I gave up my $800k/yr Google AI job for the hope of having a baby.
My epic burnout and gentle healing. My ten-year struggle for a miracle baby. And an argument for why the AI revolution means we should trust our instincts and follow our dreams.
CW: infertility, mental illness, trauma, childbirth.
Three years before I quit Google, my income tax statement showed a number I thought I was dreaming. I'd recently gotten divorced and promoted to L6, so, high on freedom, I bought a three-bedroom house right across from a park in Redwood City, all cash.
I still had plenty left over, so I got myself an exciting, hot boyfriend, learned to surf, learned to ride motorcycles, and went on adventures all over the world.
Two years before I quit Google, my income was somehow 30% higher than the year before. It was a turbulent time. I got promoted again, my dog suddenly died of cancer, I witnessed a suicide attempt in my own house, and I got married to that hot boyfriend… And, oh yes, there was a global pandemic in which people in my home country died by the tens of thousands. Still, I kept working. I liked it, and it liked me back.
One year before I quit Google, my income was utterly beyond comprehension, but my health was giving out. I was exhausted by 2pm every day, I had severe pre-menstrual dysphoria each month and had debilitating headaches every few weeks. I sought treatment for all of these though, and took advantage of my seniority by just… working fewer hours (nobody noticed). I also used science to stretch my poor, depleted, endometriosis-riddled reproductive system into producing just six more eggs. And from those, my new husband and I made two perfect embryos and froze them.
Still, I kept working, because amid the chaos of the last few years, my job was the one steady bright thing. My work friends had grown into real-life friends - we went to each other's weddings and and had a years-long D&D campain together. In those quiet, lonely pandemic days, opening my laptop for a full day of meetings was like entering a huge buzzing hive, full of people I loved and laughed with. I loved it, I needed it.
Six months before I quit Google, I did my last day of work. That morning, I opened my laptop and immediately buckled in pain from a thunderous, all-consuming headache. I'd usually have a pretty bad one after work, but this was a new level. Sitting there, debating what to do, wondering if I could somehow fake my way through the day's meetings, I came to a reckoning.
Deep down, I knew what had happened. I was exhausted from fighting. Fighting for my freedom, fighting to keep my hopes for a baby alive, fighting for the mental health and career trajectories of my six beloved direct reports, and fighting for the billions of Search users, who were getting increasingly irate about the number of ads we were showing them.
Work had always been my refuge, but now it was more memory than reality. In recent years, I'd watched as vCap (the maximum height that Ads are allowed to take up) increased every quarter. This would have been sacrilege when I joined the company. Worse, though, was the state of Search UX’s rank and file. Those dozens of junior designers and researchers whose projects were, individually, minor line items in the grand scheme of things, and collectively the future of Search. They were literally starting to cry. In the last few weeks I'd had multiple meetings in which earnest young UXers would tearfully confess things like “I've been working 80-hour weeks on this, but my manager yanked it out from under me and put me on a totally different project.” “This is my 24th ‘design sprint’ this year.” Nobody dared treat me or my immediate team that way, but outside my umbrella, shit was raining down. Sooner or later, something had to give.
And give it did. That morning, I looked at my bank balances, looked at my laptop and said “enough”. I texted my manager, made a doctor's appointment, turned my phone off and went to bed. If they fired me, so be it. I just wanted to find a shady tree in a peaceful meadow on a warm hillside and go to sleep for a thousand years.
So that's exactly what I did (but for two years, not a thousand). In the following months, I sold that Redwood City house for a peaceful 3-acre orange farm in the Sierra foothills, where cool breezes blow and the mandarins draw tourists from all over the world. My sick days turned into six weeks of medical leave, turned into six months of disability leave. At the end of it, they offered me another $125k/year to come back. I said okay… but I lasted exactly one week before I resigned for good.
