Putting a pre-emptive positive spin on this essay, we can frame it as an ode to the remarkable adaptability of human beings. In the ~250,000 years since homo sapiens dispersed from Africa, our species has learned to thrive in a remarkably diverse range of habitats. You can’t help but be impressed at our ability to thrive in novel surroundings.
Having handily conquered the default scenarios presented to us by nature proper, that is to say, besting the available macro extremes of hot and cold, rain and not-shine, high and low (within reason; ie not inside volcanos / bottom of Marianas, etc.) - we humans, in our boredom and drive to conquer new & diverse territory, have heroically seized control of the level editor and taken it upon ourselves to increase the difficulty level by creating custom environments in which to challenge our adaptability. While we work out the kinks of conducting such trials in outer space, here on earth our most recent trials in adaptability have centered not on environmental extremes, but on the increasingly alien and precarious scenarios and rituals we can subject citizens of established societies to , namely those of the workplace.
The present iteration of our self-created trial simulator seems to be giving us a run for our money, but to be fair, it always does. There is a little bit of showmanship involved in that we have to make it look like we’re struggling at least a little bit. The spirit of Paganini , filing notches in his violin strings pre-recital so that they would snap and require him to transpose what he was playing on to the remaining strings, lives on in our efforts to show that we can skirt the brink of disaster and reel ourselves back in. Of course, being always both extremely responsible and 100% confident in our resourcefulness and ability to control the powers of Science™, there is no real risk of accidentally painting ourselves into a corner or taking a wrong turn down some dark cul de sac. The trick is to make it just look like we are. Without some dramatic flair, things might get too boring.
But I don’t want to talk about those big existential trials, I want to focus today on the narrower ones created at (at? for? by?) the personal level. Specifically this is a bit about modern work within the corporate sphere, touching upon the hyped but disappointing pandemic phenomenon (phenonenon?) referred to as the “great resignation.” The basic assumptions here are that there is a well-documented lack of meaning in the American corporate work space, and that while people in this sector are not exactly taking their jobs and shoving them in the predictable unprecedented numbers, they are nonetheless struggling to adapt to the lack of purpose they offer. My goal here is to try to explore some potential reasons people stay stuck in the jobs they swear they hate and are sucking their very souls away.
Firstly, a startling & embarrassing disclosure: I can’t speak for everyone. I have not worked in every industry, nor for every corporation in America, let alone on the earth. My qualifications should be immediately suspect. Even more alarmingly, much of what follows is anecdotal rather than based on broad empirical data. Some people have no problem job-hopping, and may be perplexed by any of what follows (assuming, of course, anyone reads it). Being hesitant for a long time to walk through the exit myself, it is my depressing suspicion that nonetheless at least some of what follows will resonate with others. If nothing else, hopefully putting it down on the page (words) will help me realize the absurdity of the situation and internalize my own advice for avoiding it in the future.
Tools of the Trade
Our arsenal of adaptability is comprised of such versatile tools as fear, indecision, laziness, and complacency. They manifest themselves in familiar forms such as the rationalization loop, identity associations, and the comfort trap. These clever feelings are mainly our brains’ way of investing a tiny bit of effort in the moment to avoid a much larger expenditure of effort & exposure to uncertainty in the future.
Broadly speaking, these adaptive virtues are what enable people to withstand the emotional volatility (or slow, downward ratcheting, aka frog boiling) that is an atmospheric feature of the corporate work world. When we sense we are approaching our physical & mental limit, they are the tools that enable us to push through the arbitrary walls we perceive as being our physical and/or mental limits; to hit the wall we swore was the end of the line, smash through it, and keep on going. This is a double-edged sword in that it can be crucial in a marathon, but pathological when stuck in a bad job. We swore we would quit in April. Now it is September and we have smashed through countless intervening walls, a slowly settling trail of plaster dust particles swirling in our wake. Now we swear with renewed conviction that January is the new limit; that once we get through the holidays - that’s it - we are out of here. Done FOR REAL this time. One more passive-aggressive email from Alex and I’m fucking DONE. Except… it’s never “one more”; our deft inner Houdini amazes us with the continually creative ways he conjures to escape the feeling of wanting to escape.
We may explore these tools in a little more detail.
