A link to this post will pop-up on my google calendar every two weeks, with no set end point. During that time, my calendar should be refreshingly empty as, on March 17th, I gave notice that I was resigning from my soul-sucking corporate email job™. This decision was such a long time in coming that it had to be decided by reflexive action.
Within two years of our acquisition by a huge corporate competitor, the acquiring firm had gutted everything that made the small company I worked for interesting and engaging, and stitched its own bureaucratic DNA into the “culture” and business processes such that the old firm continued to exist only as a crudely taxidermied version of its former self, a shell recognizable in name only. The zombie husk of the once reasonably nimble and dynamic company (though by no means without its flaws) was then shackled tightly by the manacles of corporate compliance, thereafter bound to the arbitrarily rigid, byzantine, and inefficient Rube Goldberg-ian processes-for-the-sake-of-processes, all resulting in the creation an assembly line approach to providing “frustration-as-a-service” (FAAS), the equivalent of wrapping burritos at Chipotle with prosthetic hooks for hands, though arguably less mentally stimulating (no offense, burrito-wrappers).
I hung on for a while, rationalizing that it was very easy money, that in being so thoroughly dumbed down, the work was no longer stressful per se so much as “just” tedious & unfulfilling - and of course afforded me the flexibility and opportunity to pursue other things outside of work. Whatever I was actually doing there felt much less like “working” and more like “tolerating”, consisting often of menial tasks that took as much time for me to actually do them as the person requesting them spent typing out what exactly they wanted me to do, routinely sending follow-up messages into the void as if I were a human SETI beacon, haggling pointlessly over the same legal points that will never, ever, ever be contested but which ‘need’ to be in hundreds of contracts, and/or forever juggling arbitrary sales forecast dates and figures.
Requests to transfer to a more mentally-stimulating role were met with hypothetical opportunities to work on one-off projects with other departments that never materialized, and an insistence that I was “needed full-time in my current position,” despite feeling like nothing I produced in that capacity was of any value whatsoever. I was unhappy, but felt paralyzed for a long time by the relative comfort it otherwise provided.
That is until I woke up to a flurry of work texts on what was supposed to be the first of eight blissful days of PTO*. This was, or perhaps more accurately, I wanted to use it as, the last straw in an already humongous pile of hay two years in the accumulating. As is probably typical in such cases, I suspect the first and final straws always bear a striking resemblance to each other; if a strong wind were to disperse the hay pile, I would have no idea in which order they landed in the original pile. In hindsight, this should be quite natural, I think, as the things that continually annoy one would likely share common characteristics; the haystack after all is comprised of many, many similar items (hay, duh), and not a tremendous diversity of items. Therefore it is very worthwhile to making a note of the exact moment one realizes they are allergic to hay, but continually complains about being made to stand in proximity to hay piles despite it their job to shovel hay. I.e. if an environmental irritant exists in sufficient quantity & frequency to cause chronic problems, is the problem the presence of the irritant or the stubbornness of the sufferer? Recognizing this simple arrangement early on can save a lot of grief.
For all the build up, the act of resigning felt hugely anti-climactic. For all the agonized rationalizing about why I shouldn’t quit in the preceding months, it felt strangely like a non-decision; it almost in a way… just happened. The best way I can describe it at the moment is to liken it to the feeling of losing a tooth as a child; the looser the tooth becomes, the more you fixate on it, nudging it with your tongue, pushing it and trying to weaken it, but always mindful of that loose tooth, distracted by it, until, one day - it just falls out - and that’s it. For all the fixation and distraction, it’s just over. The actual instant that the tooth falls out is a non-event.
The moment I hung up with my boss I felt curiously flat; neither good nor bad, just neutral. No sensation of calm or not calm. It was as if there were no perceptible state change between the moment preceding my resignation nor the moment following. Perhaps this is a sign I had in actuality checked out long before either of these moments. However as the day went on, I was grateful to experience deep feelings of elation, bordering on giddiness, even, basking in the imagined sunshine of my impending release. This high lasted through the next day.
