We were all from North America. We were all white, and in our twenties and thirties. These were not individual moral failings, but they didn’t help. We were aware we had blind spots. They were still blind spots.

The internet was a collective howl, an outlet for everyone to prove that they mattered.

I didn’t think to mention that if he wanted more women in leadership roles, perhaps we should start by hiring more women. I didn’t note that even if we did hire more women, there were elements of our office culture that women might find uncomfortable. Instead, I told him I would do whatever he needed.

If the personalized playlists were full of sad singer-songwriters, I could only blame myself for getting the algorithm depressed.

There was something to be said for expertise.

I would pick up books that had been heavily documented on social media, only to find that the books themselves had a curatorial affect: beautiful descriptions of little substance, arranged in elegant vignettes – gestural text, the equivalent of a rumpled linen bedsheet or a bunch of dahlias placed just so.

We talked about our IPO like it was dues ex machina coming down from high to save us.

Tech, for the most part, wasn’t progress. It was just business.

Warm laundry, radio, waiting for the bus. I could get frustrated, overextended, overwhelmed, uncomfortable. Sometimes I ran late. But these banal inefficiencies – I thought they were luxuries, the mark of the unencumbered. Time to do nothing, to let my mind run anywhere, to be in the world. At the very least, they made me feel human.

My impulse, over the past few years, had been to remove myself from my own life, to watch from the periphery and try to see the vectors, the scaffolding, the systems at play. Psychologists might refer to this as dissociation; I considered it the sociological approach. It was, for me, a way out of unhappiness.