I haven’t written anything here since quitting my job in January.
I “quit” only in the technical sense. No one demanded my resignation, but after a decade of performance bonuses, my year-end review was less than encouraging: First, you shouldn’t have written that email. And second, some people are saying they’re uncomfortable working with you now.
I had already decided I wouldn’t litigate, so I just resigned.
“Makes me feel uncomfortable” and “makes me feel unsafe” are dangerous charges. Working from home I posed no threat of infection of course, but that’s not what the charge means. I suspect it means I’m upset that someone here doesn’t share my feelings, or even, I’m annoyed that someone unlike me is permitted to work here.
The anonymous, uncontested assertion of a negative feeling was enough to tilt my performance review. It wasn’t necessary for the complainers to say it to me, and it wasn’t necessary to explain the discomfort or how I caused it. It was necessary only that a member of the conformist majority call out a dissident in the minority.
On the other hand the company didn’t fire me outright, and I suspect a sympathetic HR representative actually worked to soften the company’s initial reaction to my letter. I’m ashamed that I always seem to underestimate my colleagues and friends, but their kindness surprised me again. Many sent heartening notes. Some offered to help me find other employment. Several still keep in touch.
I’m sure that I was right to take my little stand and leave. This feeling of certainty came over me in a wave when I resigned. It persists today. My relief at disentangling myself from a business determined to cow its employees and customers into promoting what Dr. Aaron Kheriaty now calls the biomedical security state is immense. I’m eager to try something new.
After leaving I realized something I hadn’t seen before. I didn’t resign from just one corporation. I finalized a divorce with the whole high-tech world. One company might have been more willing than another to certify religious exemptions or to track weekly testing for the unvaccinated, for example, but how many Nasdaq companies refused outright to act as social-credit Brownshirts? I’m not aware of any.
In fact most high-tech companies see a totalitarian technocracy as a business opportunity, part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Internet of Things. Both buzzwords encompass monitoring services that governments either buy directly or mandate their citizens to buy. My phone might report my meetings with friends for contact-tracing, my car might report my destinations for both pollution control and political-protest monitoring, or my fridge might report my soda consumption for healthcare cost-reductions. In every case there’s government interest in tracking and nudging me. And government contracts are good business.
So I’m out. I was never at ease on the corporate ladder, but after so long there, it came to feel like solid ground. I could answer “So, what do you do?” without having to stop and think. When a new graduate needed work, I could make introductions.
Now my income has plummeted just as my bank repeats that people like me must focus on retirement planning. I’m not sure what I’ll be doing next fall. Being cut off from the work I did for thirty years isn’t depressing, but it does leave me a little anxious.
A friend offered this advice: old books and new skills. His idea, I think, is that when the world feels askew, when we are all struggling with “unpersoning” each other in the Orwellian sense, coercing and ostracizing and scapegoating in a pretense of selfless kindness, we need to look back to what’s real. Looking at a book from long ago, from what amounts to an utterly different culture, it’s easy to recognize what carries over, what’s universal to human nature and lasting. Learning a skill also grounds us to what’s real—not a virtual skill like Instagram filters or TikTok editing, but a real skill that leaves a mark on the physical world.
A builder at my church, to my immense gratitude, has invited me to work for him. The work is tangible, and I’m learning something every day: coaxing substantial trees into falling away from the homeowner’s roof, cutting ceiling tiles, fixing the soap pump on a commercial dishwasher. I suppose it adds up to new skills.
I’ve also been reading some old books. This morning I finished Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Lily, the protagonist, is a society girl whose friends all urge her to make a profitable marriage. But Lily is reluctant to tie the knot just for money. On the last page her principles are intact, but she has lost all her opportunities and dies impoverished.
I didn’t expect to have much in common with a beauty of the 1890s who floats between Mediterranean yachts and New York summer houses, but I do. We both lost financial security and our public identities: she by refusing to marry into Fifth Avenue society, and I by refusing to march lockstep with the corporate world. Thankfully I have too much love in my life to die like Lily. But by the end of that book, I was right with her.
So sorry. Divorces are very painful.
History proves that it all starts with denigration, then group identification, becomes registration, and ultimately attempts at extermination. Before apps were available, arm bands were used.
Congratulations on your "divorce."