Date Night With Jeff Bezos

How Social Media Melted My Mind, Part II

After 5 years of being unemployed and continually seeking work on LinkedIn & other online job sites, I suffered a schizophrenic breakdown that required police intervention & a protracted period of medical treatment in order to recover a semblance of the life I previously had known.

At its peak intensity, I believed in my heart of hearts that Jeff Bezos, then the head of Amazon & the world’s wealthiest person, was personally invested in my fate & was testing me online & in real life to determine how far I was willing to go to succeed.

In truth, I had been underemployed since 2006, when I completed 10 years of higher education at Johns Hopkins University by receiving a Ph.D. in global history. I was constantly on the job market for a coveted tenure track position in the humanities that never came to pass. After 8 years of trying fruitlessly to find a stable place in my chosen profession, I left academic life entirely to seek out new terrain in Silicon Valley.

First, I tried to make it on my own as a freelance blogger, novelist, & screenwriter. Then, I tried to establish my own environment consultancy in the Santa Cruz Mountains where I hoped to enlist big tech companies like Amazon, Google, Apple, & Facebook as clients. I had no money to invest in advertising. I had no connections…