Fight Club has been my favorite movie since I first saw at in theaters at the age of nineteen. Not only have dualities always been a point of interest and reflection for me, I loved pretty much everything about the movie. It’s wickedly funny, visceral, and I enjoy the philosophical elements quite a bit. It’s one of the few instances where the movie is vastly superior to the book.

It’s the perfect movie for an angsty budding nihilist looking at a world that doesn’t really make any sense at all and feeling totally conflicted with himself.

As I have grown, the scene that sticks out in my head more than any other involves the convenience store clerk Raymond K. Hessel. Tyler Durden orders him out of the store at gunpoint and tells him he’s going to die. Tyler goes through his wallet:

Tyler: An expired community college student ID. What did you study, Raymond?

Raymond: S-s-stuff.

Tyler: Stuff? Were the mid-terms hard? I asked you what you studied!

Raymond: Biology mostly.

Tyler: Why?

Raymond: I don’t know.

Tyler: What did you wanna be, Raymond?

Silence and whimpering. Tyler cocks the hammer of his revolver.

Tyler: The question, Raymond was, “What did you want to be!?”

Jack: Answer him, Raymond! Jesus!

Raymond: Veterinarian! Veterinarian!

Tyler: Animals.

Raymond: Yeah animals and stuff.

Tyler: And stuff, yeah I got that. That means you have to get more schooling.

Raymond: Too much school.

Tyler: Would you rather be dead? Would you rather die? Here, on your knees in the back of a convenience store?

Raymond: No, please no!

Tyler: I’m keeping your license. I’m gonna check in on you. I know where you live. If you’re not on your way to becoming a veterinarian in six weeks, you will be dead. Now run on home.

Raymond runs off into the night.

Jack: Come on, this isn’t funny! That wasn’t funny! What the fuck was the point of that!?

Tyler: Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessel’s life. His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever tasted.

At my last couple jobs, we’ve had a running joke when a friend gets laid off or canned for cause where those of us still grinding away at unfulfilling jobs request of the departed, “Please tell us how your breakfast tastes tomorrow.” My current job—well, technically current in the strange sense that tomorrow is last day on the paperwork despite being locked out and laid off this morning—has presented my group with many opportunities to make this joke. Today was my day. Tomorrow will be my breakfast.

We knew a “reorganization” was coming. It’s been “coming” for like two months. There’s been considerable anxiety on my team about what was happening, if we’d be split up, who would be blasted into space, etc. I had said on a few occasions not to be surprised if I was on the list. My AI stance was very much at odds with the religion1 of our CEO and utterly hapless VP of Engineering—someone who I was sure was himself an AI until a good friend claimed to have met said VP in person.2 I don’t really care about the metrics. I’m expensive. I’m one of the last remote holdouts because I’m not giving this miserable organization another hour plus of my day with a commute.

My team dismissed the idea. I’m the lead. People who actually work with me are aware that not only am I a pretty good programmer who does good work, but I am a mentor and force multiplier for a team. I’m the primary designer. I have considerable domain knowledge and years of experience. I have a very emotional manner that can be infectious—for both good and bad. My old mentor was the first person to point this out to me in my late 20s.

You need to be careful. Your mood sets the mood of the whole office. If you believe, they believe. If you doubt, they doubt.

Although I thought cutting me was a stupid idea, the company is a sea of incompetence—particularly as you progress up the chain of command. The organization is run by people who have no idea how their company operates, what the systems do, and who is actually important to maintaining those systems. The two with the most power over my department firmly believe that RSI is just around the corner and doubling down on AI when the rest of the industry is having their, “Oh fuck, maybe this isn’t what we thought,” moment is going to save the day. This checks out. The place is a perennial3 also-ran. They’re typically 6-12 months behind the average industry latecomer.

Anxiety is always high because the people who do important work know that it’s actually entirely irrelevant. I had to accept that if I knew my superiors were clueless that my importance or impact was as irrelevant as any other. As it turns out, much to the shock of my team, I was right. I think I was ready for it more than everyone else.

While I’ve become something of a nihilist in recent years, there are still chunks of events that take place in my life that feels like maybe, just maybe, there is some greater element of fate or meaning or whatever. I know this is like a Psych 101 cognitive bias. We want to make sense—personal sense—of our experiences and observations.

Having said all of that, I don’t really care whether the universe is lining up big changes for me or if the fact that I think that’s at play is motivating and as such self fulfilling. Who cares? Does it matter? I know how I choose to read the tea leaves today. It beats the hell out of despair or trying to make sense out of how so much hard work, dedication, and self was poured into an entity that deserved none of it—not from me and not from many other good people. The exchange, despite the paychecks, was never equitable.

I felt it coming. I know what I have to do anyway.

The question, Raymond was, “What did you want to be!?”

My own captain.

So… let’s… fucking… go! I’m gonna get some mates and we’re gonna chart our own course this time. No more bosses. No more psychopaths. The dysfunction and nonsense will be of our own making. I think I might be delusional enough to make it work.

I wonder what I should have for breakfast tomorrow morning.

  1. Say what you want. I said it was a hill I was willing to die on and… my corpse is now a decoration and perhaps a warning to others. ↩

  2. I don’t know that I have met a duller human being. If I asked an LLM to create the image of a person who runs a company entirely from pointless stats on a spreadsheet, I swear it would conjure an image of this pinhead. ↩

  3. In the first draft I fucked up. I typed “perianal” but… it totally works. ↩