This chapter appears early in Fatamorgana. It marks the beginning of disillusionment...when she starts to see the system itself, not just her place within it.
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Throughout my career, I’ve occupied what I’d call the “Goldilocks position” in the corporate hierarchy—not too high, not too low, but right in the middle, where I could see everything.
In most companies, HR categorized it as Level 4 or 5—high enough to glimpse strategy, low enough to understand execution. The CEO was Level 1, entry-level positions were Level 9, and I was right in between. I could see two levels up, two levels down, and move laterally across departments—technology, business, sales.
I didn’t just stay in one lane. I worked across teams, across industries, across clients. It wasn’t just one company I was observing—it was a second, a third, and more.
I racked up miles—not just in the air (though there was plenty of that), but miles of realizations.
Patterns emerged, but I didn’t dwell on them. I connected a few dots, never enough to see the bigger picture. I moved quickly from one thing to the next, surviving corporate life instead of making sense of it. You notice something briefly—then life distracts you. Do that long enough, and suddenly ten years have slipped by.
But then my kids started kindergarten, and suddenly I had something new. I had time.
Was it the extra space in my day that made me finally notice? Or had the nature of work changed, and I was just now seeing it clearly?
At the beginning, I built systems. They worked. People used them. Maybe I didn’t make their jobs easier, or their lives easier—but I made an hour or two of their day easier. I delivered something that helped. I could see the output, the impact—even if it was small, it was something.
But then that kind of work became rare. Or maybe it had started disappearing even earlier, and I just hadn’t seen it—because I was anchored to a different time—blinded by my own expectations of what work was supposed to be. Maybe I was still learning, and I mistook learning for doing. There was a lag in perception. I’m just not sure what caused it.
Effort at work started leading nowhere.
More effort—still nowhere.
What I thought was a short-term lull stretched into years. Not a drop. Not a ripple. Not even the smallest wave. I couldn’t find anything useful to do at work.
And nobody noticed.
Shouldn’t work do something? Why wasn’t anyone noticing?
Why wasn’t anything changing?
Maybe they just needed time.
But time passed—and still, nobody noticed.
Or they did—but it made no difference.
I was embedded in enterprise architecture, strategy, engineering teams. But I wasn’t moving anything forward. Not technology. Not business. Not strategy. Not even a drop of impact. Nothing at all.
I was a Nothing Person.
And it wasn’t just me.
I started asking others about their work. “So what are you working on?”
They’d answer—some confidently, some fumbling. I’d dig deeper.
Every conversation followed the same arc: “What? Then what? So what?”
Sometimes work looped back on itself like a recursive function. Sometimes it was a dead-end street. Worst of all—a highway that ends midair.
It never added up to anything.
Everyone was like me. Everyone was a copy of a copy of a copy.
Nothing People.
I don’t mean people who are worthless. I mean people who have jobs but produce no tangible value.
It’s not a moral judgment. It’s a structural one.
(Actually, it’s a moral one too. It always was.)
Maybe they didn’t know.
Maybe they did—and hid it.
Maybe they didn’t care.
