Being the Final Girl & Other Tales
Dear Readers,
With the month of horror settling in, I exorcised some demons, revisited some harrowing predictions, and let you all in on what scares me most.
In this issue of the strange condition of work:
The Great Automatic Grammatizator
This Fall, I’m challenging myself to read stories written before I was born. It’s been about diversifying the language and concepts I consume. So, imagine my surprise when too many of the sci-fi pieces felt like a current headline.
The eeriest so far has been The Great Automatic Grammatizator by Roald Dahl written in 1953. A man desperate to be a writer realizes that grammar follows mathematical rules. He feeds plots, story arcs, emotion, language into a machine.
In time, the machine writes publishable short stories and novels. To stomp his competition—he starts wooing real writers with good pay to use his machine and forego their craft. Eventually, more fiction is machine-created than human made, which forces the remaining writers into the grim choice of whether to take his offer or not. What choice is there really when survival is on the line?
It reminded me of an essay I wrote last year on The Ethical Dilemma of Work, which made the case for why we shouldn’t sever ourselves from our work.
By this, I don’t mean tying your identity and worth to an employer, but rather, that no matter where you exist or go, bring your humanity along.
The things that we create and say have an impact on this world.
Rotting to Zombies
I’ve been harping on the burgeoning inability to handle everyday friction.
In my May 2025 essay on the future of work, I named this class of zombies, whose minds have or will disintegrate through social media and AI brain rot.
Zombies may not even make the conscious choice to atrophy their intellect and imagination. It starts with numbing or maybe optimizing one thing, only to become the obsession that rots minds.
Optimization feels good—Technology built a world that rewards having all the answers over sitting with questions. It’s easy to bypass the learning process and pretend. So, not-knowing starts to feel like a liability. Yet, no journey is without friction, a concept I explored in my June 2026 essay on the fool’s journey.
There’s a process to our becoming that you can’t cheat.
Straight From Science Fiction
The day I predicted came — The Wall Street Journal published an essay, Now We’re All Starting to Talk Like AI Chatbots.
We’re becoming less interesting by using sycophantic large language models. By polishing our language into a generic blob, we break the cultural norms of our microcosms. If you have any desire to sound unique or tonally appropriate, you have to edit AI-generated content, which doesn't actually save time.
So, now we await the new role predicted in Channeling Hope in Career Dystopia:
Coaches or trainers to ease individuals out of AI usage and addiction, so they can channel their intelligence, trust their own thoughts, and communicate kindly.
Our inputs and outputs with chatbots don’t translate to real conversation.
Little Lies That Keep Work Unfair
What I find scary isn’t the vampire or the puppeteer—It’s that there’s been no meaningful progress on the gender pay gap in the 21st century.
Instead of getting to the decayed roots of why—society uses stories to place accountability on women. And the stories we tell shape our reality.
Perhaps you’ve heard myths like:
Women don't negotiate as much.
Women choose roles that pay less.
Women are less qualified for leadership.
These things aren’t true. (Get the gore & lore: The Little Lies That Keep Work Unfair.)
Most notably, the gender pay gap is a reflection of gendered valuation drift, where the value of work is systematically undervalued or overvalued due to gender bias and social stereotypes.
So, when a field becomes women-dominated it loses prestige and becomes devalued.
The same societal conditioning that leads to devaluing women’s work also leads to gaps in authority, product safety testing, business investment, getting a medical diagnosis, emotional + unpaid labor, and justice.
This is something that should horrify all of us, and something I'm working to change one essay, one client at a time.
Conquering the Ritualistic 1:1
All too often we’re delaying dread by avoiding the hard conversations up, down, and around at work. But the price of dread always comes due.
If you want to make 1:1s feel a little less terrifying—Read my guide on why they suck and how to fix them no matter your role.
Being the Final Girl
I was a final girl in tech. At times it felt like a horror plot. I survived systemic dysfunction, grueling workloads, unpredictable pivots, and sociopathic founders.
I watched my peers be replaced. I listened to leaders drunk on power spin stories with no basis in reality always offering convenient scapegoats for their misgivings.
Still I pushed through pain, illness, loss. I carved off my creativity as if it never belonged to me willingly selling it to the highest bidder.
For that resilience, I got to be the final girl in the boardroom.
There I found a corporate creature indifferent to humanity. The environment was designed to grind me down and slowly turn me into a monster.
But the whole point of being the final girl was to save everyone—I was the chosen one like Grace or Buffy or Jennifer.
Just to get there, I was Grace from Ready or Not. I started pretty and polite, until I realized that I needed to rip the facade like she shreds her wedding dress. I couldn’t just go along with the tradition, games, or “old boy’s club.”
Once I bucked the entrenched masculinity, I felt like Buffy the Vampire Slayer—stopping evil in its tracks. All it took was an endless expectation to sacrifice every part of my life for the greater good. I was the reliable fixer by day and night.
My colleagues let me carry the burden. From the periphery, they called me “an ethical heart” and told me to “keep fighting the good fight.”
For those battle scars, I received no reward. Instead, they took penalties for the ordinary sins of getting married, having a child, crying over death. My atonement meant waiting longer for pay, progress, opportunity, standing in corners bearing witness to their wealth through my words and work.
So, in the end, I felt like Jennifer’s Body. My labor was undervalued and extracted by the men—leaders, founders, board members—who surrounded me. I left with the low hum of survivor's guilt or grief depending on how you look at it.
Startups burn through people. Sometimes it’s malicious, targeted executions, but sometimes it’s just a reckless, unsustainable environment. It all hurts just the same.
Getting tech culture out of the horror genre is part and parcel of why I write this blog.
xoxo, Courtney
p.s. If you want to hear more ghastly tales from work, check out the dear evermore podcast that I host with my best friend, Kelsey Peterson. Our horror stories episode includes a vampire, puppeteer, Dr. Jekyll, and doppelgängers.
