My desires were generic. I wanted to find my place in the world, and be independent, useful, and good. I wanted to make money, because I wanted to feel affirmed, confident, and valued. I wanted to be taken seriously. Mostly, I didn’t want anyone to worry about me.

This utopia was short-lived. It was being replaced by a late-capitalist hellscape, my friends reported. Rents were spiking. Art galleries and music venues were closing. Bars were overrun with men in their twenties wearing corporate-branded T-shirts, men who never finished their beers and complained whenever anyone on the sidewalk smoked a cigarette

I had always imagined, was the performative, feverish display of wealth and one-upmanship. I did not realize at the time that for people in the tech industry, such expressions of wealth were not just gauche but antiquated. There was nothing more civilized than hiding your money behind a browser.

Good interface design was like magic, or religion: it cultivated the mass suspension of disbelief.

What I also did not understand at the time was that the founders had all hoped I would make my own job, without deliberate instruction. The mark of a hustler, a true entrepreneurial spirit, was creating the job that you wanted and making it look indispensable, even if it was institutionally unnecessary. This was an existential strategy for the tech

I had also been spoiled by the speed and open-mindedness of the tech industry, the optimism and sense of possibility. In publishing, no one I knew was ever celebrating a promotion. Nobody my age was excited about what might come next. Tech, by comparison, promised what so few industries or institutions could, at the time: a future.

With the promotion came a bump in equity. I still did not know what the shares were worth, and I was afraid to ask the M.B.A. whether he had been offered more when we were promoted. It seemed safe to assume the answer was yes. After all, his work was seen as strategy, while my work was interpreted as love.

I took my phone out to dinner.

He had gone to art school on the East Coast and wore jeans that were so tight I felt I already knew him: he was like my friends from college, but successful. I was older than all three of them.