Our Daily Ration(alizing)
As rational individuals living in a science-based rational world, we’re obviously extremely adept at using our rationality to rationalize things. We get so good at this because we have been taught the value of deliberately and endless practicing this skill, sometimes even rationalizing the same thing over and over - hundreds of times even - if that’s what it takes. We will even dedicate the hours we should be sleeping, lying there in our beds, silently practicing our rationalizing, making sure we can still find the way back to the same conclusions we’ve reached in countless similar sessions. Start at, “well… I really only work about three hours a day on average…”, then take a left at your competitive salary, continue straight through two more lights and you’ll hit, “this job is really GOOD on paper; I really am lucky to have it... maybe I can find a way to change my attitude…”, and then from there go right until you see “ok.. if I can just work another 90 days, I’ll save up another $X, I can strategically sprinkle little stepping stones of floating holidays to get me through that and still get paid out on my remaining PTO. That’s it. That’s the plan. Giving my notice on April 15th, putting it on my [personal Google] calendar now. Swear to god I’m doing it this time.” I’ve spent more than a few sleepless hours spinning around in the rationalization loop, wondering if I just slacked my boss now, at 2am, that I was quitting, if that would just let me go to sleep. Long term, this is obviously not a healthy mental space to inhabit.
The rationalization loop is that disastrous exercise in masochism that tries desperately to find stable footing on continuously shifting terrain. A cynical person may suggest that to spend hours in the rationalization loop having the same endless self-debate about whether to quit one’s job is simply a stubborn or dense brain’s way of trying to deny what the sage gut already knows. A more truly jaded person may even be tempted to conclude that hours spent thinking about work simply amount to more hours spent working.
There’s something of a love/hate relationship with the brain. It is often our own worst enemy, and seldom has our long term best interest in mind. Maybe don’t hate it - it can do a lot for us, but at least recognize that it is fundamentally lazy, and be suspicious of its motives. It’s basic impulse is to conserve energy where possible. It is responsible for the impulse to linger, the one that says a bad relationship can be salvaged, the one that says there’s no harm in zoning out in a nice warm shower or lying in bed for “just a few more minutes.”
The rationalization loop is the brain constantly fluffing the pillow, so to speak. Trying to get comfortable. Repeated expenditures of effort in very small increments are treated as preferable to the exertion of a single dose of a lot of effort. There is eventually a dawning awareness that, not only does the cumulative effort spent on all these repeated small adjustments exceed the amount required for the one big push you were trying to avoid in the first place, but that we’ve wasted weeks, months, years even playing this stupid game with the rationalization loop. That is because the brain is the wrong tool for the job. Perhaps look at it in this way: You want to make a decision - should I quit my job? yes or no. You’ve been agonizing about this a fair bit already, and so you hire your brain for the job, give it the facts, and ask it to get back to you in the morning. Six months later, it’s still trying to decide. Well before this point you should fire the brain, and bring in the gut. Or just flip a coin and see if you’re disappointed with the result.
The self-inflicted tyranny of this mechanism is that, after you hold strong once, you’ve given your brain all the ammo it needs to incorporate it into future “stay” arguments for the rationalization loop, which is to say you’ve survived the unsurvivable . Most of the situations in which we most desperately want to quit are those spikes of acute, intense rage or indignation - e.g. some absurdly asinine and/or last-minute request is assigned to us, an unpleasant dig from a client or coworker. In these moments, the urge to say “fuck it all,” and log out permanently via flipping our laptop off the desk temporarily approaches infinity. You stumble around in a blind seething rage for a few minutes, take some deep breaths, and realize that it’s probably best to give two weeks’ notice, and that that means you’ll just be stuck doing the dumb task anyway, or can let whatever comment slide. And then as the rage dissipates and we slide back to more manageable levels of general background frustration, we decide, “I guess I can ride it out a few more pay checks…” The spike/dissipation loops repeat predictably from there, all equally unpleasant, but all, to the brain, very endurable.
And just like that, a precedent is established: the transgressions of old, while retaining their painful sting, have proven incapable of killing you. And so you continue to bear them knowing they can’t, but swearing each one is the last. There is no single unendurable step, there is no single unendurable email, there is no single unendurable call, project. Inside the rage spike all you see is red. Outside, it is just a dull but tolerable haze, a hypnotic background throb of boredom and pointlessness, which you are startled out of by the sharp rifle report of an incoming slack message, the familiar audio notification like so much steel wool on an exposed nerve. Long term, this is obviously not a healthy mental space to inhabit.
So even with that realization, why is it so hard to leave a crappy, unfulfilling job? Interestingly for our purposes, for those who find their jobs unfulfilling, soul-sucking, and terrible, it can feel like we actually want neither - we don’t want to stay or leave. Human beings are so strange! Predictably strange though; when it seems like we’re stuck in the rationalization loop, oscillating with terrible reliance between “I can’t take it anymore” and “I guess this isn’t so bad… the money is good”, never fully in either, the brain is just longing for consistency, screaming, just make it fully good or fully awful so I can just. make. up. my. mind. already. Again, odds are you have a perfectly reliable gut that is too demure to speak up.
