EverMore Edit: Being the Final Girl
Dear Readers,
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.
xoxo,
Courtney
p.s. Keep reading for more real life horrors.
The Stuff of Nightmares
The month of horror means it’s time to revisit the Spooky Career Stories episode of Dear EverMore where we met characters like...
The Vampire
Yes, someone bit their colleague, and yes it’s happened more than once.
The Puppeteer
A former employee brings their emotional support toucan to the office in a bid to get their job back.
The Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Navigating a duplicitous manager who pretended to have a conversation for one purpose only to use the information against their team member.
The Doppelgängers
We have not one but two stories of recruiters mixing up candidates named Courtney, including my story about slowly realizing I was the wrong Courtney.
One recurring theme was how often the tales started with “early in my career.”
We’re not taught how to handle the bizarre, political, or insidious parts of the workplace. Over time, we learn how to cope, numb, or navigate these oddities, but the early career horrors stick around. After all, they’re what shaped us.
What career story would you leave in a Haunted House?
Send us your own ghastly tale anonymously to be part of this year’s episode.
Rotting to Zombies
We’ve been harping on the burgeoning inability to handle everyday friction.
In our May 2025 essay on the future of work, we 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 we explored in our 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 we’ve 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 entry of a new role predicted in our May 2026 newsletter:
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 AI chatbots don’t translate to real conversation.
Giving Cult
How we talk to each other reveals a lot. Language was even the core focus of our Dear Evermore episode: Is it Culture or a Cult?
Cults live on a continuum. On one extreme exists things like fandoms or SoulCycle that lean toward joy and community. The other extreme is akin to doomsday cults where there’s exploitation, fear of dissension, and leaders as a soul authority.
Somewhere in the middle are the everyday environments that emotionally trap people like MLMs or startups. They all have a shared language.
Language can gloss over something bad and retrain our brain to see it as good. For a startup, fast-paced sounds better than chaotic nightmare. Euphemisms like—It's us v. them; We're a family; Work hard, play hard—aim to create belonging.
The gruesome part comes when someone tries to leave—are they celebrated or shunned? If you’re the cautionary tale—that narrative keeps others in line.
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 we’re working to change one essay at a time.
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So, what’s new in EverMore?
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 our guide on why they suck and how to fix them no matter your role.
iOS App Launch
If you’ve ever thought you were slowly losing your mind at work—EverMore’s reflection process helps sort through reality versus nightmare in The Mirror.
Download the app by November 4th to get 3-months free with code: FINALGIRL.