And then an entire week went by (still on PTO) before I realized I hadn’t thought about work at all. Of course, I had only given notice; I have not technically quit yet. Perhaps in this sense the tooth is still there, maybe in a phantom form. As of this writing, I am on the eve of my last day. That feeling of elation has returned with almost indescribable intensity as I realize that everything I do on that last day will be the last time I ever have to do it. I am hugely excited about removing Slack from my phone.
And then what? Well suddenly the tooth is gone and there is now an empty space that can’t be ignored. Something will need to fill that space, and it will, eventually. The immediate desire is for some extended time off (I’m talking months here). During that time I will need to constantly remind myself not to take this respite for granted, to remember that leaving the place I was in - including the accompanying condition of financial free-fall that is necessarily part of the bargain - is exactly what I wanted, and had been dreaming of for a long time. The purpose of this piece is to write down those reasons do that they do not fade with time & distance.
Reminder #1
The first reminder is necessary because I felt the sensations of most wanting to escape only when it seemed most hopeless to actually avoid it; i.e. they were most acute while having to perform the specific tasks that inflamed those feelings (duh), and that even if I gave two weeks notice right there and then I’d still have to complete them. Though these spikes of acuity occurred with some regularity, as the proximity to them decreased, there was always just enough distance between the last and the next that those feelings faded from stinging sensation to only the grey memory of it. A couple days in a row of not experiencing them always resulted in me finding myself thinking, “today wasn’t so bad. I can keep this up if every day is like this.” …
So at some point in the coming weeks, months, I will inevitably find myself thinking about the job in the abstract, as it might exist on paper. And I will likewise find myself second-guessing whether I just walked away from the easiest money I will ever make in my life. And of course in some sense the answer is “YES” - I walked away in large part because the work was too easy. Paradoxically it was simultaneously too easy in that it required absolutely no cognitive effort whatsoever to mindlessly forward emails, or serve as a prosthetic ctrl + c / ctrl + v, mindlessly copy/pasting content between documents for people too lazy to do it themselves, and yet intolerably difficult - and ultimately unendurable - for exactly the same reason. It required 0% of my mind and 1,000% of my patience. Trying to steel myself to do the types of robotic tasks that my job turned into was may akin to my body rejecting an organ transplant. And so as these feelings of second-guessing inevitably surface, I must remind myself that what I am doing now is exactly what I wanted, and the thrill of having no idea what I’ll be doing 3, 4, 6 months later was so appealing to me while in those moments of now-distant acuity.
Reminder #2
Some people may walk away from a job absolutely mentally ruined and discouraged by their experience there. After hearing themselves mutter “fuck this fucking job” under their breath (or very much aloud) with every new email they receive, the perception that all work is terrible may start to take hold, and the particular becomes a stand-in for the general. This extreme frame that asserts that all work is necessarily unpleasant can lead to the mindset that the intervening time off is more like a gasp of breath in between waterboarding sessions. In this scenario, one dreads going back to work.
Thankfully I am not of that mindset. I am not dreading the eventual return to work, and I actually look forward to it, because I know that not all work is bad, a new job will not be my old job, and that the entire point is to find something stimulating, nourishing, and perhaps even enjoyable. There is a growing notion in our culture that work is drudgery, that it is at best tolerated and best kept to a minimum. With that mindset, we are forgetting that there are types of work that are extremely fulfilling, and that work can be a virtue in itself, and that once hard work starts to pay off, it can get really fun as you see the fruits of your efforts in something you are passionate about. The reason for this reminder then is mostly to avoid becoming too addicted to the “freedom” of my time off, and to succumbing to complacency and laziness, forgetting that the entire point is to be looking into the frontiers for what comes next.
While I look forward to having a large span of unstructured time, I plan on making the most of it by staying busy and engaged with personal projects during the time off, and very actively thinking and keeping my eyes open for whatever is intriguing enough to eventually come next; if an opportunity arises that seems too good to pass up, I will pursue it. This is not about “finding myself” and doing a lot of aimless searching (although I’m sure there will be some of that…), but the more focused pursuit of several ideas and hobbies that I want to advance in but haven’t had the time resources. It is the “put-my-money-where-my-mouth-is” reality check for all the things I said I’d get to “if I only had more time…” - well, here it is.