I’m Not a Job, I’m a Human Being, Damnit
Americans are sort of notorious for following up “Hello, nice to meet you” with, “tell me, what do you do for a living?” Despite potentially having been a very career-fixated people, though this may be changing. The tragic image of the loyal company man is now a sucker who doesn’t know what he is worth, and younger generations actively seek out better opportunities for themselves (data suggests they are just as unfulfilled, but more inclined to do something about it). Whether because of technological obsolescence or through weaker ties to tradition, fewer people follow the career path of their parents. Most people end up in jobs which they neither pursued a degree in nor even realized existed until HR responded to their random application and told them what the job they applied to actually entailed. A mantra of “I am not defined by my work” encapsulates this ethos.
Interpreted charitably, it is the mindset of the free individual, of a person broadly & actively engaged with life among a number of dimensions, and who refuses to be narrowly classified by an arbitrary dimension of their life. It is AN aspect of their being, but by no means the crucial one, even if by hours of dedication it would seem to be. I don’t disagree that this is a healthy attitude, but note that it also doesn’t imply dissatisfaction with one’s work; only that it suggests it might be a means to an end, a way of achieving bigger things than being reduced to whatever our job title says we are.
Interpreted less charitably, particularly for one who feels “stuck” in a job they hate, it can be the paralyzing mindset of passive surrender. It acknowledges a contentedness with the arrangement of work being a system of mutual use, of being morally & spiritually resigned to the fact that it is a “necessary evil”, and that as long as it pays the bills and allows us to do other things we want to do, we will continue to tolerate it.
It is absolutely true that life involves trade offs, but it is also easy to become complacent to that line of thinking and forget that it is within our power to make improvements in our situation if we want to. I used to personally buy into that mantra. I believed that, while I didn’t love my job, it was flexible & bearable enough and afforded me the potential to do what I wanted outside of work. I believed that, given the fundamentally boring nature of my work, I was lucky to have something relatively tolerable with coworkers I liked, and that most jobs were probably more or less likewise just something you did for a paycheck to finance more exciting things outside of work.
This thinking allows a subtle but pathological strain of logic to implant itself into one’s thought and valuation processes. First of all, it squares us with the notion that a large chunk of our time, time we will never get back, merely need to be tolerated. It devalues our time. With the caveats that of course even a bad/boring job can open other opportunities, and of course we don’t hate every second (or even most of them) of our jobs (and nor do people with fantastic jobs love every second of theirs), few of us actually consider the quantitative aspects of the trade off entailed by this mantra. And, to the extent that we often suck at setting boundaries, of not not working on vacation, work can and will find ways to bleed into the aspects of life that we claim tolerating it helps us afford - it ruins the very “rewards” we make the trade off for in the first place.
We’re saying that, with regard to our once-in-a-lifetime lives, that we’re willing to say, on average, “this is ok” for 40 hours of our week, 2000 hours of our year, or ~23% of our non-work hours and 34% of our waking hours. That is a tremendous amount of time to write off as “just something we need to do.” Now add to this the non-work hours spent feeling anxious or losing sleep over a job that provides no fulfillment or sense of meaning, or which is a source of chronic stress. That time is irrecoverable, and if you owe anybody anything, it’s the peace of mind that you at least put a reasonable effort into finding an enjoyable career before settling for utilitarian bill-paying one.
I was so convinced that the idea of “loving what you do” was a new agey crock that was probably unrealistic for all but a very small percentage of lucky people, that I didn’t bother to even try to find one. And then, of course, I just started to spin around the slow whirlpool of the rationalization loop, firmly “stuck” in the comfort trap. I regret that, but know that it is not too late.
Still Figuring It Out
Another artifact of identity not being tied to vocation is that it (theoretically) unbounds any constraints about what potential career paths to pursue. A major question for those considering a job change is which layer to pursue change at; we have the option of exploring different opportunities within our current place of employment (new role, but geographic / lateral / departmental transfer), applying to a competitor (same industry, potentially similar role), as well as exploring options for switching industries or vocations altogether.
Yet this produces a weird friction in that, even though the new job “will not define us”, there is a strong impulse to make sure it’s the right move and can result in something resembling option paralysis, manifesting in a self-sabotaging compromise strategy of just “keeping our head down” at our current job while we “figure it out.”
