The Ladder at the Edge
Sergey Brin’s retirement story sounds funny at first because it begins with such a soft little dream.
Brin—one of the co-founders of Google, who stepped away from day-to-day work at Alphabet in December 2019—imagined, as he later put it, that he would sit in cafés and study physics. Then the pandemic arrived, and the cafés disappeared. The joke is obvious. The emotional truth underneath it is not. Brin said he felt himself “spiraling” and “kind of not being sharp” without the intellectual stimulation he had depended on for so much of his life. Once Google began letting some people back into the office, he returned too, eventually finding his way into the work that became Gemini. Staying retired, he said, would have been a “big mistake.”
I read that and believed him.
I also felt, almost immediately, that I was standing on the far side of a contrast.
My pandemic image is not a café. It’s our kitchen table.
A Table Holding too Much
When everything moved home, I worked from the kitchen table in our small apartment. Not from a home office. Not from one of those clean little remote-work arrangements that look like they were assembled by someone with a ring light and a plant budget. Just the table where we ate.
My laptop sat there. My calls happened there. My deadlines, notes, messages, meetings, drafts, and calendar reminders all gathered on the same surface where dinner was supposed to go. Work did not merely follow me home. It took up the center of the room.
Christa put up with it.
That’s what I remember most clearly. Not the novelty of Zoom. Not the strange quiet outside. The thing that stays with me is more ordinary than that: a shared space under pressure, and the grace of someone absorbing inconvenience without making the inconvenience the whole story. She had to live around me while I worked. I had to remember that being home was not the same thing as being present.
By then, I had already stopped driving because of my vision. The pandemic did not invent limitation in my life; it made the whole world briefly speak a dialect of it. I don’t want to overstate that. I was not confined to the apartment in some absolute or cinematic sense. My life had still been a life. But I had already begun learning how the world changes when your independence becomes less automatic.
More planning. Less spontaneity. More dependence on other people’s schedules. More awareness that a casual errand is only casual if the body cooperates.
So, when people talked about the world closing in, I understood. I felt it too. But part of me also felt a strange recognition. The closing-in was not entirely new. It had already been happening at the edges.
That may be why Brin’s story lands for me with sympathy but not identification. His retirement failed because he missed the arena. My life, by that point, was already teaching me that the arena had been asking too much.
Ambition Without a Ladder
The difference is not only about introversion, or disability, or temperament. It is also about a word I have argued with for years: ambition.
Early in my time at the agency, back when I was still going into the office and still young enough to think corporate language might eventually reveal itself as sincere if I listened long enough, I had a small disagreement with my boss.
We were talking about ambition.
She meant the company version of the word. Advancement. Climbing. Taking on more. Moving up. Being able to point to the org chart and say: there, that is growth. In that framing, ambition was visible only when it traveled vertically.
I remember trying to explain that I did not reject ambition. I just did not experience it as a ladder.
For me, ambition has always had more to do with curiosity than hierarchy. What do I want to learn? What do I want to make? What do I want to understand? What kind of person am I trying, however unevenly, to become? Work can belong inside those questions, of course. Sometimes work can sharpen them. Sometimes it can give them a place to land.
But, work is not the whole horizon.
A person can be ambitious about craft. About honesty. About becoming less afraid. About noticing more carefully. About writing one sentence that does not flinch. A person can want a larger life without wanting a larger title.
Nothing dramatic happened in that conversation. No one stormed out. No one raised their voice. But the disagreement stayed with me because it revealed a quiet mismatch that never fully went away. The company wanted ambition to be measurable inside the institution. I experienced ambition as something older and wider than work, something the institution could either support or distort.
Years later, that same disagreement returned in a more elaborate costume.
The Role That Made Sense too Early
Around 2023, after AI had begun to feel less like a novelty and more like a structural shift you could hear in the walls, I proposed a new role for myself: Senior AI Strategist.
I did not pitch it as a vanity title. I pitched it because the need seemed obvious to me. Someone had to coordinate the company’s position and processes around what was coming. Someone had to think about standards, workflows, tools, client expectations, internal education, risk, quality, and the basic reality that a field built around producing words was about to be transformed by machines that could produce words.
This was not “let’s sprinkle AI on the work so we sound current.” This was: the ground is moving, and pretending it isn’t moving will not keep us standing.
Since the role did not exist, I did what I tend to do when I care about something: I wrote a long document. Job description. Responsibilities. Outcomes. Deliverables. Scope. Future direction. The boring, beautiful scaffolding that turns a hunch into something someone else can evaluate.
