Fake Work

Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism Is A Joke (2025) by Leigh Claire La Berge

Genre: Insider memoir/reflection of someone who worked at one of the most powerful and ultimately notorious consultancy firms and witnessed how stunningly arbitrary the entire mechanism of their stated mission was (to prepare advertising agencies for Y2K).

Recommended For: Someone who doesn’t want to read something angry or self-righteous about the state of society but instead wants to go on a journey with an author who lived capitalism’s most absurd fraudulences and willingly took the ride for a year of her life.

Buy here or check out at your local library. (Don’t go to the Jeff Bezos website).

This newsletter has been therapeutic in the punishing way only writing can be.

I don’t like the idea that my relationship with writing has changed. Because writing is realistically my oldest relationship. I only met my wife six years ago. That’s nothing compared to how long me and writing have been together.

In high school, I had a lot of friends, which is very different from being popular; a distinction that can’t be described in words as well as it can be felt in anxiety. Writing was the thing that was going to help me figure out and express who I was at some point down the road and then allow me to be able to make new, intentional friendships based on that information.

In college, I thought I was effortlessly good at writing, which was untrue, but in the particular case of my personality, was an essential false confidence for bridging that version of me to a person who could write well enough to make people either learn something or feel something or, on good days, both (though it’s always taken just short of maximum effort).

And after college, I made money writing, a statement that was true for a decade but doesn’t really convey the emotional ties of that relationship. There were some brief stretches of writing-based employment, and fairly routinely consistent gigs writing something somewhere, until each dried up. But the largest percentage of the time available to me was spent writing something (anything) that I could think up that would hopefully land at some unknown place. Pitching story ideas. Writing on spec and then pitching finished stories later. Researching potential leads. Writing jokes and selling those jokes. All of that was very taxing and took a well of optimism and steadiness. I leveled with writing at a certain point. I never asked it to go easy on me, if it began to understand that I wasn’t going anywhere

My creativity was intensely tied to money. My lifestyle was very much Eat What You Kill, but my ethos was Be Creative. That creativity just had to operate at an output so drastic that I could survive failures and the low wages of a dying industry.

Now, I have a normal job. Granted, writing as a skillset is a crucial element to my ability to do that job, but my life is very different, and my responsibilities are very different. When I write now, the money - or a career progression upwards in writing - is not inherently woven into my motivation. When I write now, time is what I’m trying to steal away in order to get alone with it. The motivation is there, but it’s like calling an old friend across town for lunch; it being worth it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.

—

What Fake Work sounded like to me was different than what it was. I imagined a book that you give to your moderately minded friend in order to radicalize them against the notion of capitalism. In reality, it could theoretically begin to send them down that path, but it’s not some irrefutable crashing blow to the way things are done as much as it’s a surreal look at someone’s absurd corporate life. The author has 25 years of hindsight and academic rigor to eviscerate the entire operation where she worked (literally “The Conglomerate”) and use her former self as a way to prop up the growth of her current self. She doesn’t take that approach.

The book’s intrigue is in the scenes more than the straight philosophy. La Berge maintains a gentle and humorous curiosity in the lives of her former colleagues and her past self. They operated in this system because this was the system, and they tried to make it their own, but they more or less just bent toward something that formed a shape with no image, no purpose.

In 1999, essentially right out of college La Berge stumbled into a job at a consultancy firm that was “consulting” much of the world’s advertising firms on how to prepare for Y2K. The job was fake in just about every way: There was nothing to prepare for, the consultancy firm’s work mostly consisted of documenting that it was trying to do work (an endless loop that led to no work), and the place she was employed eventually was brought down in quite a bit of legal trouble.

But of course, it also wasn’t fake. There was no ruse that anyone was quite aware of. There didn’t really even get the sense that there was even one particular person who was hiding anything. This was the job that they had come to do. It just so happened that the work not only didn’t make the world a better place, but it also didn’t really assist anyone in any way whatsoever. Everything was running as it was supposed to.

The writing is extremely sharp, witty and informed. When she writes strictly about ideas, she tends to repeat herself and you crave for her to get back to storytelling, but the book is written with a certain amount of care, which is fascinating because having finished it, I’m not sure where exactly that care is directed, except perhaps toward her former self.

Over the course of Fake Work, La Berge gets promotions, goes on dozens of unnecessary international business trips, watches bosses do nothing or lose their temper or make up new rules. She sees colleagues exploit rules to their advantage. She learns to do the same. All along the way, there is one consistency: pointlessness. None of this leads to anything. Everything is arbitrary.

The case in this example is extreme, but it’s also intensely relatable for most Americans. If they stare at their assigned work long enough, it will look arbitrary. If they think about their jobs’ procedures, they will feel arbitrary. When they think about the existence of their employers, they might question, is it all just fairly arbitrary?

—

I would like to have more time to do everything. My son is almost nine months old, and life is appropriately different than it was ten months ago.

There was a point where I thought my writing made a positive difference in the world. That wasn’t naivete. It was held together by a larger theory. I just had a simple optimism that more good writing was always good. It’s always been a gift for me to read. And all I can do is put things out there for any particular person to find, theoretically to connect with, but at worst learn a little something or spend that time not doing something worse, because there are always worse things you can do than read something a person wrote with genuine care and responsibility. I still believe all that.

I recently tried to get my job to give me a new position that focuses entirely on sustainability. Bringing a child into this world made me want to spend my career helping him have a planet he could feel confident about bring his own kid into if he chose to (plus, I had put in a lot of work and felt I made the connections and the case for why this was a smart business move).

The answer was something of a soft no. Or a hard no, put politely. That will not be your job, but how much you’ve shown us through this process! What’s really been teased is potentially more responsibility and other potential good career stuff, and if I want to do all that woke stuff, well, no one is stopping me, but I better have a lot of personal bandwidth.

The former writer in me would have been a bit cynical of trying to help small and big companies be more sustainable, and I respect that guy’s skepticism. But the person with a kid who knows he wants to make this planet better for that kid is going to do what he can with the institutional opportunities that are near me.

Previously mentioned kid is a bad sleeper. So, I’m tired a lot. So, when I open that laptop after dinner and try to keep my eyelids from shutting, I’m going to have to make a choice between that work and this newsletter. And this newsletter is going to lose out.

A lot of you subscribed and it’s meant a lot to me. I really tried to write them all so that any given one could be read months after it was written. So, feel free to go back and browse if you’re looking for a book idea.

To be honest, my favorite part has been recommending the other things you can read that day. I love reading books, but I really love reading great things I find on the Internet and sharing them. There’s not one that I recommended that I don’t think you’ll get something out of.

I reserve the right to come back and almost promise I will. I have a few journalism ideas I’ll probably get published at some point and maybe will write a book review to promote them for you. And I think I’ll want to share my top five albums of 2026 with you.

But until then, it’s goodbye and thanks. Only advice I can leave you with is that the algorithm makes you feel arbitrary, and no one wants to feel that way.

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