The result of this is continuing to coast, maybe the current job regains some semblance of stable tolerability again - which is the worst thing that can happen, since it keeps us there, languishing in this state of non-productive half-engagement, and the endless deferral of making an actual decision, of taking an action. Lapsing back into the coma of complacency, heedless of the same-seeming passing time, one day the quarterly reminder that we need to update our corporate network password chimes in our inbox and we realize that 90 days later, we still haven’t figured anything out.
Part of figuring things out, of course, is knowing what to throw out, of knowing what “options” aren’t really options in the first place. If you’re stuck in this zone, and the only thing you know is that you aren’t happy where you are, the solution may just be to eliminate the current option.
Freefall
While the current job ostensibly provides a financial shelter from which to ponder the vast ocean of alternatives, I am a strong proponent of the sabbatical. If you really want to make a change, taking the first step and cutting the umbilical cord to your current gig is maybe the best way to light a fire and prompt some actual productive thinking over what comes next - especially if you have no idea what the next step is. Voluntarily entering a state of financial freefall (give yourself some kind of cushion / people with dependents have different challenges here, obviously) radically scales back current distractions, gets one to stop treading water, and actually swim towards a shore, any shore.
Almost all of the resistance to this strategy, of course, lies in front of the cliff edge. Once the decision has been made, the resistance is gone, and the consequences are what they are. Still, that visual of being atop the cliff edge and stepping off is a powerful detractor. It’s also exactly the wrong damned visual. The idea is that we’re exiting a state of discomfort, temporarily passing through one of uncertainty, and into a state of comfort, where the cliff implies the opposite. A grosser, more helpful visual is that we’ve fallen into the sewer, are crawling around in the darkness, and suddenly see a dim ring of light overhead; grasping out into the dark, one rung after another, we slowly climb up to and emerge from a manhole into the sunlight.
I definitely understand the hand-wringing concern of, “I could take a six month break, but… what id I get hurt or sick and don’t have insurance (not that my health “insurance” from work gets me anything other than the right to pay thousands of dollars a year for the privilege of paying another thousand or so towards a deductible before the insurance company will contribute anything, but that and the great ransoming of the illusion of physical & financial security by shackling it to jobs that make us stressed out maniacs is another story). The comfort trap - the security offered by that steady injection of a biweekly corporate america-grade paycheck that supports our consumption patterns and, by extension, the basis of our very identities, anchoring us to a middle class consumer lifestyle is not a place that is particularly conducive to making major life changes. It is easy to look around the cozy confines it provides and make the decision to simply coast for a while longer. It takes a conscious exertion of will to step outside of it after being so used to its protection; it is the naked feeling of leaving the house without a cell phone.
The spaces we inhabit have a way of influencing the way we move through them. If we feel like our lives are stuck in molasses, often the tendency is to move accordingly. Our dynamic range becomes self-constrained to tentative non-committal gestures, conservative baby steps towards progress that only go far or fast enough to ensure safe retreat but never to reach escape velocity, thrashing in place, expending energy without seemingly making progress; the gas gauge is on empty but the odometer is still somehow stuck at zero. Bold dynamic moves, changing entire frames, are the answer, but can be counterintuitive and difficult to make. Even if after a period of contemplation the result is a temporary, “break in case of emergency” job, or another corporate job that proves as boring as the one you left, the fact that you left at the very minimum provides proof of concept that you can leave a crappy job.
Musical Standing Desks
After analyzing some of the more common mental fences we construct to convince ourselves that we’re stuck in unfulfilling jobs, we arrive at perhaps the most depressing of all: the “great resignation”, to the extent that it is actually realized, may not amount to anything more than a giant case of “damned if you do / damned if you don’t.”
Think of it this way: if you have a significant amount of people who are unhappy with their jobs, that suggests that a great number of jobs are unfulfilling. People who are dissatisfied enough then to change jobs will primarily be the people with the jobs that are the most unbearable, which means that a good amount of future job openings will exactly the least fulfilling jobs that people hated the most. Some of these people may drop out of the workforce for a little sabbatical or retire early, but others will end up be leaving a role they found unfulfilling and trading it in for one that somebody else found more or less equally unfulfilling. There is no denying that any change will be positive for some people, whether simply from shaking up the mix of personalities or a change of scenery, but this consideration nonetheless provides even more ammunition for the rationality loop - why bother if the net result will be the same.
