Netflix, cross-referencing shows against Rotten Tomatoes scores, only to look up and realize that I’ve wasted an hour contemplating how to waste an hour without even really wasting an hour.
Choice exhaustion in adult life is, well, exhausting, but more than that, it leads us to gravitate towards simplicity, even when said simplicity might not be what we really want. Did I really want to rewatch The Office? No, I was looking for a new show to really lose myself in, like Better Call Saul or Severance or Mare of Easttown. But after a day of walking by a partner’s office at calculated times because they aren’t responding to emails, making small talk with a perfectly nice but overly chatty taxi driver at 11pm, and emailing back and forth with ten venues to plan a party for a friend, the search cost of finding that Great New Show can seem like too much.
So The Office, it is. Again.
TV shows are a silly example, of course, but the simplicity vacuum is real. Clear paths—straightforward, perhaps, or just familiar—tend to suck us in even if we don’t want them to and never intended for them to. This gravity extends beyond just picking which TV show to watch, too—it extends to one’s career, especially in conveyor belt fields. One of the most (unintentionally?) haunting Twitter threads that I’ve ever read goes:
This isn’t a criticism of those who were young and became old without knowing where the time went. In fact, I think it speaks to the utter efficiency of the shortcuts and schemas that those people developed, to be able to focus on the necessities of living, day in and day out, without spiraling into existential crises. It’s near superhuman.
But as with all efficiencies in human life, there is such a thing as being too efficient. Your shortcuts can be too fast; your schemas too available; your decisions too much like a flowchart. Machine learning is efficient, but there are times when our human brains should strive for more than mere efficiency. There are times when our shortcuts and schemas are just plain wrong, just like ChatGPT sometimes is just plain wrong.
We are particularly susceptible to over-reliance on our learned schematics when we’re facing choice exhaustion. When we don’t know what to do, because of a potentially disruptive technology or industry layoffs or something else, it’s easy—comforting, even—to cling onto simplicity, any straightforward or familiar thought process. (In some way, I wonder if the simplicity vacuum animates a lot of the outsize backlash against including pronouns in profiles and introductions, but that’s a topic for another time.)
I know there are a lot of reasons right now to be scared, to feel hopeless, to want to give up. But I want you to interrogate that mental shortcut, to ask yourself why you’re replaying The Office1 instead of stepping back to really survey the possibilities more carefully. How would ten-year-old you analyze the situation, not adult you with all of your learned experiences and causal inferences? There’s a lot of change ahead for the world and for you, but in every change, there is opportunity. I promise.
🔖 open tabs
Last Friday, Google—which had been my dream in-house role back in law school—announced that it was cutting 12,000 jobs, or about 6% of its total workforce. As my FYP came across Googlers vlogging getting laid off, it felt like the end of an era. For so long, I had idealized tech as the stable stalwart of our times, but perhaps now we must all come face-to-face with the eroding compact between employer and employees, no matter how many cafeterias they provide or how much on-site laundry they offer.
I had the pleasure of reading The Good Enough Job by Simone Stolzoff over the long weekend, and it did, in fact, help heal my relationship with work, which was funny because I didn’t even know it needed healing. He profiles eight people whose lives centered around work at some point, and I hate to admit that I saw a little of myself in each of them, toxic mindsets and all. It’s a quick read and comes out in May, but you can preorder it now. (Full disclosure: Stolzoff and I have the same editor and have chatted!)
The recent studies about the detrimental effects of even a little alcohol have scared me, so I’ve begun looking into non-alcoholic versions of wine and beer. If you have any brands you like, let me know!
I feel like I have to admit here that I haven’t seen all of The Office.