[1193] Housekeeping

Round and round we go.

The reason I take any job is because the alternative reaches an unsustainable turning point. Whether or not I can maintain the kind of fire that sustains entrepreneurial efforts, I still maintain a value for my time that keeps me investing and trying to protect it literally until the last moment where things break. I didn’t dream about being any one of the 20 or so roles I’ve occupied since I was 15. I’ve only modestly enjoyed the perks of privileges that come with each one, and certainly have dozens of pages detailing each nuanced way in which they’ve exhausted me.

It looks like I need to, again, leave a position. I’ve only been here since November, but the cracks showed themselves immediately, and the friend who got me in the door exposed them even deeper. With her now on the way out, the groundwork I was laying to try and turn the job into something I could invest in is functionally dead. What I’m struck by is her perspective, because it so closely mirrors my own across all of my work environments, but it seems to be like a shock or something new to her how she’s been treated and what she’s been met with from her colleagues’ dispositions.

I’ve grown to expect unyielding complacency, excuses, double-speak, placation, condescension, failing-up “leadership,” resentment, undermining, and given I work primarily in fields dominated by women, enough gossip for 100 terrible TV shows. My friend, apparently, has only worked in supportive environments who allowed her to use her brain and skills in ways that could meaningfully contribute to her former work environments. She’s got plenty of general life things on her plate that are well worth her attention that would make any amount of the bullshit she's received acutely painful, but it still feels like it’s even moreso, or like she’s been experiencing a depth of betrayal akin to what I had with college.

Because I took this job out of desperation, I’m not heartbroken about the prospect of leaving it, but it just reopens the wounds that had me desperately searching for any job to begin with. I felt a tingle of panic earlier today at the prospect of returning to the thousand-spam link job boards and wasting hours of my life applying to incorrectly-described jobs with ambivalent leadership and high turnover. This job I’ve described as a bait-n-switch, and my experience is shared by many who have occupied my role and others within the organization. I’m a babysitter, full-stop. And I’ve got people who make it their job to try and dress that up while punishing those who would call for maintaining a standard or growth mindset.

Is it “easy?” Everything is easy if you can shut off your brain and do the arbitrary self-inflicted wounding necessary to meet their demands. Is it “worth it?” I do prefer having an incredibly little amount of money versus zero money, but of course it’s not worth it. If I wasn’t born into this system, it’s not one I would have chosen for myself, and the sacrifices we culturally perpetuate as matter-of-fact I’ve rejected from the moment I could choose drug studies for cash and to live in a shed-house.

Each new work environment I occupy helps round out my perspective as to why “things” work or don’t. Most of the time, I have absolutely no one with any power or inclination to change anything to even discuss the prospect of doing so. I’m about the only person who can even pronounce the word “union,” let alone feel any type of way about what organizing would or could mean. If I do find someone approaching my headspace, they’ve often got their own emotional baggage or family obligations that preclude any appetite for risk or consequences. They’re smart, say, but that also makes them anxious and depressed. Invariably, they’re “normal” with normal expenses and obligations like affording the medicine that allows them the ability to keep walking their psychological razor’s edge.

Here, there was a chance. A slim one, but a chance nonetheless. It was predicated on using the full extent of our respective positions of power to begin saving money and making moves with the blunt instrument of numbers and story of consequences when you actually follow policy. The “stuck” corporate-speakers and dead-eyed overwhelmed or incompetent middle-managers who would disrupt it could have been over-ridden by my friend. Without her, I’m again a baby fish swimming in murderous shark waters of the stupid, unwilling, and afraid. I’ve laid a lot of groundwork with my people about how things could be, and demonstrated the effectiveness of my perspective at my individual site. It’s over-stating to say it might amount to “nothing” now, but it feels that way.

At scale, we’re also at this inflection point culturally. Are we going to stay and fight? Are we going to resign ourselves or the business-as-usual chaos of those incidentally in charge of the “most feelings” they’ve violently weaponized against all sense and order? It’s hard for me not to mourn any loss of potential where I’m a player in the game, but it takes on an extra brutality when I map it onto why “things” at the cultural level feel like they’re in perpetual failure. Again, my curiosity about my friend’s experience shows up. What has, so far, been so insulated from the decline? Or is it perhaps just easier to mask in different settings? Me doing “poor people” jobs meant I never got too much of the hoity-toity posture as part of the culture I was working within more than from its “leaders,” forever in quotes. The types that all read the same 4 most popular business books about how to be a Good Human Manager.

I ran from my computer today. I went and got food and parked in my work parking lot hours early to listen to podcasts and write this. I don’t want to feel marooned looking for work again. I don’t want to spend months endearing myself to a new crop of listless and dejected chit-chatters who have no fight or broader sense of responsibility to themselves or the world. I don't want to tuck another crop of names and faces into a, “I’m sorry I don’t remember you even though we saw each other every day for months” folder. Because at this point it’s hundreds of clients or co-workers who would never text me on a friendly level or to do anything like eat or bowl.

I'm destined to keep looking. I refuse to be the person waiting for someone like me to show up. Those "nice-enough" or "well-meaning" husks who would be just as content following the mind-control of a Tiktok algorithm as they would whatever you propose. There's a ton more to say and this has been incredibly rushed, but I need to go.