A Letter to My Daughter’s Future Employer (About the Lies She’ll Have to Tell)
Letters from Exile #5
A Letter to My Daughter’s Future Employer (About the Lies She’ll Have to Tell)
Dear Future Gatekeeper of Her Labor,
By the time you read this, my daughter will have learned to contort her brilliance into whatever shape your algorithm demands. She will have mastered the art of the corporate haiku—"passionate about synergies," "excited to leverage my skill set," "a dynamic team player who thrives in fast-paced environments"—phrases that mean nothing and everything at once.
Yes, she will lie to you. But only because you asked her to.
You see, she is a creature of raw creativity: a musician who composes in chromatic bursts, an artist who sees the world in textures you’ve been trained to ignore, a furry in the purest sense (costumes! animals! zero percent fetish, one hundred percent joy). She is Gen Alpha—forged in the dual crucibles of pandemic isolation and AI omnipresence, fluent in the language of code and the poetry of absurdity.
She is also a girl who arrived in America at 18 months, her citizenship a bureaucratic tightrope walk between consular stamps and naturalization papers. In Hawaii, where she grew up, strangers will call her haole without knowing her North African roots, without seeing the immigrant story braided into her DNA. She is straight A’s not because she loves your system, but because she learned early how to game it.
And so, I have taught her this: Play the game. Nod when they say "culture fit." Smile when they ask about "career goals." But never forget that you are more than the boxes they try to check.
You will want her to shrink herself into the tidy narrative of a "diverse hire," a "high-potential candidate," a "self-starter." But here’s what you won’t see in her resume:
The way she dissects corporate jargon like a linguist studying a dying language.
The fact that "print to PDF" is the closest her generation has ever gotten to a printer.
The quiet rebellion of a girl who knows her labor is worth more than your stock options.
I cannot stop her from learning your dance. But I have armed her with the subversive truth: that every cover letter is a work of fiction, every interview a performance, and every "company mission" a collective hallucination. She will play her part—but only so she can rewrite the script from within.
So when she tells you she’s "thrilled to collaborate," know this: She is smarter than your onboarding process, more adaptable than your KPIs, and far, far more interesting than your LinkedIn bio.
Good luck keeping up.
Sincerely,
CD Familias
Satoshi Manor
Otaru, Japan