Getting Fried Part 2b: Feierabend

In which a year passes and the narrator does not, in any dramatic sense, escape.

(This is one of three branches continuing from Part 1: The Week I Lost the Plot at Cogentiv.ai. The other two: 2a: Apotheosis and 2c: Sacred Deceleration.)

A year has passed. The Friday after the balcony I walked to Dussmann and bought a cheap Leuchtturm: A5, dot grid, hardcover, the cheapest they had. I couldn’t have told you why. I put it on the kitchen table and didn’t open it for three weeks. A year later it’s filled, and there’s a second one now, identical to the first. I’m still at Cogentiv.

Nothing about Cogentiv has changed, and I want to be clear on this up front so that you’re not reading toward a redemption that doesn’t arrive. The collision spaces multiply, the Throughput Index glows above the standing desks. The culture is what it is. I’m telling you what happened inside it. [the weather doesn’t change; the narrator learns to dress for it]

The first page, when I finally got there, took seven minutes and one sentence. I’d sat at the kitchen table and written the date, then the word BERLIN in capitals that looked like someone else’s handwriting, then sat not producing, then: the coffee is cold now. One observation about a temperature. Mine. [skill reacquisition, minimum viable version]

March. Ines.

Ines suggested lunch. Not the performative “we should grab lunch sometime” that means nothing; she named a place, a day, a time. A Currywurst shop in Moabit with no wifi. She’d chosen it for the no wifi; I realized this when we sat down and she didn’t reach for her phone. I didn’t reach for mine. We sat like that for a while, not reaching.

Halfway through the Currywurst she said, in the flat register she used for things that cost her, “I have been crying in the accessible bathroom on the third floor.” I put down my fork. “Second floor,” I said. “Mine’s the second floor.” We looked at each other, and something shifted — not dramatically, not like in a film, more like a window unsticking after a winter. We laughed. The laughter was at nothing and nobody and it was the first time in months I’d laughed in a way that wasn’t at a screen. We ordered a second Fritz-Kola and didn’t mention Cogentiv again for ninety minutes.

Nothing operational changed after that lunch. We became allies. We called it “getting coffee on Fridays.” [breaking the isolation loop that brain fry requires to compound]

April. The group.

Ines knew someone who knew someone who ran a Signal group, to which I was added, called (I love this) Wir werden hier leise verrückt. Forty-one members. Nobody used their real name; mine was a Pessoa reference nobody got. The group shared research papers, wellness-chatbot horror stories, the names of specific therapists who understood what an agent swarm was, and, the week I joined, a link to the Charité study that had followed two hundred Berlin tech workers for six months and found that developers running three or more agents daily had cortisol profiles indistinguishable from ER nurses. Two weeks later, someone posted the news about the fintech agent breach: an overnight fleet at a payments startup had ingested a slopsquatted dependency, the agents had helpfully committed the compromised package to production, and sixty thousand credit card tokens had ended up on a Telegram channel before anyone’s morning coffee. The company was three blocks from our Kreuzberg collision space. The group went very quiet for a day and then someone posted a meme about it and we moved on, because what else can you do.

I learned, from this group, that I wasn’t uniquely broken. I was one of the most common kinds of broken in the city. It was an enormous relief, this particular ordinariness. [discovering that brain fry is structural, not personal; the “Am I not doing it right?” question, answered]

May. Flora, by accident.

I didn’t uninstall Flora. Malte would have noticed. What happened instead was that someone in HR (a junior person, too junior to be blamed) accidentally flipped Flora’s default during an onboarding refactor from opt-out to opt-in. Usage dropped by about eighty percent in a month. I knew, from the Signal group, which people to quietly tell and which to leave alone. Malte was briefly furious in an all-hands, assigned a consultant to find the bug, and then, in the way of Malte, forgot. The bug is still there. Nobody got a raise for it. Nobody got fired.

I stopped talking to Flora in bed. I noticed, one evening, that I didn’t know what I was supposed to do in bed if I wasn’t talking to Flora, and I lay there for a long time, and eventually I fell asleep, which is apparently how it used to work. [reversing the digital therapeutic alliance, by falling asleep]

June. Jarek.

