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FATAMORGANA
Fatamorgana is a scalpel of a book—part memoir, part corporate takedown, and part philosophical dispatch from the heart of white-collar America.
Sarah Majdov—tech professional, immigrant, insider, outsider, and mother—writes with unapologetic clarity about life in the shadow of the Switch. After rising into the tech elite, she had it career, family, degrees, travel, titles. But from the inside, she saw something darker—an entire system built not on productivity, but on proximity.
What she calls the Proximity Economy is a world where value isn’t created but signaled. Most white-collar workers—“Nothing People,” as she provocatively names them—orbit inherited digital machinery, producing little of substance while signaling innovation to justify bloated salaries. It’s not laziness or incompetence—it’s that the system no longer demands real output. Only the illusion of forward motion.
Majdov explores this system from within, with brutal honesty and satirical edge. She maps its architecture—Switches, gatekeepers, and noise creators—and shows how it rewards signalers, not thinkers. Her burnout didn’t come from long hours—but from the erosion of meaning. Fatamorgana spares no one. Not corporations. Not herself.
But it doesn’t stop at critique. In its second half, Majdov looks forward—and inward. In chapters like Curated Struggle and The Last Free Children, she asks what it means to stay human in a system designed to flatten. She writes of biohacked men, symbolic weight, motherhood, and the future her daughters may inherit—refusing both utopia and despair.
Instead, she offers a Stabilist not a return to the past, but a rebalancing—toward seasonal rhythms, visible labor, less noise, and a slower, more coherent world.
If the first half is an x-ray of the symbolic economy, the second is an act of recovery—of self, family, and community.
Some scenes unspool like cinema. The end of Day 69 is pure poetry. Living Through the DEI Era will unsettle you. They Weren’t Meant to Be Divided will make you reconsider your alliances. The Art of Signaling takes you backstage. The Last Check might make you say, “Wait—what?” And The Years, at the very end, just might undo you.
Fatamorgana is not self-help.
It’s collective clarity.
A mirror.
A warning.
And maybe—even—a beginning.
Read it once for the story.
Then again for the system it’s exposing.
Sarah Majdov—tech professional, immigrant, insider, outsider, and mother—writes with unapologetic clarity about life in the shadow of the Switch. After rising into the tech elite, she had it career, family, degrees, travel, titles. But from the inside, she saw something darker—an entire system built not on productivity, but on proximity.
What she calls the Proximity Economy is a world where value isn’t created but signaled. Most white-collar workers—“Nothing People,” as she provocatively names them—orbit inherited digital machinery, producing little of substance while signaling innovation to justify bloated salaries. It’s not laziness or incompetence—it’s that the system no longer demands real output. Only the illusion of forward motion.
Majdov explores this system from within, with brutal honesty and satirical edge. She maps its architecture—Switches, gatekeepers, and noise creators—and shows how it rewards signalers, not thinkers. Her burnout didn’t come from long hours—but from the erosion of meaning. Fatamorgana spares no one. Not corporations. Not herself.
But it doesn’t stop at critique. In its second half, Majdov looks forward—and inward. In chapters like Curated Struggle and The Last Free Children, she asks what it means to stay human in a system designed to flatten. She writes of biohacked men, symbolic weight, motherhood, and the future her daughters may inherit—refusing both utopia and despair.
Instead, she offers a Stabilist not a return to the past, but a rebalancing—toward seasonal rhythms, visible labor, less noise, and a slower, more coherent world.
If the first half is an x-ray of the symbolic economy, the second is an act of recovery—of self, family, and community.
Some scenes unspool like cinema. The end of Day 69 is pure poetry. Living Through the DEI Era will unsettle you. They Weren’t Meant to Be Divided will make you reconsider your alliances. The Art of Signaling takes you backstage. The Last Check might make you say, “Wait—what?” And The Years, at the very end, just might undo you.
Fatamorgana is not self-help.
It’s collective clarity.
A mirror.
A warning.
And maybe—even—a beginning.
Read it once for the story.
Then again for the system it’s exposing.
368 pages, Paperback
Published May 16, 2025
17 people are currently reading
130 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 18, 2025
There are people who shouldn’t read Sarah Majdov’s book Fatamorgana.
If you work in banking, financial services, fintech, or consulting, in big tech, in government—hell, if you suspect that what you do doesn’t really make a difference, that you’re working a “bullshit job”—then Fatamorgana is going to feel like a punch in the gut.
Majdov has lobbed a burning fireball of a book at the “Proximity Economy,” a massive portion of our economy that takes its meaning by being close to—but not critical to the success of—the machinery and systems that drive our economy. Large percentages of educated knowledge workers in America’s highest profile industries draw high salaries but don’t do meaningful work. They’re working in a mirage, writes Majdov, a “Fatamorgana,” the term that people from the Balkans use to describe the mirage of utility associated with the Proximity Economy. “You think you’re seeing innovation—people working on valuable, meaningful, real things. But it’s just innovation signaling. False promises. Empty pursuits. It takes time to really look—until the mirage fades. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.” It’s a big scam designed to mask massive corporate profit-taking.
