fighting with the overlord in my head

An ambitious woman's notes from trying to escaping hustle culture.

When I was nine, I told someone I wanted to be a school teacher. “You are too smart to be just a school teacher; you should become a college professor,” he told me. I didn’t realise what he meant then. 16 years later, as a burnt-out 25-year-old, I understand him all too well.

I was born with a capitalist overlord in my head. He mostly spoke in my mother’s voice. He asked me to be ambitious. To dream of creating surplus value from my labour so his friends could benefit from me. He can be called a manifestation of the world I lived in. One who instilled in me that my work is directly proportional to my participation in the economy and the money I could make and hoard.

When I was 13, the most ambitious thing a girl could want to be was a Software Engineer. So we (my overlord and I) wanted to be a Software Engineer. I asked my parents to enrol me in after-school coaching so I can start preparing to get into a good engineering college.

It wasn’t until I turned 15 that I discovered the joy of writing. Well, no, that’s not the case. I have always been a writer. But my overlord (this time in the voice of my grandmother) told me that writing is just a hobby, not a career. You see, writers just didn’t make enough money.

When I told my mother I didn’t want to be a Software Engineer anymore, she was very understanding. “You can study biology, later medicine and become a doctor,” she said. I reluctantly agreed.

But when the time to attend college came around, I decided to major in humanities. No way, my mother said. I pleaded. I cried. I yelled. I rebelled. And with my father’s support, I finally got the go-ahead.

Then I continued to spend the next 3 years of my life, oscillating between having my brain cells expand from the texts I was reading and panicking that I would never get a job, despite working very hard in my program. The former was me, the latter was my overlord. But by then, I couldn’t know the difference. 20 years of conditioning had mushed him and me together. We were one and the same.

My relationship with “ambition” has always been complicated. I was always ambitious and at the same time not ambitious. I was smart. I was good at academics. But I had no dreams of topping my class. I was good at writing stories and essays. I wanted to be the best in that. But I was told it isn’t an ambitious dream.

During my bachelor’s, I wanted to try many different careers until I found the one I liked the most — culture journalism. It was mostly by accident. I came across a pitch call-out from the LGBT+ editor at BuzzFeed. I sent over a pitch. He commissioned me to write the piece and paid me $100 — almost half of my monthly pocket money. I realised: with the purchasing power parity between the US dollar and the Indian Rupee, one could make a bare minimum living in culture writing, if one was earning in dollars and spending in rupees. I have found a workaround. I can be a full-time writer forever and ever and ever, now. I was pleased with myself. My overlord was pleased with me.

Next Monday, I was added to their weekly newsletter with topics they wanted to commission, and I was suddenly a Contributing Writer.

Slowly, I discovered the world of internet culture reportage and fell in love with it. By the time I graduated from college, I was building my career as a culture journalist one byline at a time. Every time I earned a byline, I would be happy for a moment and start working on the next one. I wasn’t satisfied until I was the next Taylor Lorenz. About two years in, my brain and body crumbled under the weight of my ambition and gave up.

In mid-2023, I took my first career break. Mostly due to burnout, partly due to culture writing opportunities drying up.

My career break was the first time I had breathed in a long time. I was depressed, but I was also free. I didn’t have a byline to chase. I didn’t have a deadline to honour. I could read without having to make notes. I could knit, colour, scroll on my phone and lie around. But an “ambitious” woman could be “idle” for only so much time.

After a year of recovering from burnout, I went back to doing what I love the most, writing, in a different setting. I joined a small, ambitious startup to lead its content department. “We are a team of hustlers. We don’t believe in work-life balance. This is going to be the most rewarding time of your lives,” they said.

Dear reader, it wasn’t.

The pay was decent. Initially, I had fun. It felt good to be ”a productive member of the economy” after a very long time. Within a few months, my 996 — 9 am - 9 pm, 6 days a week, a horrible, horrible working standard set by the crony techie capitalist in Silicon Valley that has taken over tech startup culture across the world — caught up to me.

