“The Company Man” by Tomás B.

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

To get to the campus, I have to walk past the fentanyl zombies. I call them fentanyl zombies because it helps engender a sort of detached, low-empathy, ironic self-narrative which I find useful for my work; this being a form of internal self-prompting I've developed which allows me to feel comfortable with both the day-to-day "jobbing" (that of improving reinforcement learning algorithms for a short-form video platform) and the effects of the summed efforts of both myself and my colleagues on a terrifyingly large fraction of the population of Earth.
All of these colleagues are about the nicest, smartest people you're ever likely to meet but I think are much worse people than even me because they don't seem to need the mental circumlocutions I require to stave off that ever-present feeling of guilt I have had since taking this job and at certain other points in my life [...]
---
First published:
September 17th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JH6tJhYpnoCfFqAct/the-company-man
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.