As such, I am giving myself a financial leash rather than a temporal one, and the “warning bell” signaling that it’s time to get serious about returning to the workforce is based on burning through a % of savings rather than on a specified period of time.
Reminder #3
The third reminder is that this is my opportunity to find work that is complimentary to, and in harmony with, whatever it is that I call “my life.” This is to say that it will not be distinct from other aspects of “my life.” The modern need to compartmentalize or partition aspects of our identity into discrete personas that can be turned on & off on demand in accordance with the various functions we play in life results in a schizophrenia of sorts, created by the strain of attempting to maintain the fidelity of this separation.
Perhaps this is a skill that western cultures will adapt to and improve at with time, but for those in the testing phase of this new distributed mode of being, I think, maintaining the integrity of these personas is intensely difficult. Internal tensions and anxieties inevitably arise as the contents of one partition bleed into and corrupt another, or as contradictions & conflicts between two areas become increasingly difficult to suppress or reconcile. These mental levees seem less resilient in practice than in theory, and serve as entry points for introducing more friction into our lives.
Though I am not a neurologist, as far as I’m aware, there are not discrete compartments in the brain in which we can house these separate iterations of ourselves, and that let us switch seamlessly from one to the other when & where needed. The brain is not a computer where you can just hit ctrl + alt + delete to seamlessly switch users or boot a partitioned operating system. Try as I might, “work” me doesn’t just noiselessly retire to its unit in the pre-frontal cortex condo complex at 5:00pm and shut out the light until 9am the next day. The boundaries are porous, and it will remind me of the day’s neglected emails while “lounge me” is trying to relax (for an innocuous example).
The root problem results from much deeper cultural issues than we have room to discuss in this summary of simple reminders, but if there is internal tension between our “work” & “life” personas, perhaps it is because we feel a need to have a separate work persona in the first place. “Work” me should not need to be sealed off from the rest of our personality as if it were a leaky barrel of nuclear waste threatening to contaminate the rest. Nor can it. But the fact that such a significant amount of modern work feels so empty, unfulfilling, and pointless provides more than enough incentive for many people to make the futile effort to establish and maintain this partition. This is an unnatural separation to me (of me, of you, etc), and frankly we should not be dedicating so much energy and anxiety to “balancing it” as the cliché goes. Consider that tension between the work persona and the “rest” of the self may be fundamentally a moral protest by the self against the anxiety & stress that the work persona is unilaterally insisting as being the necessary price of admission for maintaining a comfortable lifestyle. The rest of the self rightly suspects that the work self is greatly embellishing - if not outright fabricating - its justifications for complacency. We wonder where the work-self may be getting its facts from, what master it really serves, and… is that kool-aid on its breath?
If we attempt to repress the undeniable fact that our jobs are empty and unfulfilling, eventually there comes a point where we eventually crack under the spiritual cross-examination that a well-functioning & vigilant conscience should subject it to. This is when we can no longer keep our stories straight, and the rationalizations that the we concoct to justify why we need to live this way crumble and turn to dust, and the illusion is revealed. Though unpleasant, this is, I think, the mind’s way of forcing us to confront and reconcile the frictions that such attempts at division impose on our psyches. The reflex to question and reflect is perhaps a mental immune system of sorts; while the tension of the discomfort is unpleasant, it is a signal of a healthy defense system alerting us that something is wrong. It can be suppressed temporarily, but eventually our minds have a way of not letting it go, and these frictions and contradictions must be confronted. We try to suppress it because it is unpleasant, and we do not like any unpleasantness in our lives. To try to suppress it at all however is against our long-term interests.
Yet suppress it we try in a misguided attempt to declare symptom as disease. Sugary foods, booze, drugs, expensive gadgets, “experiences” - or the simulation of experiencing these things through binge-watching shows about baking sugary foods, or drugs, on demand via our expensive gadgets - are all available by summoning our faithful butler, the consumer economy. Modern life provides access to endless amounts of palliative & pacifying, diversionary measures and thrills that work to, if not completely subdue the urge, at least to fiercely compete for valuable attention and bandwidth, which could otherwise be engaged in the types of deliberate and sustained self-reflection that may actually lead us to wonder if these partitions are really serving us in the first place, or just holding us in a catatonic stupor. The logic, consciously considered or not, is that for a high enough price we are willing to keep our “living” separate from our work, and tolerate the latter as a “necessary evil” which permits us to accrue the pleasures & status of the former. I should admit that it is of course not all that bad, not everybody hates their jobs, obviously (which is a good thing), but then how many would continue doing them for free?