I spent two years hiding out in the mountains, but by God it was plush. Holy shit. That house was a retreat. Pool, spa, grounds, everything. I paid a guy to maintain it well, I went for walks in the trees whenever I felt like it, and I did nothing all day but sleep, walk, swim and eat. Of course, I kept the farm in good condition for the next owner. I mulched trees and scattered seeds and pruned shrubs. We had an orange harvest, and I sold them to my vegan-chef neighbor who holds healing retreats at her place.
Mostly, though, I healed. I wanted that baby and the tests showed that my body was almost out of eggs. I used all of myself, my brain, body, soul, heritage, privilege, trauma, heartbreak, MIT alum network, everything. I wove my way past the mountains of woo-woo bullshit and discovered, off in the land of myths, legends and ancient wisdom, a great many things worth knowing about life and how to live it.
And then I tested them on myself. And they worked. After a fifteen-year relationship with my first partner, after trying for a child at 27 and failing bitterly for five years, after the miscarriage, the resulting divorce, the clean slate, the new partner. In that secluded house on a hill, I started to figure out how to get better. Slowly but steadily, I healed.
I waited till all the pain had left my body. I devoted myself to feeling better every day. I was trying to learn how to be a mother, by mothering myself well. And then, only when I could evoke my own, serene and accepting inner mother at will, any time my harsh critical inner mother got out of hand. Only then did I dare to unfreeze one embryo and put her into my womb.
And guys. She's glorious. She is radiant with joy. We are in heaven. I thank the stars every single morning that I quit Google when I did, made the choices I did, got divorced like I did, chose the boyfriend I did and just went for it. No regrets whatsoever.
Now I live by a very simple formula - I trust my instincts, follow my dreams and do unto others what I’d have them do to me.
After my first, ten-year marriage ended in divorce, I knew I had to course correct. I’d picked my first bet with my brain, so this time I needed to use my heart. I dreamed of someone who would fill my heart with laughter, who I would trust with my life. I dreamed of someone brave and daring to help me take the kinds of wild, but calculated risks I wanted to take. I had a vision of a hand, clasping mine, just as we leapt off a cliff, into azure water. I dreamed of a fantastic father. Kind, patient, loving, calm, playful, and most of all, present. Good looks not necessary, but a plus, because, let's face it, our daughters are still going to grow up in a world where pretty-privilege is a huge help, if you can get it.
So, where did I find this motorcycle man? Well, to start with, I recognized him from my dreams. It was only later that I understood the mechanism behind my decisions. You see, this reality we experience is an illusion created by the vast, squishy neural network in our skulls. Every time I open my eyes, my brain stitches together dozens of small, blurry snapshots from my eyeballs into a high-definition scene. These days, you can see for yourself how powerful the imaginations of an artificial neutral network can be. All of them are modeled on the human brain. They work the same way, they run the same computations. What I'm saying is, they dream too. We knew this back in the earliest days of AI, in 2006, way before I got my PhD in it. AIs can be used to make decisions, but they can also be used to create, to imagine, to dream. In fact, one of the first ever neural image generators to become popular was called Daydream. How's that for a lark?
So dreams aren't useless. In fact, they're so useful that people today are paying billions of dollars and burning rainforests worth of fuel just so they can make artificial dreams from artificial brains. That's what generative AI is, after all. The the not-always-coherent output of a vast neural network, in response to a prompt. And if we are going to start taking the dreams that AIs have seriously, surely we should do that for our own dreams as well? What difference does it make that ours run on meat-ware, and the “prompt” is the day’s experiences. Dreams are how the GPT in our skulls chats back to us.
All to say, dreams matter. They are valuable, highly expensive computations, that we get in exchange for fueling and sustaining a rather fragile and delicate biocomputer (our physical bodies) and even more complex bio-fabricator (pregnancy), and providing the careful post-training the models need (parenting) in order to achieve the objective (more happy babies) in the present environment.
If you have ever wondered what it feels like to live in a simulation, now you know. It's just called consciousness. The simulation is running on a beautiful piece of meat-ware, evolved and fine tuned, generation after generation by the harsh reality of death, and the miracle of birth.