Majdov can’t unsee it, and that’s why she left high-paying jobs in finance and consulting to write this book. Part memoir, part expose of corporate self-deception, part social and political analysis, the book fits into no existing genre. It doesn’t fit the conventions of memoir or conventional nonfiction. Rather, it’s the report of an intelligent human being refusing to bullshit herself about the value of the work that occupies so many people.
Majdov gives new meaning to the term “unsparing.” She’s brutally hard on the companies she has worked for (Mastercard’s lawyers are surely reviewing the terms of her employment agreement to see if there is room to ruin her); she’s hard on herself, openly asking whether she has acquiesced to the erosion of her integrity and her sanity for the sake of a paycheck. And oh boy, she’s hard on her friends! In a series of chapters relating how friends of hers cope with the fraud of living in the Proximity Economy, she paints a particularly damning portrait of “The Washington Insider,” who sees the contradictions of his work as a government bureaucrat but deludes himself that it’s still worth doing. Majdov painfully renders his self-delusion, his seeming hypocrisy, knowing full well that if he reads her account, it will end their friendship. “I chose the book over our friendship. It was a choice. I knew exactly what I was doing. I chose betrayal.” (Any writer who has struggled with how to depict a friend in their work will feel her pain.)
That’s the level of commitment and honesty that Majdov brings to the whole book and it’s what makes it worth reading. Her analysis of the economic and spiritual pitfalls of the Proximity Economy are highly detailed and, in my experience, accurate. Anyone who worked in an American corporation in 2020 and 2021 will wince at her depiction of the deployment of DEI policies, for example. I have a harder time with her analysis of how to work our way out of the dead end she describes. Majdov is neither a Trumpite or a Muskite, but she’s sympathetic to the impulse behind DOGE and wants that impulse to go even further, to a massive descaling and revision of our corporate world via a Department of Corporate Efficiency (DOCE). If it requires UBI to make it work, so be it. I liked where she was going with this thinking ... but her solutions aren’t quite as incisive as her critique. With luck others will pick up the thread on making work more efficient, meaningful, and satisfying.
So if you insist on fooling yourself about the nature of your work, by all means skip this book. On the other hand, if you’re interested in an honest and vital account of what’s wrong in American corporations and society, I’d give it a read.
If you’re on the fence, you might read Sam Kahn’s review here “https://samkahn.substack.com/p/sarah-....”
If you work in banking, financial services, fintech, or consulting, in big tech, in government—hell, if you suspect that what you do doesn’t really make a difference, that you’re working a “bullshit job”—then Fatamorgana is going to feel like a punch in the gut.
Majdov has lobbed a burning fireball of a book at the “Proximity Economy,” a massive portion of our economy that takes its meaning by being close to—but not critical to the success of—the machinery and systems that drive our economy. Large percentages of educated knowledge workers in America’s highest profile industries draw high salaries but don’t do meaningful work. They’re working in a mirage, writes Majdov, a “Fatamorgana,” the term that people from the Balkans use to describe the mirage of utility associated with the Proximity Economy. “You think you’re seeing innovation—people working on valuable, meaningful, real things. But it’s just innovation signaling. False promises. Empty pursuits. It takes time to really look—until the mirage fades. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.” It’s a big scam designed to mask massive corporate profit-taking.
Majdov can’t unsee it, and that’s why she left high-paying jobs in finance and consulting to write this book. Part memoir, part expose of corporate self-deception, part social and political analysis, the book fits into no existing genre. It doesn’t fit the conventions of memoir or conventional nonfiction. Rather, it’s the report of an intelligent human being refusing to bullshit herself about the value of the work that occupies so many people.
Majdov gives new meaning to the term “unsparing.” She’s brutally hard on the companies she has worked for (Mastercard’s lawyers are surely reviewing the terms of her employment agreement to see if there is room to ruin her); she’s hard on herself, openly asking whether she has acquiesced to the erosion of her integrity and her sanity for the sake of a paycheck. And oh boy, she’s hard on her friends! In a series of chapters relating how friends of hers cope with the fraud of living in the Proximity Economy, she paints a particularly damning portrait of “The Washington Insider,” who sees the contradictions of his work as a government bureaucrat but deludes himself that it’s still worth doing. Majdov painfully renders his self-delusion, his seeming hypocrisy, knowing full well that if he reads her account, it will end their friendship. “I chose the book over our friendship. It was a choice. I knew exactly what I was doing. I chose betrayal.” (Any writer who has struggled with how to depict a friend in their work will feel her pain.)
That’s the level of commitment and honesty that Majdov brings to the whole book and it’s what makes it worth reading. Her analysis of the economic and spiritual pitfalls of the Proximity Economy are highly detailed and, in my experience, accurate. Anyone who worked in an American corporation in 2020 and 2021 will wince at her depiction of the deployment of DEI policies, for example. I have a harder time with her analysis of how to work our way out of the dead end she describes. Majdov is neither a Trumpite or a Muskite, but she’s sympathetic to the impulse behind DOGE and wants that impulse to go even further, to a massive descaling and revision of our corporate world via a Department of Corporate Efficiency (DOCE). If it requires UBI to make it work, so be it. I liked where she was going with this thinking ... but her solutions aren’t quite as incisive as her critique. With luck others will pick up the thread on making work more efficient, meaningful, and satisfying.