In taking this mindset - or settling into it in the absence of introspection - we lull ourselves into accepting the normalcy of this fate, that this type of psychological tension is just something “everybody deals with”, and rationalizes the value of the “work” we are asked to do in personal utilitarian terms vis a vis the delights of consumption it allows. I do not think this complacency results from the deliberate manipulations of a malevolent architect trying to ensure the passive participation of otherwise unwilling contributors in a system of consumer capitalism. Rather, it maybe results from the fact that the virtues that might serve as as potential remedies - rooting ourselves in actual strong communities, slowing the pace of life, and learning to be content with much less - are themselves goods that the market has not altogether figured out entirely how to commodify, and therefore cannot be promoted as solutions in the first place. They are likely actually antithetical to the “health” of a market economy in that their realization may only be possible by slowing dynamism and consuming less, and eschewing the paradigm of obsolescence and transactionalizing relationships (and being aware of what a drastic slowing, or contraction, of the economy would mean, it makes it hard to advocate for the pursuit of these goods…). As such, they are regarded as nebulous “nice-to-haves”, but with no clear path to their attainment they remain unavailable as part of the current programming. Another knock against them is that the current program very much upholds a culture of seeking the lowest cost, path-of-least-resistance and convenience as the chief goods, and therefore anything requiring hard work, sacrifice, and the cooperation of determined people on a large scale, i.e. doing a lot of work will not be able to compete favorably unless can be commodified in terms that the consumer economy can equate with being valuable. Or somebody needs to figure out how you get these virtues from a pill you can take with breakfast or outsource their manufacture to a factory in China. I am not holding my breath for either.
So, to avoid the perils of compartmentalizing such a significant portion of life (which, really, is a way of living a shorter life), the quest is to find - or rather be given - work that can be performed free of material motivations, and instead in a spirit of being done “in truth, in beauty, and in righteousness, with singleness of heart”, as the prayer “For Every Man and His Work” from the ‘Book of Common Prayer’ hopes that we can achieve.
Now that would be a beautiful thing indeed, and it seems so absurd to say aloud that we should all be so lucky to find work which we not ashamed to have mingle freely with the rest of our being, a vocation we can pursue that doesn’t require the manufacture of partition within, or multiplicity of ourselves which must be walled off from the rest. Days spent doing the equivalent of digging holes only to fill them back in may provide the means for comfortable material attainment, but this material attainment is never satisfied and instead becomes not the ends but the means for numbing oneself to the spiritual degradation experienced in attaining it.
Reminder #4
Approaching my mid-40’s, I owe it to myself to at least try to find something I love to do. For years I had rejected the idea of “loving what you do” as being anything more than a new-agey pipe dream that very few people were lucky enough to realize, and that the vast majority of us slobs had to be content with settling for something that paid the bills and wasn’t too bad. I wasted a lot of time under that mentality, and sitting here regretting it will only amount to more time lost.
Being unemployed in a consumer society, I will feel financial pressure, maybe in the guise of some urge to maintain a “standard of living to which I am accustomed.” My savings may dip below the thresholds I’ve budgeted for, and panic may set in. I may need something temporary to get some income in. This reminder is to serve that finances are not a reason to capitulate by settling back into a different but identical rut. I feel fortunate to be in the position of having a relatively long leash to look around. I consider that an investment, and intend to have something to show for it after I rejoin the workforce, and if that proves not to be the case, if the now-familiar warning signs surface, then I need to keep looking.
Reminder #5
The last one. Speaking of savings, imagine you have a bank account whose balance you can’t check, but for which the estimate is that there is about $80 in there, and lacking any evidence to the contrary, that’s approximately what you believe to be the case. Being without income in this hypothetical scenario, there is no way to add to the balance, whatever it is. On top of that, interest rates are negative, so the balance is slowly evaporating whether you actively spend the money or not. If you were actually in such a precarious situation, i.e. if this were real life and not a thought experiment, you would likely become increasingly discerning about your expenditures when you think you have ~$30 left vs when you think you have $60. As the balance declines, the dearer the remainder becomes and we want to make sure we spend it on what counts (most of us, anyway?). Of course, however, it is real life, and yet we do not think this way.
