Should I quit my job at Gemini?

I mean, I feel calm and think I'm happy...right?

I was in the thick of Gemini, one of the most exciting AI projects on Earth, and retreating into a corner with a couple of collaborators while the rest of the organization buzzed around me.

I’d spent a decade doing deep learning research at Google. I’d worked on everything from convolutional neural networks for medical imaging, to writing playbooks for hyperparameter tuning, to working on LLMs for code generation before they were cool. By the time Gemini came around, I’d largely succeeded at managing my ADHD/OCD and built a daily meditation practice that kept me functional.

I’d spent years wielding adrenaline, fear and stress as fuel to rapidly generate forward momentum. This gradually stopped working as I gained emotional stability. I didn’t want to dip into those fuel sources, but I didn’t yet know any other way to be without this stress addiction. So I felt incredibly calm, but everything felt flat and hollow. I spent not a few afternoons on the office rooftop staring out at the NYC skyline and contemplating my life. Theoretically, I was deeply passionate about deep learning, but not a single project in Gemini called out to me. I’d get validation that my creativity often created “magic” in Gemini. Senior VPs, Gemini leads, various Google product teams often got excited about many of my ideas. But I just didn’t give a shit, and couldn’t even muster the energy to be alarmed by that. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to be at Google anymore, or even cared about the overall purpose animating Gemini. But I didn’t feel empowered to do anything about it without a green card, and felt terrified about leaving.

I was stuck in a cycle that produced a lot of calm and emotional stability, but left me feeling empty. It’d start with someone prizing the work I did on a project. They’d then offer me an invitation to enmesh myself more deeply into Google’s broader purposes, by either joining or leading a new project. I’d immediately feel a deep resistance to saying yes, but wouldn’t have any idea why. I’d eventually sit down to meditate and manage to dissolve this resistance. This dissolution would give me enough space to commit to this new project, but not with full conviction. My meditation practice would often give me enough non-attachment to navigate high-stakes situations within a project with grace, finding solutions others weren’t always able to. This would work, until it didn’t. I’d never actually resolve the underlying resistance to being on the project. It’d build up until I couldn’t push it down anymore, and would burst open as reactivity somewhere else. Nevertheless, I’d do a good-enough job on the project that people would cheer me on. Eventually, I’d move laterally to another project once the current project felt too “tiresome”. I also wouldn’t do a good job of holding clear boundaries within the project where I did feel some resistance. So I’d continue getting invitations that weren’t entirely energetically aligned with me, I’d then push down this resistance to create calm via meditative practice, and the cycle would repeat. Consequently, each emotional outburst would gradually be greater than the last.

For example, it sounds ludicrous now, but a friend actually needed to convince me to raise my hand to volunteer for Gemini. So I started on the original pre-training sprint, but got rapidly absorbed into drama triangles within that sprint. So I shifted to post-training on Bard, but the overall center of mass of drama moved there instead. I eventually found myself on the instruction following team in NYC. I built a project that went viral within Gemini and recruited a few people to spend cycles on it, but I refused to actually lead them. I was too scared to hold clearer boundaries, and to concretely articulate why I was excited about that project in the first place. So people, including my management chain, projected their own visions and purposes onto the project. This triggered deep internal resistance. I refused to create and delegate concrete tasks, and refused to enroll people into the broader purpose of what we were building. This contributed to the overall drama within Gemini, which generated even more resistance in my body.

LLMs profoundly reshaped the structure of the ML ecosystem. This change led to substantial drama in their wake. The temperature just kept rising within each passing quarter. I wanted to work on LLMs to “change the world” and because they fascinated me, but I also just wanted to be left alone from the drama. Each passing quarter made the idea of being within any frontier lab, not just Gemini, harder and harder.

The decision to stay or leave wasn’t just about work. It had deep implications for an entire life I wasn’t sure I was ready to dismantle. The “stability” of a big company was useful for my relationship with my girlfriend at the time, along with the overall lifestyle I’d grown used to. It was incredibly difficult to separate “do I want this job?” from “do I want this life?” from “do I want this identity?”. I didn’t have conscious awareness of how interconnected these questions had become. Bringing these questions into consciousness would quickly overwhelm me, so I remained stuck.

I experienced two ruptures in 2024 that forced me to face all of this. I got my green card, and my girlfriend and I broke up. That break-up devastated me. I thought I’d eventually marry her. In conjunction with the green card, it rapidly untethered me from all my previous stories about why I wanted to stay at Google, and all my overall stories of how I’d organized my life. Separately, I’d often told myself that I’d quit to do my own thing once I got the green card. Yet here it was, and I was totally stuck. Why was I still at Google?

This stuckness rapidly infected every other part of my life. Meditative practices that once worked started failing me. Thus far I’d managed to stabilize my emotions via meditative practices like Mindfulness of the Breath, and processing them in therapy. Jarringly, I went from being a regular meditator to being totally unable to do any practice of any sort. It didn’t matter if it was Mindfulness of the Breath, Cultivation of Loving-Kindness, Body Scans, etc. I’d feel a deep resistance in my body whenever I tried.

My stuckness got so bad that I took a three-month mental health break from work to process all this. I’m deeply grateful for how supportive my entire management chain (especially my manager) was during this time. I’d often pay lip service to disconnecting from work during vacations and leave. This time I meant it. I put my laptop on the top shelf of my cupboard so it’d be totally out of sight, and out of mind.

I kept asking myself - why do I feel so lost and confused?

I eventually realized that I desperately wanted to feel alive at work, rather than being instrumentally useful for the company. I wanted my energy to come from purpose rather than stress, fear or judgement. Ditto for the professional environment I was participating in. I wanted fewer “meetings” on my calendar and more “good vibes and fun hangs” with my coworkers. To work on something more than the reactive undercurrent of “beat this other lab on this benchmark”. I yearned for a clarity of purpose in creating specific value for specific people with specific problems. At the bottom, I wished for the capacity to stay centered in the face of drama, and to co-create an environment that had structural mechanisms to rapidly overcome it.

I was stuck at Gemini. I couldn’t leave, and I couldn’t stay. Leaving felt disorienting because I didn’t know what I was leaving for. I’d be jumping off a cliff into a fog of confusion and doubt without any navigational equipment whatsoever. The spaciousness of the world was overwhelming. What did I want outside of my identity at Google? Who did I want to be other than an ML engineer? Moving to another frontier lab wasn’t a viable solution. Sure, some things would have been better at OpenAI or Anthropic, and other things would have been worse. Being at another lab wouldn’t change the fundamental dynamic of working inside a large organization whose purposes were increasingly misaligned with whatever was pulling at me, even if I didn’t know what that thing was. Leaving Google also meant leaving a number of delightful managers and coworkers, especially since I loved their good vibes. My manager, director and VP at the time were such good dudes, and I loved shooting the shit with them.

Staying at Google left me with a pit in my stomach. It meant watching my soul erode before my eyes. I saw my continued participation at Google turning me increasingly avoidant, reactive or numb. Of performing excitement I didn’t feel or slowly becoming someone I didn’t recognize.

My three-month leave was one of the best things that ever happened to me. For the first time in a long time, I had the space to gain awareness on where these deep feelings of resistance were coming from. For example, I vividly remember deeply reading Evan Thompson’s textbook Mind in Life, and feeling so much peace, joy and flow. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had the opportunity to go so deep on any one particular thing. Especially not in the day-to-day firefighting of the LLM era. No wonder I’d been feeling increasingly resistant to being in a frontier lab.

I also gained awareness on why my meditation practice had started to stall. I was introduced to Charlie Awbery via a mutual connection, who taught me their Opening Awareness practice. I was hooked! I’d never done a practice that was simultaneously so calm, somatic and engaged with the world. I felt very little resistance to doing this practice everyday, on the cushion and off the cushion.

A daily Opening Awareness practice started making me aware of all sorts of things that had been sitting just beneath the surface. I realized just how important uninterrupted purpose-driven work was for my day-to-day experience of joy. And how little of that tone I’d participated in over the last few years. Working through and integrating these awarenesses into my life started rapidly releasing the tension I’d been carrying at the base of my belly, and in my sternum. I hadn’t even realized I’d been carrying this tension.

I was jarred at how far my day-to-day somatic experience at Google was from where I wanted to be. My daily experience within Gemini was one of a million Google Chat rooms with red notifications pinging constantly, everyone constantly rushing, fueled with reactivity, urgency and stress. I was so done with using stress rather than purpose as my fuel source.

