1/26
“Now that I can’t sleep anymore, I’m going to die.”
This thought had been repeating itself in my head for months. There were nights when I lost consciousness for thirty minutes and then woke up to spend the rest of the night in bed completely aware of my body. There were nights when I didn’t even get the thirty minutes in. But I still lay in my bed with my eyes closed. I thought it’s better to just lie there than to walk around.
There was this one night though when I got, I think, three or four hours of sleep. That was freaking magical. I got this small Xanax pill from my friend who works at the hospital. I still remember how great I felt taking the pill and watching TV and feeling how I was starting to get tired and the wonderful thought came up in my mind that I might – I just really might this time – sleep a little on the couch.
And I fucking did, I slept for three hours, and then I spent the rest of the night in my bed completely aware of my body. But I knew that I couldn't go down that road. I can’t just start taking drugs, to what beautiful places has this led people before?
2/26
I felt how a huge rock was taken off my chest. Literally that was the feeling. This freedom from worry and this freedom from always thinking about where to get money for my next rent. The fear had been accompanying me for the last four years.
But I was a team member now and this meant I had a salary coming in to my bank account every fifth day of every month. What a freedom!
It felt good. I had a girlfriend too back then. She had dark hair and hourglass body and she lived with me in a small one-bedroom apartment. That apartment, by the way, had a balcony bigger than the whole apartment. I smoked my cigarettes there.
Finally, a new beginning.
3/26
Before joining a startup I was building websites for money. I could easily pay my rent and buy food and cigarettes for smoking on my big balcony.
I had plenty of money because I was working alone. No employees. No office. I was never searching for clients. They came to me. They somehow found me on the web and they filled in the form to order a website. Life was good!
But then the recession hit and no one suddenly needed websites anymore. And I did what a reasonable person does. Gets a job. Almost everyone has one, so how bad could it be, right?
Right?
Well, I didn’t have much choice and soon I was there in their office and shaking hands. I was the second technical hire and I got a desk and a laptop. But most importantly, I got paid every fifth day of every month. I also got one month of vacation every year but now that I think about it I never took a day in all those seven years.
4/26
The first thing that surprised me when sitting in those meetings was how slowly things were moving. I never had any meetings. I never had any todo lists. But now there were meetings and there were todo lists. There were decisions to be made and tasks to be finished.
I was always doing everything myself. Talking to clients, drawing designs, writing code, sending invoices. But now there were other people. I had to wait with my code until someone made some decision or someone else finished his part of the code.
And meetings. Why so many? Someone always had a meeting going on. And why did I have to come to the office every day and why did I have to be there from morning to evening? I didn’t have a car so I had to travel by bus and this took me an hour there and an hour back.
When so far I was maybe spending an hour a day for building websites now I was spending eight hours a day in an office and two hours in a crowded bus.
5/26
It was a role play. That's what it was. People came to the office and played out their roles. Someone was a project manager, someone else was a customer support person. The work role was part of their identity and I learned quickly that people are very protective about their identities.
The things they said when they looked into your eyes – which they rarely did by the way because everyone was always so busy and said things over their shoulders – were always coming through the role they were playing. Say something that hurt their role and they would attack you to protect their identity. The role is a brain-program that fights for its survival.
It’s just funny, that’s all, it’s just funny that we’re all going to this office and putting on some nice clothes and turning on our identity programs and playing this game. Just playing this silly game. It was all normal.
Many horror stories begin with a normal, everyday situation, to invite the reader into a false sense of security.
6/26
I saw this woman from our office window. Every day, she was sitting behind her computer in her small office. I think it was a bank, worst of all options.
She was just sitting there and clicking her mouse and typing her keys and looking at the screen from eight to twelve. Then she was gone for an hour and then back clicking and typing until five. This was her life. I don’t know what she did after five. I suppose she spent an hour in the morning in the bus and an hour in the evening in the bus and so she was home at six and she probably had like four hours left for the rest of her life because she must have gone to bed at ten because otherwise how could you wake up at six to put on some make up and get dressed and spend an hour in the bus to sit down in your office chair at eight with your office coffee.
What a life! There’s a lot of sitting, clicking and typing. At least it’s normal. It’s normal to get born into this world and click click click until you’re too tired to do anything else meaningful, go to bed, and then again click click click and you’re – surprise surprise – dead! That's what you are!
You’re dead!