Estimating optimistically, I am probably (hopefully) on the very beginning of the “back 40”. I will die one day. I don’t know when. It could be in forty years, or it could be tomorrow. I actually feel a lump in my throat while simply typing, “I will die”. I think that is a good thing; it feels like I am rendering an abstract concept into concrete fact by the act of acknowledging it. Saying it feels like a conjuration, or that I am attracting attention to myself from forces I would rather have ignore me, as if I had convinced myself I was somehow flying under their radar this whole time.
Intuitively, every day that succeeds in graduating into a yesterday is one less day remaining in our bank, and yet it is so hard to calibrate life to this creeping scarcity. It seems easier to maintain this mindset with money than with time, and you almost get the impression that money is somehow more valuable; it certainly is on the minds of most people, more often. Competition by products, experiences, for our money is actually competition for our time, which is to say that money is visceral, immediate, and it is measurable, in the sense that it is something we physically “possess” (though so much of it is digital), where time is the background; not even the scenery, but the imperceptible that-which-happens-without-happening. It is not in my pocket, my wallet, on my phone, but all these things are in it. Spending several seconds now trying to decide how to conclude this paragraph, I am thinking, these seconds are gone, my balance is shorter by that duration, by all durations. For all activities do we ask: was this time well-spent?
Is that even a worth-while question to ask since we can’t go back and re-spend time deemed to be misallocated. One lesson might be, if we find ourselves wondering that, to start learning to apply it in foresight, asking where an endeavor we are considering might lead - to a higher plateau, something that not only the present iteration of “us” considering the endeavor would like to accomplish, but also that the future iteration of our self is glad to have accomplished; is happy to have traded x amount of time to have these memories, these sensations, in return. In attaining a goal, have we considered whether it is something the future self will have to maintain, and what will the time requirement be there; will it impede the pursuit of subsequent goals?
Philosophically of course one does not want to get carried away or bogged down with over-analysis, by the unknowables or what-ifs that lead to decision paralysis (which is of course more lost time), or the impossibility of predicting intervening events that could alter the values of our future selves. All this is just to say if we aren’t asking that question at all now, but just going with the current, maybe we should at least spare the duration of an afternoon walk one day, or the time spent chopping vegetables for dinner to consider it, to consider what the opportunity costs, the foregone alternatives are. Sleep on it, flip a coin and see if your gut is relieved by the result.
Nor do we need to dwell too much on the reality of our eventual death. It is enough to know that it is there, to not deny it. Every day need not be an urgent PSA for death-awareness month. The more pleasant side of this awareness though is just acknowledging that our time is really our remaining time, and that it grows increasingly valuable with its scarcity. Possibly a conception of a bigger picture ought to emerge, of thinking not how we want to spend each individual remaining dollar, but what we’d like to have gotten for the next forty in the aggregate. Some people are wise and figure this out when they are 20 and playing with 60, but it is never too late to start.
Into the Unknown
So what next? Although it already feels like a tremendous weight has been lifted, I look forward to the intervening lull as a much-anticipated palate cleanser, and I am grateful to have the savings & flexibility to take the time to explore a few very different fields, and see what feels compelling. The idea our society - particularly the middle class - has that we must never, under any circumstances move backwards in our “careers”, that anything that isn’t forward progress is as good as suicide, makes me believe that it is exactly the proper course of action here. With regard our own experience, there are frontiers not only ahead, but to either side, perhaps even farther behind, all that we currently know; we should not be bound by moving in one direction only. I know very much what I don’t want, know what the warning signs of those things are, therefore the place to start searching is exactly the opposite of that. I can always get another boring corporate email job as my “break in case of emergency” option, but, if I start to seriously consider that, it may be time to increase the frequency of my reminders. This is what I wanted.
Very excited for whatever is to come next, and here’s to what I hope will be an interesting, varied, and worth-while trip into uncharted territory during the months & years ahead. Err, remaining.