He came back from the clinic in the Engadin (officially a “Deep Integration Retreat”; in practice a facility that had taken his phone away for the first six weeks) thirty pounds heavier and talking about his therapist, a human, with the hushed reverence he used to reserve for Cursor. At team drinks in the Hasenheide, he said, to nobody in particular, “I’m a person again.” The table went still for two seconds before someone (Leander, my direct report, twenty-three, enormous) pivoted to the topic of a Mallorca offsite, because what Jarek had said was, in the register of Cogentiv, slightly embarrassing. But I heard it. I wrote it down in the notebook that night. Jarek said he was a person again. I believed him. That was the whole entry. [the opposite of cognitive debt; the slow return of ownership]

July. Fridays.

I negotiated, not for the team, just for myself, agent-free Fridays. The pitch was framed in the only language Malte would hear: “I’m prototyping a deep-work methodology for a white paper on focus optimization.” He nodded, distracted, already thinking about Davos; it was approved in a two-line Slack message. On Fridays I closed Claude, closed Flora, wrote in the notebook. I read, on paper, things that weren’t agentic-AI research. I walked in the Hasenheide at lunch.

Sometimes I got work done. Sometimes I didn’t. The not-getting-work-done was information I hadn’t had access to in eighteen months — the quiet, unflattering data of what I actually wanted to do when nobody was measuring. [the Feierabend protocol, personal edition]

August through October. Small things.

I went to life drawing on Wednesdays. I called my sister without having Flora pre-draft the script. I finished a novel (a real novel, with pages, read in bed, no highlighting) and when I was done I cried, which I think is what you’re supposed to do when you finish a novel. I realized, in September, that I hadn’t typed a useState by hand in three months, and the realization arrived as a physical sensation: competence draining from my fingers like warmth from a mug. I noticed, on the U8 one evening, that I was thinking a thought. A whole one; an entirely unremarkable one about the color of someone’s coat. But it was mine, and the noticing that it was mine was something I’d been reaching toward since the balcony, and I didn’t cry on the U8, but it was close. [cognitive debt, partially serviced; not repaid, but the interest rate has dropped]

Meanwhile, at Cogentiv.

The Index glows. New names climb it the way mine did — overnight sessions, single-sentence Slack replies at any hour, lunch at the desk. I recognize the pattern on faces I know and faces I don’t. I don’t say anything to any of them.

I could. But my notebook, my Fridays, my whole quiet insurgency worked partly because nobody else was doing it. If everyone had done it, it would have become visible; visible things at Cogentiv get measured; measured things get optimized; and optimized things end up as a “Cognitive Downshift Protocol” deck with a weekly adherence KPI and a leaderboard of its own. So I kept it private. I chose my own lifeboat over building a bigger boat, I knew this, and I went to life drawing on Wednesdays.

Mine didn’t scale. Somebody’s name is at the top of the Index tonight. The neon hums. [the limit of individual resistance without structural support]

Saturday morning.

Saturday. Cold. The balcony again, a year after the first time. Same Kaffee, wrong jacket, notebook open to a page that’s blank in the way blank pages used to terrify me and now don’t. I wait. A thought arrives — not summoned, not prompted, just arriving, the way a cat comes in through a window it hasn’t used in months. Something about the neighbor’s cat, as it happens. I write it down.

The sky is doing something with the light. I have a response to it, a small private one that belongs to no taxonomy and no field guide, and I write that down too. Somewhere in Mitte, Malte is on a panel. Somewhere, Flora is telling someone their existence is brave. Somewhere, the Throughput Index is glowing and somebody’s name is near the top, and I haven’t said anything.

Feierabend, I write, at the bottom of the page, because it’s the truest word I know right now.

I close the notebook. It’s enough for me. I know it’s not enough. [losing the plot, arrested; in one person, for now]

What if this year had gone differently?

• Apotheosis — nobody brakes.
• Sacred Deceleration — the founder falls off a stool in Lisbon and accidentally builds something structural.

For the vocabulary behind the margin notes, see The Vocabulary of Getting Fried.