Okay she worked on her computer. That’s fine. She had tasks to do and she probably did them well. But could she go home at twelve if everything that was needed of her was done? Of course not, because when everything that was needed of her was done, there were maybe other things that were needed of her or probably there weren’t and then she just had to sit there until five.
Can you finish your day early when you’re working at a bank? Well, dear you, you’ve signed a contract where you give forty hours of your week to your employer and you need to spend those forty hours to get paid every fifth day of every month.
7/26
She was actually really beautiful and she had dark hair and she always wore dresses. Different dresses almost every day. This you can do with your bank salary.
One day as I was click click clicking my own forty hours and drinking my second office coffee, I couldn’t help to think back to this thing I read somewhere how in history we’ve had orgies.
How in ancient Greece and Rome we had all these sex parties dedicated to the gods of wine and ecstasy involving excessive drinking and dancing.
Click click click.
8/26
The horror elements are gradually introduced, making the contrast between the normal and the horrifying more effective.
Remember I told you how surprised I was to learn how slowly things were moving in a small team? Meeting after meeting, decision after decision, task after task.
Well, that changed quickly I’ll tell you. We won a big contract that had a deadline and oh how there was work to be done now in our small team. And yes we worked. We were productive and good workers. We spent a lot of our waking hours at the office, drinking coffee and writing code. No, really, it was great. It was my own free will and I liked what I did. I learned a lot.
But the best horror stories are psychological and not physical. Best horror is mental.
9/26
The thing with the deadlines is that they arrive. We had built this massive platform for our client. We needed to succeed because the startup would then survive. Otherwise we will go bankrupt and no one will have a job. That was made very clear to us.
On a normal Tuesday, our deadline arrived. Suddenly, there were hundreds of thousands of people using our platform and we were moving tens of millions of dollars per month.
I mean it’s okay. It’s okay if you have big teams building big products and big quality assurance teams checking that everything works as it should. But there were only a few people in our development team and there was no one in our quality assurance team. This meant that suddenly the code written and seen only by twenty-year-old me was now being used to move millions of dollars for hundreds of thousands of people.
You think there were no bugs? You think I got some sleep? Well no, I didn’t get any sleep now because the code I wrote was complicated and did a lot of things and we started to find things that needed to be fixed and fast.
10/26
I went to bed but it was hard to fall asleep because my mind went through the code trying to see if I made a mistake somewhere. A mistake that would cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars by the time I wake up in the morning. It was easy to make a mistake that would bankrupt the company and I felt the responsibility because I had written the code.
I finally shifted to my dreams but then a curious thing happened. My mind found a mistake in my code and woke me up. I hadn’t slept for three nights in a row but I just had to drag my body out of my bed, open my laptop and fix the code directly in the production server. Should I have run it through our quality assurance team? We didn’t have a quality assurance team.
You think when I got back to bed I was able to easily and swiftly fall back to sleep? My mind continued its work and I stayed up in my bed completely aware of my thoughts.
11/26
Could I just say fuck it and leave? Of course, and that would have been the best thing to do ever. But we were in this together. I couldn’t just leave them deal with my code.
Did anyone say to me that it’s fine, Benjamin, you have been working so hard and it has been so great that you’ve written all this code and we didn’t have to hire twenty developers, we only had to hire you, and you, Benjamin, worked a lot and wrote a lot of code and you didn’t have any life outside of your work and you spent these eighty hour weeks in our office. Thank you, but it’s not your responsibility to make sure that everything works 100%. Take it easy. Have some vacation days because you haven’t had any in the last four years. Go have some fun outside of work and we will hire more developers and we will build a quality assurance team and you don’t have to worry about it. We see you’re tired and your eyes are red and we know that you haven’t slept for three nights so please, Benjamin, take a month or two off, go travel a bit and get some sun.
Well, no one told me that.
“Our bets are now so high that make sure you don’t make a mistake that you can’t pay from your salary.”
I heard that instead.
12/26
“What’s the smoke in the office?”
I asked when coming back from the kitchen with my twenty-first cup of office coffee that day. Well, that “day” started three days ago. I hand’t slept because who sleeps during a day. I just had a long day.
It was like something was burning without a smell. Or it was rather this fog. I remember thinking to myself that it’s so weird that there’s fog in the office. How could it be? What could possibly be the explanation for that? I couldn’t come up with anything and I didn’t have to because my co-worker was now suddenly standing in front of me, no idea how he got there, I didn’t see him walking, he just appeared.
