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This weekly thread will focus on work and work culture.
This has been a back-burnered issue since COVID came and upended many workplace traditions worldwide, but I’d really like to hear about what you all think about it!
Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):
- What is the ideal work / life balance? Right now, the worldwide average is 5 days per week, 8-5 PM. Is this too much / too little / just right?
- With productivity skyrocketing and wages falling, what would you like to see to fix things?
- Would you accept less money and shorter hours?
- What would you feel minimum wage should do to adjust?
- Do you feel that the current resurgence of Unions is positive or negative?
I just quit my job to start a business with a friend and I thought the reaction I received from my coworkers was interesting. Most were genuinely confused, didn’t understand why I would want to quit, and were surprised that I would do so without any guarantee of employment somewhere else (somewhere that isn’t a non-funded startup).
One manager, at a loss for words, just asked (in a weirdly childlike way) “why?” And I didn’t have a good answer for him. Because I can’t imagine staying at this job until I’m middle management? Because I hate the internal corporate pressure to produce crappy software? Because I want to set my own schedule and have a shot at wealth that will give me freedom from the 9-5 before I’m in my 60’s?
I want to be free, and I want my son to be free.
I think many people have a deep aversion to being unemployed, or are scared of being in an untenable financial situation. If I have an unexpected expense in the next three months, I’m screwed, and that’s a scary place to be in. It’s not a place that most of my coworkers have ever been in. It’s been a while since I’ve been in that place, but I have been there, and rolling the dice with your home or vehicle on the line is easier when you have had the experience of doing so, failing, and recovering from that failure. If you were raised middle class or in stable poverty of some sort, you may never have found yourself with all of your belongings in a rucksack and then come back from it.
Anyway, just an observation.
I quit my job (working marketing for a tech firm) and then-career in very late 1999 without any parachute or soft landing zone. I just couldn’t pedal lies for a living any longer and had to get out. I then spent a year burning through my (stock-option inflated) savings as I thought about what I could do instead.
In early 2001 I made my choice. I would sell almost everything I owned, I would burn all my career bridges behind me, and I would go to China to teach “for a year or two” and get in touch with half of my family roots. EVERYBODY thought I was crazy making that choice, and my mother in particular was frantic because she’d spent her youth trying to escape China.
I’m now in my 23rd year of my stay “for a year or two”, 16 of which I spent teaching before stepping back into marketing for a firm run by a guy I love working for. (Officially on paper I’m his PA, but in reality I’m the de facto head of market research for our little consulting firm.)
That’s two major career changes, one at age 36, and one at age 52, that I’ve made in my life after leaving school. And in that first one I not only left without a safety net, I’d also very carefully burned all my career options behind me just to make sure that I didn’t get tempted to go back to working in Hell.
So congratulations! You did what I did, only with even MORE guts involved. Kudos!
Very cool story! Thanks!