I couldn’t see until that moment that I’d spent years confusing calm for clarity. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for the calm and stability that my previous meditation practices brought into my life. Especially since I was in crisis. However, calm and stability aren’t the same as being able to see my situation with stark clarity. I’d been parsing the absence of instability as clear understanding.

Why weren’t my previous meditative practices producing clarity?

All meditative practices work by repeatedly and intentionally directing our attention towards something, until it becomes an unconscious habit. The Mindfulness of the Breath involves repeatedly prioritizing a specific object in our awareness (e.g. the breath), over distractions (e.g. other thoughts, internal bodily sensations, external stimuli like sounds, etc.). Some presentations of the practice may involve gently acknowledging these distractions, but they all generally involve bringing the mind back to a specific object. This is akin to, but not exactly like, thought suppression, where one consciously sets aside feelings, thoughts or impulses, especially at high doses of the practice.

Most typical presentations of mindfulness have such a suppressive result at very high doses. This doesn’t make them “bad”! Such gentle suppression can be constructive for an individual in crisis whose emotions have become unregulated. However, too much can habituate this pattern of suppressing thoughts and feelings, and can ultimately result in generalized avoidance. I’d spent a lot of time (many thousands of hours) doing mindfulness practices, and the resulting calm helped tremendously across all areas of my life. But it came at the cost of clarity.

But hadn’t this practice worked for lots of people in history? Why was it having this result for me? Let’s take Goenka-style mindfulness as an example. The tradition that developed this practice was originally embedded within a series of individual monastic vows and communal monastic norms. The vows provided pre-decided answers to organize every domain of human need from where to eat, live, relational norms, etc. Monks didn’t need to navigate career decisions, romantic relationships, financial planning, etc. like the laity. The vows oriented each monk’s life towards the single developmental through-line of purpose called nibbana. This orientation shaped each monk’s perceptions and worked in lockstep with an overall family of practices, including specific suppressive ones.

I didn’t have such monastic vows nor a rich set of communal norms to organize my development. I was inside Google, inside the US, inside of Capitalism. This was fine so long as Google’s through-line of purpose was aligned with mine. However, the broader purpose orienting me started evolving and growing as I gained emotional stability and did my inner work. Eventually, my internal purpose and Google’s purpose increasingly came into deep conflict. I couldn’t consciously perceive this dissonance, partly because the suppression from my mindfulness practice had already grown into emotional avoidance.

Zooming out, everything I was doing was oriented towards staying in place with stability, rather than creating stark clarity. My therapy had become more about managing my emotional symptoms, and for building self-acceptance to create stability. My behavior at Google was more about avoiding discomfort, rather than asking myself honest questions about what I wanted, and then pursuing it. My analytical problem-solving skills stabilized my framing of my overall situation, rather than critically examining the framing itself.

I didn’t need more stability. I needed to grow my capacity to change. I’ve previously discussed the difference between heroism and authenticity. Heroism is characterized by generating the courage to defend oneself from one’s fears, whereas authenticity is characterized by generating the courage to heal and change based on one’s fears, judgements and pain. I’d been using my meditation practice to relate to my experience heroically. I’d sit down, silence the voice of fear/resistance within me, and walk away thinking I’d solved the problem. Opening Awareness helped me relate to my experience authentically, by creating clarity around what my discomfort was actually pointing at.

The “real” question wasn’t about staying/leaving at Google. It was - could I build the capacity to become aware of what I actually wanted, to have the courage to be oriented towards it, and act from awareness rather than reactivity so that I wouldn’t self-sabotage?

I’d returned from my three-month leave as a totally different person. I had so much clarity on what I wanted. Clarity on the gap between the kind of work I wanted to do, and what was actually possible at Google. Clarity on how I was complicit in creating the conditions in my life that I claimed I didn’t want. I loved the people I worked with but vividly remember, “I don’t belong here anymore”. I was able to sit in these questions, and ultimately make a clean decision to leave. I gave notice a few days later.

I wanted to align myself with the purpose of giving people pathways for the proactive cultivation of wisdom, augmented with AI. This didn’t seem possible at Google in the ways that I wanted. So it was time to go.

Opening Awareness was the core practice which created this shift within me. Unlike Mindfulness of the Breath, it involves relaxing into awareness without proactively choosing any object. Awareness finds whatever it wants to find within the field of perception (e.g. thoughts, feelings, impulses), without judgement or control, but also without getting too “involved” in what’s found. One simply rests in awareness of everything moving around in one’s field of perception.

There’s many similar practices in Buddhism, and this specific practice comes from a Vajrayana/Dzogchen tradition. It doesn’t produce the same suppressive dynamics as Mindfulness of the Breath because its mechanism works in the opposite direction. The entire mechanism involves allowing perception of awareness to widen, rather than proactively narrowing it, so there’s nothing to suppress in the same way.

A regular practice of Opening Awareness started pulling me towards other awareness-increasing practices. For example, doing the Morning Pages and associated exercises from The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron changed my life.

It’s pretty easy to get started with Opening Awareness. The practice itself is profoundly deep and an entire book may only scratch the surface. However, here’s an example to give you a quick taste of how I started doing the practice.

1. I’d find a lively place to sit. Perhaps a park bench, or a noisy part of my home.

2. I’d close my eyes and take some deep breaths. Slowly, in through the nose and out through the nose, making full use of my lung capacity.

3. I’d let everything in my senses flood in, but wouldn’t fixate on the breath. I’d open my hearing awareness to the birds chirping in the trees, the sirens buzzing in the background or people chattering around me. I’d open my bodily awareness to the weight of my body on the bench, any breeze on my face, the warmth on my skin, the pressure of my heartbeat, or the ebb and flow of my chest as I breathed.

4. I’d allow my awareness to move freely in these sensations while remaining “uninvolved”. My awareness might happily flit between the birds chirping in the trees, to my heartbeat, to the warmth on my skin, and back to some people chatting behind me. I wouldn’t worry about getting “distracted”. I’d let it do what it wanted, and wouldn’t try to force it to do anything. Simultaneously, I wouldn’t let it linger too long on any particular perception in my awareness. I’d know I’d gotten “too involved” once I’d lost awareness of everything else.

The crux of Opening Awareness is remaining “uninvolved”. “Uninvolved” doesn’t mean dissociating from experience. Neither does it mean suppressing thoughts, sounds and emotions from experience. It’s an open stance of being aware of being receptive to anything that one finds within their field of awareness. Acknowledging it, but not getting totally swept away by it. Building a habit with this practice made me increasingly aware of the richness and intricacies of my inner monologue. This way of relating to my experience, particularly via meditation, was deeply foreign to me. I needed weekly 1:1 coaching with my teacher Charlie Awbery over a period of months before I even began to “grok” the practice. Charlie was able to diagnose my specific situation, and to offer specific instructions for effectively downloading the practice into my body.

It’s worth noting that Opening Awareness was part of a broader complementary system, rather than a standalone tool. I was already in therapy and used those sessions to integrate any difficult emotions that came up during this practice. I was simultaneously working with a psychiatrist to experiment with ADHD medication for the first time. I’d already been on SSRIs for a while, but finding a good stimulant helped me build a consistent routine for this practice without relying on adrenaline, stress or fear as fuel.

Integrating what came up from this practice released so much chronic tension in my body. I started sleeping better, and had a reliable bedtime for the first time in my life. I started going to the gym more consistently than I’d ever done, and started cooking healthier meals at home.

I gradually found so much more peace, joy, love and flow in my life. After leaving, it was so much easier to find the right purpose-driven projects that gave me money and meaning simultaneously. I found a community that was in far greater alignment with me, and I didn’t feel as much chronic stress on work projects anymore.

I’m so grateful for everything and everyone from Google, but I’m glad that I had the clarity to leave. I feel like more of who I truly am with each passing day since leaving.

If any of this resonated with you, and you’d like to gain clarity on whether you should leave your job, please feel free to reach out at varun@doubleascent.com. Write to Charlie Awbery at coaching@awbery.com, who taught me this practice.

Further Reading

• Charlie Awbery’s Opening Awareness book, and blog post on the practice.

• David Chapman’s book at vividness.live if you’d like to learn more about Dzogchen.

Acknowledgements

• Charlie Awbery for teaching me Opening Awareness, and for helping me understand how the different pieces of my practice life fit together.

• Brian Basham for reconnecting with me during my leave, teaching me his emotional surfing practice, and suggesting I connect with Charlie.

• My therapist for everything she’s done for me. Including giving me the homework of leaving my apartment at least once a day during my leave.

• Professor John Vervaeke for everything he’s taught me over the years.