Ipso
Ipso was Steven’s first documented Paris CDI, a developer role at a medical software company in 2019 to 2020. It arrived quickly after he decided to settle in Paris and gave the move an immediate professional structure.
Role in the Paris arrival
The job belonged to the first Paris wave: courses in the city, weekends with friends, techno parties, ketamine, a new apartment, and the sense that the city had opened at once. In later writing, Steven remembered this period as a “sentiment de toute puissance” that he took for granted too quickly.
Ipso therefore functioned less as a company narrative than as the proof that Paris could work. It was the professional half of a larger configuration that also included housing and social life.
The departure
Steven quit Ipso shortly before the first COVID lockdown in France. He later described the reason as “complètement aberrante” and connected it to a belief that he could find another job easily.
The timing made the decision consequential. The job ended, the city locked down, and the social environment that had made Paris feel possible stopped functioning. In his later account, the departure opened “une boîte de Pandore” and began the descent into the 2020 lockdown depression.
Pattern significance
Ipso is the first clear professional example of Steven leaving a stable situation before another structure was in place. The same pattern reappeared with Résilience in 2022, when he left a job he liked for a higher-paying freelance mission that later collapsed.
The company itself matters because it marks the first iteration of a recurring sequence: arrival, stability, restlessness, exit, and loss of structure.