So if you insist on fooling yourself about the nature of your work, by all means skip this book. On the other hand, if you’re interested in an honest and vital account of what’s wrong in American corporations and society, I’d give it a read.
If you’re on the fence, you might read Sam Kahn’s review here “https://samkahn.substack.com/p/sarah-....”
August 19, 2025
Fatamorgana is a hot take on corporate America, written by fin-tech insider Sarah Majdov who worked at MasterCard and affiliates for… a long time. Her book is provocative, brutally honest, and full of thoughts and ideas on how we can do better; Sarah takes no hostages.
Reading this book has lended me new eyes to seeing how tech companies are robbing their customers by introducing "new" features that solve a problem they created in the first place. As someone who works in the trenches of healthcare and previously knew nothing about the corporate upper management landscape, this book served as my enlightenment. I now know how to read LinkedIn articles properly: “A new post by MasterCard VP: ‘Our company is now rolling out another customer feature based on the *insert xyz bullshit change theory*, and together we are going to innovate *insert xyzzy bullshit*.’”
One of my favorite quotes of the book that highlights the problem at hand: “The same forces that strip my work of meaning are the ones that leave others just getting by.” Sarah offers solutions to these problems - she ruminates on the founding principles of DOGE (unfortunately, it didn’t work out the way Middle America hoped it might) and she proposes a straightforward approach to creating a stronger social safety net with a Universal Basic Income.
If you want a book with nuance that intersects political parties, look no further. If you want to peek behind the door of the Big Tech economy, come inside. If you are looking for an author who speaks with authority, but also humbles herself with admittances of her own participation of the system she wants to fight against, this is the book for you.
Reading this book has lended me new eyes to seeing how tech companies are robbing their customers by introducing "new" features that solve a problem they created in the first place. As someone who works in the trenches of healthcare and previously knew nothing about the corporate upper management landscape, this book served as my enlightenment. I now know how to read LinkedIn articles properly: “A new post by MasterCard VP: ‘Our company is now rolling out another customer feature based on the *insert xyz bullshit change theory*, and together we are going to innovate *insert xyzzy bullshit*.’”
One of my favorite quotes of the book that highlights the problem at hand: “The same forces that strip my work of meaning are the ones that leave others just getting by.” Sarah offers solutions to these problems - she ruminates on the founding principles of DOGE (unfortunately, it didn’t work out the way Middle America hoped it might) and she proposes a straightforward approach to creating a stronger social safety net with a Universal Basic Income.
If you want a book with nuance that intersects political parties, look no further. If you want to peek behind the door of the Big Tech economy, come inside. If you are looking for an author who speaks with authority, but also humbles herself with admittances of her own participation of the system she wants to fight against, this is the book for you.
November 4, 2025
This book is brutally honest, and sometimes even funny in a way. The author takes a scalpel to modern work, meaning, and the strange machinery of American life—and makes it deeply personal.
It’s sharp. Eye-opening. At times, mind-bending.
The writing is—short sentences, big ideas.
As someone who has worked both hard-working jobs and what the author calls bullshit jobs, I was stunned at how accurately she captured what so many of us feel but can’t quite articulate. She says the quiet parts out loud. It’s raw. Sometimes depressing. Always real.
The book dives deep into the idea of signaling—how so much of modern work and success is about appearances over substance. It unpacks what makes a “real” job vs. a “fake” one, and why the line between the two keeps blurring. It's not just theory—it's backed by lived experience. From war and refugee life to corporate America and algorithmic elitism, she covers it all.
She brings in stories of Buffett’s bet, Jamie Dimon, proximity economies, and the strange economics of presence in America’s new class system. It’s dense with new concepts, but the short, punchy style helps make it digestible. I had never heard of half the ideas she explores, and yet she made them clear—and unforgettable.
This book is brave. Important. Deep.
It doesn’t just make you think—it changes the way you see. I can’t recommend it enough.
It’s sharp. Eye-opening. At times, mind-bending.
The writing is—short sentences, big ideas.
As someone who has worked both hard-working jobs and what the author calls bullshit jobs, I was stunned at how accurately she captured what so many of us feel but can’t quite articulate. She says the quiet parts out loud. It’s raw. Sometimes depressing. Always real.
The book dives deep into the idea of signaling—how so much of modern work and success is about appearances over substance. It unpacks what makes a “real” job vs. a “fake” one, and why the line between the two keeps blurring. It's not just theory—it's backed by lived experience. From war and refugee life to corporate America and algorithmic elitism, she covers it all.
She brings in stories of Buffett’s bet, Jamie Dimon, proximity economies, and the strange economics of presence in America’s new class system. It’s dense with new concepts, but the short, punchy style helps make it digestible. I had never heard of half the ideas she explores, and yet she made them clear—and unforgettable.
This book is brave. Important. Deep.
It doesn’t just make you think—it changes the way you see. I can’t recommend it enough.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews