As most of you know I quit my day job last fall to transition to making a living through my writing.
When I was preparing to give my notice, I met a UK-born writer named
Robert Wringham, who publishes an independent magazine for
workforce escapees such as myself (or those who are thinking about it),
called
New Escapologist.
I loved it immediately: it’s smart, advertising-free and perfectly
square. Given that I was in the “great escape” chapter of my own story,
he asked me to write a piece for the magazine, which appears in the
latest issue. I’ve reposted it below (edited slightly to fit a blog
format.)
The months following my escape consisted of one lesson after
another, as I expected, but the biggest lesson was quite a shock — and
it’s something all 9-to-5ers should learn as early in their lives as
possible. This piece is my warning to would-be escapees who are
eternally waiting for the right time.
***
After leaving a jobsite, I drove to a nearby field and parked my car
facing a row of corn. It was afternoon, on the day that I’d picked to
finally do it, but I was still nervous. I sat there for about half an
hour before pulling the trigger.
I phoned my boss and told him I was leaving the company to work for
myself. I’d rehearsed for a confrontation, but he was very professional
and understanding. The moment I hung up, laughter exploded out of me,
like I’d just gotten a joke told to me years ago.
The drive home was euphoric, as I expected it would be. But two weeks
later I would discover an unsettling side-effect of having been an
employee so long.
I enjoyed the weekend after my final office Friday as normal.
However, the following Monday happened to be a holiday, which I quickly
realized carries absolutely no benefit to the self-employed man. My
former colleagues were getting paid to do anything but work, while for
me it was simply another day. If I chose not to work, it was my loss and
only mine. When you’re self-employed, every day is Wednesday.
This feeling of absolute responsibility for the outcome of my working
life was a new feeling. It dawned on me that before I quit my job at
32, I had never really experienced a self-directed period of my life in
which I was actually trying to accomplish something. At 29 I went
backpacking for nine months just to see what it’s like to be me in other
countries. It was an unforgettable experience but it didn’t involve any
goals or specific intentions.
Aside from that rewarding but relatively aimless period, I was always
either a full-time employee, a student, or a dependent child. This
meant I’d always had a) someone telling me what I ought to be doing, and
b) a network of reminders, best practices and potential punishments
that together almost guarantee a certain acceptable range of outcomes.
The worst that could happen is that I’d gradually advance along the
current ladder, as long as I did a reasonable job at coloring within the
lines provided.
I didn’t realize it until the lines were no longer there, but this
type of subservient arrangement trains a person to need others for
direction. When I woke up that first Monday, free for the first time to
build a life on my own terms, I began to realize that I have exactly
zero experience doing that.
Few of us do, because we’re born as subjects to the authoritarian
figures of our parents, and from there we’re funneled straight into the
education system, which steers us directly toward the employee
workforce. In each of these systems, we are subordinates whose work is
likely to be unrelated to our own values, on schedules that are always
determined by someone else.
We’re trained to need bosses
It seems inevitable, then — though completely insane — that for the
first 33 years of my life I was never the one determining the basic
day-to-day structure of my life. When you only take full control of your
life less than a decade from middle age, it’s alarming to find yourself
allowed to actually put your hands on the wheel. There’s a conspicuous
absence of instruction, and it feels strangely like you’ve done
something bad.
Thirty years of conditioning is extraordinarily difficult to
overcome. Most people, when they emerge from the conventional
child-school-workforce tunnel, are almost entirely untrained to manage
entire weeks and months in which the bulk of one’s time isn’t committed
to serving an institution of some kind.
Given all my life experience, subservience is the quality in which
I’m most highly trained, and I suspect I’m a pretty typical case. A
friend of mine is a blogger turned
New York Times-bestselling
author, and he told me much of the reason he hasn’t left his corporate
job is because he’s aware that without the structure imposed by a job,
he’s liable to devolve into an unwashed caveman, eating cold cereal
three times a day and gradually forgetting how to talk.
His fears aren’t unfounded, in my experience. I notice I shave less
often, my hair has grown long enough to cover my face, and my lunch is
often just apples and raw almonds. There are days I don’t go outside.
It’s been three months since I sat and laughed in the cornfield, and I
am only now beginning to adhere to a day-to-day workflow structure of my
own design. Each day is a blank page with no outline indicating where
the crayons go. I have to decide what to draw, how ambitious or humble
it’s going to be, and what it’s all going to add up to over time.
This is exactly why we all ought to be thinking of our escape from
kindergarten on. I wish somebody had pulled me aside and told me that
the education system and working culture I’m going to be marched into
are places that are ultimately going to need escaping from, because
otherwise I’d never quite get a chance to run my life. These
institutions may be useful for learning the fundamentals of language and
human interaction, but they’re generally inhospitable for the finding
and doing of the work that’s most important to you.
The giant brick sitting in your salad
I’m convinced now that nobody gets away with settling on work they
don’t care about. The nagging banality of having to do irrelevant work
five-sevenths of your days is not something that will eventually leave
you alone. Nobody ever makes peace with with the ringing of their alarm
clock. We either make a calculated escape, or resign to becoming
cynical, bored — and worst — dependent on constant entertainment for
relief, because our work does little but drain us.
Independence has to be practiced throughout life beginning as early
as possible, because by the time we recognize the need to escape, we’re
extremely dependent on the day-to-day controls provided by school and
work culture. This makes change a steeper proposition with every year
that goes by.
Among other depersonalizing habits,
resignation is
perpetually being trained into us until we do finally make our escape
from institutional life. At the beginning of your life, you must resign
to what your parents allow you to do. Then you must resign to the tedium
of twelve-plus years of public schooling, and from there you naturally
believe you must resign to the banality and irrelevance of whatever work
is required for you get the next paycheck.
Many people deal with the vapidity of their jobs by having children,
because parenting lends an immediate seriousness and purpose to one’s
role on the planet. Providing for a child is an act that feels
intrinsically meaningful to a human being, and so devotion to your job,
even a dull one, can become an extension of devotion to your role as a
parent, giving meaning to the hoops to be jumped through at work.
But not everyone wants their primary contribution to the world to be
in the field of parenting, and even for those who do, the job still
feels like a necessarily evil done only to make this passion viable.
Unless you love your work, your workday probably feels something like a
giant brick sitting in your salad, and in my experience this doesn’t go
away until you do.
Much better than resignation is to make a long-term plan to find work
that is valuable enough to you that your typical day is a fulfilling
one, and valuable enough to others that people will pay you for doing
it.
I dream of a future in which this is the norm — where everyone
expects to spend as long as it takes to find fulfilling work. The
resignation rate for us, presently, seems extremely high. Imagine the
difference, not just if you found your own work fulfilling, but if
almost everyone else did too. Products would be better and we’d buy
fewer of them. And the people selling them to us would be proud instead
of indifferent, because their work and their joy would no longer be
confined to different parts of the day.