To grapple with possibility that the new job will be no better than the current one is to suggest that, the current job is the devil you know, and therefore the one that is mostly paying you not to leave, while the one will be the one where you have to work harder to prove yourself as the new person; you are giving up your current institutional credibility and starting again as an unknown. The rationality loop tells you that you’ll wind up working harder at a job that is just as boring and empty, and unless there are salary or other gains to be had, your brain will try to convince you that maybe you’re better off staying put.
It is important to realize that this default logic, operating from the cultural frame of your current work environment, is largely transposing or extrapolating it over to any & every possible environment. In the absence of any other data points we’re just constructing assumptions using the best available data. But now for the real black pill: I believe those assumptions are likely correct.
Within the frame of the tech / corporate world, the buzzword repeated ad nauseum is scale. Scale, scale, scale - how does it scale? This is the question that keeps developers, managers, and C-suite types awake at night. Scaling is a function of replicability & uniformity, and is a consideration in all the various niches of the economy. Scaling for any single product line or service is a big challenge. One way the global economy is configured to scale is by trying to ensure ample supply of qualified workers to fill needed roles within any sector of the economy. The idea notion of interchangeable parts looms large here. This is where you come in.
To zoom out for a moment, picture America as you travel through it - it is flat and getting flatter. Not only in terms of geography, but… if you were drugged and awoke after an indeterminant amount of time inside, say, a Starbucks, a CVS, a Walmart, a hotel, any Airbnb or restaurant, any number of identical, cookie-cutter places - would you know if you were in Providence, Des Moine, Anaheim, Minneapolis or any of a zillion other places? The flattening of America into monotonic & sterilized non-places in turn has a similar effect of flattening & making uniform the people that inhabit them - and vice versa - in an ever-intensifying feedback loop.
For corporate America, having a huge availability of interchangeable parts that can be plugged into the various levels and ranks of their is a huge plus. The more similar that roles and functions are overall in the corporate world, the less dependent they are on the institutional knowledge of any single employee, and the more reliable prior work experience at other corporate entities becomes in determining whether a candidate will work. It is basically a process of swapping batteries between devices, if you want to get downright matrix-y about it.
We adapt to the uniformity of these places by becoming increasingly uniform ourselves, and to be sure, there is something in it for both the companies and the employees. There are always superficial differences, but by symbiotically evolving and converging toward a relatively narrow window of cultural norms that ensures we will be able to quickly recognize the jargon, hierarchies, the nature of the tasks, the marketing messages (the weird, impossible way every single company in every industry is somehow a “market leader” or “best in class”…), etc. it allows us to quickly get our bearings and eases the friction of transferring jobs for the employees as well as the companies.
And eerily so. The firsthand discovery of how much the new job superimposes on to the old one, like a template - matching up the new iterations of the same milquetoast personalities & corporate archetypes, engaged in the same petty office politics, interdepartmental beefs (“sales doesn’t understand operations!” / “what does the customer success department do all day?!?”), cliques, and the same bullshit cheerleading - is a sobering one. But realizing that the mediocre, boring company you are starting at is virtually indistinguishable from the mediocre, boring company you just left is only the initial shock, the prelude to the humbling awareness that the seat from which you now find yourself dutifully managing projects was perhaps only freshly-vacated by some other corporate drone, superficially interchangeable with yourself, and who quite conceivably could this very moment likewise be managing projects your old seat, introducing themselves to your old cast of coworkers, who see them as being as interchangeable with you as your new interchangeable coworkers regard you to be with them. The ultimate adaptation of large systems is eliminating potential scarcity & dependency by de-essentializing as many components as possible.
So to the extent that people aren’t quitting, aren’t fulfilling the prediction, perhaps it’s because they’ve convinced themselves that the devil they know is not going to be any more or less a devil than the one they don’t, that there is in fact no difference whatsoever between the devils at all. That the sterile interchangeability of individuals & environments means that annoying Dean in their current job will just be insufferable Derrick at the next.
Thus “resignation” under the flattened homogenizing paradigm of liberalism takes the spiritually-gutting form of resigning not from a job, but of resigning one’s self to the abandonment of hope of achieving meaningful change or real fulfillment. We resign ourselves instead to the rationale that a mortgage on a townhouse, a decent car, and a vacation or two every year is a fair trade for a job that amounts to so much middle class welfare, whose pointless paper-pushing leaves no discernable impact on the world or our communities. We say, “a job is just a job,” and accept the path of least resistance, adapted to a state of drifting inertly through life in the depressing neutral buoyancy of relative material wealth that tries, yet always falls somehow short of completely comforting the accompanying quiet spiritual desperation.