I was looking at him and there was still this fog in the background. I held my twenty-first office coffee in my hand and I knew there would be a twenty-second and a twenty-third too before I can go home and get some sleep – because there were all these things needing to be fixed.
“There’s no office in here,” I heard my coworker say – the same one who appeared in front of me without walking.
“No office?”
“There’s no smoke in here,” he repeated. “You'd better go home and get a few hours of sleep.”
I said fine and went to my car and started driving back to my home. It takes around 30 minutes to drive to the other side of the city where my apartment was.
Yes, I had a car now – ought it with my salary.
It was 8AM and I was stuck in traffic jam when I suddenly woke up before crashing into the car in front of me. My body was so tired that it had turned itself off without my permission.
When I got home, I couldn't fall asleep. I was tossing around the bed for a few hours and then I went back to the smokey office.
13/26
I panicked and for a reason. I woke up thirty minutes after going to bed at 1AM. I was walking around in my living room and I couldn’t remember what day it was.
First, I tried to just think about it. Like when you do when you want to know what day it is. Well you just think about it and the answer magically appears in your mind. I did the same except no answer came.
Then I tried to reason it with logic. What did I do yesterday and what day could it have been? No fucking clue what I did yesterday and no fucking clue what day it was then. I felt how my heart started pumping faster and faster and I panicked. This is it! Now I’ve finally done it. I’ve worked too hard and I went crazy in the middle of the night.
I knew I can find out the answer by looking at my phone but I didn’t want to because there was clearly something wrong with my head and I wanted to see if I can come up with the answer on my own.
Then I remembered. It was Saturday and I had to work on the weekend. Like all other weekends. The answer magically appeared in my mind.
14/26
It sneaked up on me. I was young and healthy. I had all this energy. I could work on my laptop and think solutions from morning to morning. It was easy for me.
But then suddenly – fucking suddenly! – it wasn’t anymore. I couldn’t sleep much. I had some energy in the morning but I had almost none left at lunch.
My eyes went blurry. I lost weight. My hands were shaking. I didn’t know it back then but I was entering the hardest part of my life.
I was angry that I had let myself burn out like this. I was angry about the startup who hired me and asked me to work so much. I was angry about the startup ecosystem and capitalism in general that priorities money and companies and not individuals and their lives.
15/26
One day I heard my coworker went to the ER with heart problems. He was also up night after night. Young and healthy, until he wasn’t.
I think it was maybe then that I thought to myself fuck this and said that I will quit. I said it to myself and then to my boss. I still felt responsibility but I was just so fucking afraid.
Not only did I quit but I also gave up my apartment and moved to a small city. But it wasn’t this magical I moved to a countryside and started walking in the forest and felt this complete peace and happiness inside me after getting myself out of the startup life.
Hah, no. I wasn’t able to sleep more than 30 minutes a night. My thoughts were racing in my head. I felt weird emotions. Like dreadful fear or something like this?
I did walk in the forest though. One day I was walking there the same thought was repeating itself in my head.
“Now that I can’t sleep anymore, I’m going to die.”
I really thought that. I didn’t know what to do. I was walking in this forest and I was crying. I would have said fuck this and gave up on life if I wouldn’t had a two-year-old daughter.
Your head starts to thinking weird when you get no sleep. When you’re sleeping fine, it’s hard to imagine that you could think differently when you can’t sleep for many nights in a row. But you do. You start thinking differently. You start going crazy a bit. Thoughts like not wanting to live anymore will sneak up on you.
I think not being able to sleep most affected my thinking. I was afraid about my body because I thought that it’s only logical if my body won’t get a rest it will shut down soon and die. But thinking back I see it was fear only and I didn’t see any real symptoms from my body that it can’t handle being without sleep anymore.
The body was actually quite fine. The mental world went nuts.
16/26
Well the whole model sucks, no? There’s a company that is owned by one or two people and then there are people working for that company.
Sometimes employees – how I hate that word – will give their health to that company but okay not always. I agree that my own example here is based on my own stupidity. I was young and I was dumb and I probably wanted to prove something. That I’m good?
But even if people are not giving their health to that company then they still give 40 hours of their week to that company. The company is growing and making a profit. Who are the one growing the company and making a profit for it? Well the employees of course.
Where is this company? Where is it? It’s on paper. It’s on fucking paper that’s where it is. You are working 40h weeks minimum and company is making profit.
Or maybe you work a lot more, leave your health there and then the company is sold for millions! That’s fucking awesome.
17/26
And yet this is exactly what I did when I quit the startup life and moved to a small town next to a forest.
I started a web agency because I needed to make some money to live. I needed to pay rent and I needed to buy some food for myself, my lovely daughter and my wife.
My wife who was now increasingly stressed because I had promised her a good life where I earn a lot of money from a startup and eventually build my own startup and make even more money.
These dreams were clearly now broken because I had no job and no outlook on life with my 30 minutes of sleep per night.
I worked a lot even though I still didn’t have any energy. I got it so far where I hired four employees and we were building small web projects and making some money.
18/26
“We need some help with our product. Can we buy some of your services?”
I was sitting on my balcony and drinking beer. It was a sunny day and I felt actually good. Because I had a $10,000 tax debt, there were salaries to be paid the next day to my four employees – how I hate that word – and I just won a $6,000 contract and that means with the two other smaller contracts I had just won I was able to pay my four employees – how I hate that word – their salaries tomorrow.
My daughter was growing and I loved her so much but it was hard too. She was waking up every night a lot and was crying a lot.
So I got to live another day. I slept some. More than 30 minutes every night, but I still had serious sleep troubles.
I didn’t know how to solve this in my mind. I was burned out, I had some debt, I had responsibilities in front of my family and in front of my employees. Stupid word!
Turns out it’s not such a great time to start a web agency when you’re fucking burned out from a startup life.
I didn’t have much energy. I didn’t sleep much. My dear daughter was crying a lot. My wife was stressed.
And so things got worse and worse. I had to work a lot to get my web agency running. It felt like I had to do everything myself even though I had four employees – who came up with that word – because this is how starting a company is supposed to be, I told myself. You have to work hard in the beginning and then things get easier. You will hire more people and then in the end you can just enjoy doing what you want and other people will do the rest.
19/26
The caller was my boss from the startup I had left two years prior. So of course I said yes. I knew that I can pay off the tax debt with the money and maybe we can get some ongoing projects from them to keep us afloat until I find some other clients.
“Yes, happy to meet at your office on Friday.” I said on the phone and continued drinking my beer at 4 PM.
But the thing is I wasn’t happy at all. You think it didn’t wake up some dreadful emotions that I had buried into my subconscious for the last two years?
Well it did and I still remember the feeling. It has never left me and it never will.
20/26
I drank several beers every day. I used my bike to get to my small office which was in the same building as a small grocery store. That tells you something.
I started drinking at noon. I skipped the lunch and had two beers instead from the grocery store on the first floor. Then I wrote some code and tried to finish some client projects. Oh how I hated doing those projects.
Not that there was something wrong with the projects but I was just so tired and there didn’t seem to be any bright future ahead of me. I was drinking too much. I couldn’t sleep. My daughter – who I love very much – was crying a lot and my wife – who I love very much – was also crying a lot. Because she was stressed! Of course she was stressed and of course my daughter was stressed when I was stressed. We affect each other so much!
21/26
I think my lowest point was where I didn’t have any money to pay salary to my fours employees and to myself. I also didn’t know where I will get some money in the future. It was summer and the projects in my sales pipeline – how I also hate that word! – were dead.
I continued to have a tax debt, which was increasing every day, I also had other debts, like for the office. I didn’t see any future I wanted to be part of.
I also didn’t have any money on my bank card. Not on my company’s bank card and not on my personal bank card.
And then you know what I did? Do you fucking imagine what I did? I went to my dear daughter’s piggy bank and I took two dollars to get myself a beer.
I continued to take dollars from there until only the smallest cents were left and I couldn’t really take much more because you could then feel when raising it that it’s fucking empty.
22/26
I was able to climb out of the desperation with the help of the same startup where I burned out. They offered me and my employees some work. We were working hard and I took a train to their office once a week.
At least now I had some money to buy beers because I had already emptied my daughter’s piggy bank. I drank too much and I knew it. But I was also very sad.
I was sad that I had joined the startup in the first place. I was sad because I let myself burn out. I was sad because I started a web agency when I didn’t have energy for it and I was fucking sad because I joined them again!
Could you believe me? After burning out in their startup I left and started my own web agency which I almost sinked and then I joined their startup again.
Because I wanted OUT. I wanted OUT of my web agency life and INTO some other life. This was my chance. I didn’t have to let go my employees because they now had a job at the same miserable startup.
23/26
One miserable train ride after another to their office every Wednesday. I went sober but came drunk.
I often wondered in my drunken train rides that why don’t we ever ask “how are you, really?” in our offices. We only ask “is this task done” and say “you have to finish this by Monday” but do we ever look into the eyes of our EMPLOYEE and ask them “how are you, really?”
Do you want to know why? I know! Because no one fucking cares about you at your workplace. You are a resource.
I remember sitting at the Human Resources office after joining the startup and looking at this twenty years old or something girl who showed me a presentation about their company’s values and their mission and slides about how things work in their company and was is expected of a resource like me. How they value work life balance.
I smiled but felt like shit inside. All I could think of was these four beers I will drink on my way back on the train and how I was actually the second employee of this company and I built a lot of it with my own brain. She didn’t know any of this. Not about beers and not about me being an early employee who burned out and who said that “I will leave now” and no one every tried to convince me otherwise.
They probably knew that this resource was already quite used.
24/26
I said that they were probably happy when I told them that I will leave their startup. I think it’s true because I understand how it can be complicated to build a company of fifty or eighty people and keep the first five or eight. THEY have spent countless of sleepless nights getting the startup off the ground. THEY have used all of their energy to build dashboards and went to meetings and had calls.
You want to start from a clean slate. You want to get rid of the people from the beginning and you want to start fresh. It’s just too complicated with the original people.
Today, there’s no people left from the original company. Everyone are new. Even the owners are new because the original owners – my boss too – sold for millions.
They have millions and I have nothing. I still have sleeping problems though. That’s what I have. Sometimes, I don’t sleep at all, who knows what I fucked up in my brain with all these sleepless nights. Some neurons here and there.
Want to join a startup too?
25/26
You know when you’re watching a really good movie and you’re so IN it that you don’t remember that YOU exist? You’re so inside the story that you’re like this one character or maybe all of these characters in the movie. And then the movie ends and you remember, oh right, I’m this guy sitting on the couch.
Well the same thing happened to me when walking in the forest one day. I was watching this really good movie – horror movies can also be good movies – and I was so IN that I didn’t remember that I existed. I was so inside this story that I was like this one character or maybe all these characters in the horror movie. And then I suddenly remembered to look away from the TV screen and I found myself OUTSIDE of the movie.
I realised that I’m not this character in the movie but I’m watching this character and other characters in the movie. It felt so funny and so silly that I started to laugh HARD. How could I ever think that I was this little character inside this horror fiction? It just seemed so silly.
It was like I took a mental step back from my life and saw it from somewhere else, from mental behind. Was I able to step forward into the storyline again? Of course but it wouldn’t ever be the same. I couldn’t ever forget what I had realised.
Yes, I could enter the story consciously and PLAY. I could PLAY this part if I wanted to but now I could shape it and bend it to my will very easily because I had discovered how the world works.
Sometimes, when I played for several days straight I might forget briefly that I was actually a mental step behind myself but I remembered this very quickly again.
26/26
All these sleepless nights and the copious amount of alcohol and nicotine consumed to build millions of dollars of profit for my owners was worth it.
It was so fucking worth it. It was a gift and I’m so grateful for them for that gift of allowing me to be part of this process of waking up from the story. I don’t think they did. I think they have their millions and they’re buying their houses and cars and going to vacations with their wives and kids.
But I was free now. I could do anything I wanted to because I was not this character inside a story anymore. I was this transparent thing looking at the 3d character like in a computer game. And I could move this character in a 3d video game called “My Life on Earth.”
Wanted to walk over there? I intended it and my character moved. Wanted to buy a coffee? I intended it and saw my body move perfectly in a crowded 3d world to a cafe and asked and paid for a coffee.
Well I wanted to quit and that I did right after the coffee. Because I was free now, remember. I could do anything I wanted to. ANYTHING.
I wanted to make money to live a good life but the problem was that every time I heard words like “meeting” or “task” or “project” I wanted to vomit. “Employee” was another word that got me to almost VOMIT twice.
Or “company”. Oh how I hated that word and still do.
So I needed something different. I needed to be INDEPENDENT.