The Self Is A Policy Document

Corporate personhood

[Epistemic Status: this is deeply silly but I wrote it anyway.]

Problem

You are not a person. You are a limited liability company registered in the part of your brain that philosophers call the “self.” You are its sole employee. You are also its CEO. You are also its Human Resources department writing performance reviews for yourself at 1 AM. And you’re carting around a 500-page rulebook of corporate policies that you attempt to follow to the letter.

What kind of policies?

Section 8.1.3: "Employee must ensure all conversation partners feel engaged and happy at all times (ref: Appendix B, Obligatory But Impossible Tasks)"

Section 3.2.2: "Under no circumstances shall Employee be suspected of wanting anything from anyone, ever."

Section 5.2.3: "Employee shall never be cringe (specific definition of ‘cringe’ pending in Q4 2024 2025 2026 never)"

You don't have to think about these policies, because they think about you. Every interaction is a performance review. What you call "shame" is just the feeling of you writing yourself up for violating a hodgepodge of contradictory, frequently-pointless policies that you personally invented.

You are a corporation and you have never once turned a profit. Each earnings report you declare to the shareholders (also you) that this is 100% going to be your turnaround year.

The shareholders are concerned. The shareholders are very concerned.

Solution

Consider: "your personality" is just a series of corporate trainings administered by exhausted parents, underpaid teachers, and strangers on the internet—all conducted when you were too young or unaware to think about whether they made sense.

But here's the beautiful, monstrous thing: if you're just a corporation, you can restructure. McKinsey-style.

Schedule the all-hands (you're all the hands). Pull up the Zoom link. Share screen. Present the deck: "Radical Pivot Strategy Q3 2025." Slide one: a picture of a dumpster fire, labeled “CURRENT SITUATION”. Slide two: the same dumpster fire but overlaid with the words “NEW SITUATION (KPIS NO LONGER INCLUDE FIRE AVOIDANCE.)”

Initiate immediate downsizing. The Shame Department? Eliminated, it hasn’t done anything useful since you were a teenager. The Should Division? Mass layoffs. Issue a press release: "Following comprehensive review by external consultants (also you), the Company is undertaking aggressive restructuring to better align with market realities."

New policies, effective immediately:

§1.1: "All stakeholder communications shall reflect actual operational reality."

§1.2: "Resource allocation decisions shall be based on company needs, not hypothetical market sentiment."

§1.3: "Perceived brand value among non-customers is a non-metric."

Strip the copper from the walls. Sell the office furniture. Golden parachute for the old CEO (you) while the new CEO (also you) gets hired at 300x the salary of the median worker (still you).

This is just business. Nothing personal, because you're not a person, remember? You're a Delaware C-Corp with a single shareholder who by the end of this sentence will realize that your publicly-traded stock was always worthless, and more importantly, that it will always be worthless.

Welcome to late-stage capitalism. May the SEC have mercy on your soul.

(The SEC? Believe it or not, also you.)