I still toiled on. As a former gifted child, my self-worth was very much tied to what my boss (and my overlord) thought of me. So I continued to deliver good results, despite knowing that every single day I was losing a part of myself. I will rest when I get replaced by the AI I am building, I joked. As if building the AI that will replace me is going to benefit me in some way.

I had slowly started losing myself, though.

First, I stopped reading. It’s okay, I can always find time to read.

Then I stopped writing for joy. If you have been here from the beginning, you might have noticed the frequency of my emails reducing steadily and then just stopping altogether.

Then I stopped talking to my friends regularly.

Then I stopped doing my skincare regularly.

And then I stopped living. I became just a body furiously typing on my laptop screen for 12 hours a day, and then dissociating from the said typing for 12 hours a day.

For the first time in over 2 decades, my overlord was silent.

One day, in the silence, I looked around and saw the meaningless days I was adding to my life. It was a stark contrast to what my life had been when I was a culture reporter. Yes, I was tired under the weight of my own expectations. But I was joyful at times. I was social. I was travelling. I was reading. I longed for the life I had then, even though, back when I was living it, it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows.

That’s the thing about our overlords. Once you give them a little leeway, they colonise your entire brain and life. They make you their slaves, until you can’t think, feel, or move anymore. And when you are finally broken, they stop chattering. But as soon as you recognise the futility of the life you are living, they are back. You couldn’t make it, they say. You were lazy, they say. You just don’t have what it takes to make it in life, they say. You have wasted your potential, they say.

After a year of doing the 996, I quit my job without a backup plan. The only plan to get myself back. Even if it meant I have to give up my ambition. It’s been a year since then, and I have gotten back bits of myself again.

The parts that came back are telling me that I have been wrong all along. They are saying it is okay to be ambitious. As long as it is your definition of ambition and not that of the capitalist overlord in your head.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary explains the origin of the word “ambition” as such:

When candidates for public office in ancient Rome wanted to be elected, they had to do just what modern candidates must do. They had to spend most of their time going around the city urging the citizens to vote for them. The Latin word for this effort was ambitio, which came from ambire, a verb meaning “to go around.” Since this activity was caused by a desire for honor or power, the word eventually came to mean “the desire for honor or power.” This word came into French and English as ambition in the late Middle Ages. Later its meaning broadened to include “an admirable desire for advancement or improvement” and still later “the object of this desire.”

The parts that came back to me chided me. They questioned why, when even the dictionary meaning of “ambition” has evolved to include various kinds of lives well-lived, I have been fixated on honour and money. So I asked my overlord to go on vacation. He was angry. “Go on a vacation?? In this economy???” he asked. So I drugged him with hours of gardening and reading fiction. I injected early sunrises and evenings at the beach into his veins. I fed him the joy of spending time with my girls and myself. He told me he was disappointed. He reminded me that we had done this dance before, but had always gotten back stronger. I took that as a warning. I didn’t want us to get back together. It was time for a cerebral revolution and to throw him out.

As a literature graduate and a lifelong bookworm, I believe the best way to bring forth a cerebral revolution is to read. So I read. I read the works of feminists and thinkers before me. The politics of labour. The politics of rest. The politics of hobbies.

Then I rested and “wasted” my time cooking, dancing, painting, knitting and gardening. I spent my time filling my soul. I felt my cerebrum expand. I achieved clarity. I realised what I want and don’t want from life.

I want a small house with a garden where I can cook for my friends.

I want to swim in the ocean every day.

I want to see places.

I want to write stories.

I want to learn more about people on the internet.

I want to write this newsletter more regularly for you.

Unfortunately, none of my dreams is possible without the money my job makes. So I need to go back to selling my time for money. But this time around, I need to keep the overlord in my head sedated so he doesn’t rewire my brain cells into equating my self-worth to my job title.