I also argued that the role needed real seniority. Eventually, I thought, it would need to rise even higher, maybe to director level and beyond, because a function like that cannot work if it is merely decorative. Without authority, strategy becomes suggestion. You become the person who is consulted, thanked, and then quietly routed around.
When I presented it, one response stayed with me.
Do you see people reporting to this person?
I didn’t know how to answer because the question was both reasonable and beside the point.
Maybe someday, yes. But that was not the essence of the role. The essence was coordination. Judgment. Standards. Momentum. A center of gravity for a change that was going to touch everything.
Inside the company’s logic, though, ambition still seemed to mean management. To matter was to supervise. To be senior was to have people beneath you. The idea that someone could be consequential because the work itself required weight, not because headcount reported upward through them, seemed to miss the available categories.
The role was never created as I imagined it. Instead, some of the work was folded into my existing duties in a way that felt both familiar and deflating: a watered-down version of the new thing, blended awkwardly with the old thing, without enough authority to make the original vision real.
Looking back, I think the proposal landed poorly because it challenged the same assumption I had challenged years earlier.
The ladder mattered more than the direction.
Polish and Drift
This is where Brin’s story loops back in for me.
At Stanford, he talked not only about his own failed retirement but about Google’s hesitation in AI. Google, of course, published the 2017 Transformer paper, “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the architecture that now underpins much of modern generative AI. Brin’s own postmortem was blunt: Google “underinvested,” he said, and was “too scared to bring it to people because chatbots say dumb things,” while OpenAI “ran with it.”
I don’t read that as a simple morality tale. It’s too easy to say the big incumbent was timid and the smaller challenger was brave. The truth is probably messier. Large institutions hesitate for reasons that are sometimes cowardly, sometimes prudent, and often tangled together. A chatbot saying something false or foolish is not a trivial problem when millions of people may treat its tone as authority.
Still, the line stayed with me: chatbots say dumb things.
My old work was not AI research. It was marketing. But I knew something about polished language detaching from reality.
Best. Top-rated. Trusted. Proven. Most effective.
Those words were everywhere. They were expected. They were the air of the job. Most of the time they weren’t criminally false, just spiritually unearned. The kind of phrases everybody recognizes and almost nobody interrogates because the whole room has agreed to treat inflation as normal.
That was the strange moral fatigue of the work. Not that every sentence was a lie, but that so many sentences were built to sound more certain than the truth allowed.
Then generative text arrived and made that tendency easier to reproduce. Ask a model for marketing copy and, unless you steer it carefully, it often reaches for the same polished shapes the internet has been rewarding for years. Smooth confidence. Clean claims. Slightly inflated reassurance. The machine did not create that habit. It inherited it from us.
This is why the AI moment feels, to me, like both a technical revolution and a mirror. It shows us what we have trained language to do. It shows us how often fluency gets mistaken for honesty. It shows us how easily a sentence can sound finished before it has earned the right to be believed.
The Life at the Center
By the time I left work, the least corporate thing I could say was also the truest.
I did not want to keep building my life around the institution’s idea of ambition.
My body had already made part of that case for me. Fatigue was real. Vision was changing. Energy had become something I budgeted instead of assumed. In an earlier essay, I wrote that the job had become less “think this through” and more “feed the machine,” and that my body was slowly unplugging itself from the fantasy of a forty-year office career. Eventually, the conversations shifted from accommodation to future-talk to severance, and after I left, SSDI and LTD came through.
A door that had been half-open for a long time opened all the way.
I don’t want to go back.
Not because work is evil. Not because I resent people who thrive inside it. Not because I have transcended ambition in some purified, monkish way. Quite the opposite. I still care intensely about learning, making, understanding, writing, noticing, helping, and being of use.
I admire people who can stand at the center of fast technical change and help shape it. I am grateful for builders like Brin and for the enormous, complicated machinery of people behind the tools I now use every day. Those tools have made parts of my life more possible. They help me read, write, understand, navigate, and participate in ways my body might otherwise make harder.
But I no longer confuse that gratitude with a desire to rejoin the machinery.
Brin’s story is about discovering that stepping away was, for him, the wrong ending.
Mine is about discovering that stepping away was the first honest ending I had allowed myself to imagine.
And, if I need an image for that, it is still the kitchen table.
Not as a symbol of confinement. As a symbol of what the office kept interrupting. Laptop closed. Work no longer occupying the center by default. Dinner back where it belongs. The room returned to the people actually living in it.
That, to me, is ambition too.
Not the ladder.
The life.
I’ll never go back
The ladder is a mirage
For me, at least