Also, if we've already got powerful GPTs implanted and integrated into our bodies, we should pay attention to those signals when making conscious choices. Every option has a score - the likelihood of survival. That's the only objective function that has ever stood the test of time. Survive long enough to make babies who will survive long enough to make babies, and train them to recognize and trust their own signals. That's the output of the body, the squishy survival machine, that has thrived on instinct alone since the dawn of time.
In any case, yes. I followed my dreams and listened to my body, and I highly recommend it. I had great results. I picked the kind of face, the kind of arms, the mouth, the hands, the chest I'd dreamed of. It led me straight to him. Well… there was one detour, unintentionally repeating a counterproductive strategy, but this time, because I was listening to my body, I caught it early.
On the second try, I spotted him. His smile caught my eye while I was swiping through okCupid. Through the tears I'd been crying because my "detour" had left me brokenhearted, I found myself smiling, feeling... a sense of lightness, of fun. Of curiosity and adventure, and absolutely no danger. So I messaged him.
Wisely, he responded almost instantly and yeah... We just kept going, and it kept getting better and better. The lows were low, but the fights were always gentle, and with each bump we would correct our dynamic a little. Soon, we saw the ride getting smoother, and felt each other settle in, getting a more comfortable, more trusting after each bump. We made it through a lot of trauma on both sides. It wasn't easy, and I had to attend a daily several-hour group therapy program because I was suicidal at one point. But we had each other, we got through the pandemic, and we got through the valley of my shadow.
That's the man whose sperm I finally deemed good enough for my last, few, precious eggs. And that perfect little embryo, implanted in my healthy womb in my relaxed and pain-free body, grew!
And then she was born. And it felt... And it feels... And historical record in the form of my teenage diaries shows... that my dreams had finally come true. Everything WOULD be alright, whatever it is, I COULD handle it. Being responsible for her gave me the certain realization that I would do it, or die trying. I would destroy myself in an instant to save her. I am her mother. She is the most valuable part of my body. More than my brain, more than my blood, more than my very heart. I would bleed to death if it meant she could have a life, because that's just table stakes when a woman gives birth.
So now, I will do no harm, but I will take no shit either. I believe that I'm fully capable of thriving. And I'm devoted to training my daughter's model (only ten months old) to dream well and listen to her body. So that she will find herself able to thrive, and raise children who thrive in turn, amidst the tides of chaos in which we fragile bio-computers live.
This is why I chose that first AI class, junior year at MIT, 2006. I wanted to know how choices get made. Because more than anything, your life depends on those choices. You are not a sea sponge that can simply exist. You have to do things. You have to decide what to do.
I needed to understand it. How do people decide what to do? How can I produce a child who makes good decisions? Now I understand, there’s no magic hardware, it's the objective function. What are they optimizing for? What feels good? What kinds of choices do happy, old people with thriving, happy families make?
My grandparents were on the whole, quite happy. They laughed frequently and had me, a grandchild who loved spending time with them. It turns out that right in my own backyard was the invaluable training data they'd showered on me. My family intends to do the same with my child. Create examples for her, of ways to thrive, by doing so ourselves, and creating thriving communities with healthy, sustainable cultures, for her to continue with.
So yeah, now you know why I quit. All I ever wanted in my life was a happy baby, and a happy, relaxed, joyful motherhood. The strategy I was using wasn't working. So I had to try something else.
A safe house in a healthy community, with a laughing, chubby baby to play with and a wonderful companion to share it with. I have what I used to dream about when I was a little girl - my happily ever after. And even if it cost me, now, millions of dollars in lost income, I'm really glad I never gave up on it.
This is such a powerful story. Thank you for writing and sharing about the impact of the work environment on your overall health. And congratulations on a beautiful daughter 💛
Wow, thank you for sharing your story. I'm one of those lower-level UXRs . . . . I can't tell you how much I appreciate your honesty.