THE GREAT RESIGNATION

“Sometimes I thought about what Margaret said. About how a person can just drift through life like they're not connected to anyone or anything. You look around - all those characters trying to kill time. Going around in circles. Even if a person wanted to break free, they could find out they've got nowhere else to go.” -- Iris Chapman, Clockwatchers

"The future had lost its rosy glow and become something real and menacing." -- George Orwell, Burmese Days


Twenty years ago left my desk in the courthouse and went home for lunch. Today I finally came back.

I mean this figuratively. I actually didn't quit my job for another four or five months. But the decision to walk away was made then and there, as I sat on my couch and gazing at my television screen. By chance, or perhaps by design, I'd happened on Clockwatchers, a low-budget indie movie directed by Jill Sprecher. Clockwatchers is the story of four young women temping at a huge, faceless credit agency. The stupidity and boredom of their jobs pressure them into a mutual friendship which slowly unravels as the work climate grows nastier and more humiliating. Instead of coming together in support, they begin to quarrel. What begins as a thoughtful, gently comedic poke at the modern workplace devolves into a dark commentary about the emptiness, the senselessness of modern life, and the fragile and fleeting nature of human relationships. I had begun the movie thinking it was an all-female take on Office Space, and finished it in a completely different place, intellectually and emotionally.

Clockwatchers devastated me. I felt as if I were watching an allegory about my own life. There was nothing which happened to the film's chief protagonist, Iris, which hadn't happened to me: the petty indignities, the lonely, solitary lunches, the paralyzing boredom, the futile office crushes, the petty feuds and squabbles, the broken friendships, the drunken nights out full of forced cameraderie and secret despair. With the supreme egotism of all miserable people, I had assumed that I alone felt the existential woe. That I alone knew what it meant to be in my late 20s, financially sound with a respectable job, and yet achingly, tormentingly empty within. Stupid as it seems, I thought the condition localized to myself. WItnessingClockwatchers made me realize that it was generalized, spread over our society as generously as butter on diner toast.

So I decided to quit. Right then and there, in my shabby apartment on the corner of Market and Duke Streets, I decided I would quit my job, and more than that, abandon my entire career in the criminal justice system. I had gone to college to work in that system, and for four and a half years had worked within it, rising to a supervisory position in the district attorney's office before I was thirty. Had I stayed the course, I would have risen still further -- if not there, then in the office of the attorney general or inspector general. From there I could have gone into federal service. Yet because of an obscure movie I'd never heard of until I saw most of it on an extended lunch break, I decided to chuck it. To walk. To get the hell out while I still had some youth and some hope for a more satisfying and fulfiilling future. The film had simply hit too close to home to be ignored. It was like the scene in Miracle on 23rd Street when the hero is stabbed, and while in the hospital is discovered to have a tumor requiring immediate removal: to his amusement he realizes that if someone hadn't tried to kill him, he'd have died of cancer. Watching Specher's movie had hurt like hell, but only because, by some species of curiously cruel logic, the truth often hurts.

I went back to the office and typed up my resignation. I didn't hand it in for some months, but I carried it in my suit pocket every day like a talisman. Sometimes, when I was angry or depressed about the nature of my job, I'd remove it and stroke the corners like a James Bond villain stroking his cat. Eventually I gave it to my boss. I didn't have another job lined up, I simply quit. I had to. If I had waited for the stars to align properly, I'd never have left. As a friend of mine once remarked, "There will never be a perfect time, but there will never be a better time."

If you read this blog even occasionally, you know the rest of my story. I spent six glorious months in fertile unemployment, writing up a storm, traveling periodically, and generally decompressing from the last five years of my life. I then spent two horribly unhappy years back in the system in a different state, when economic circumstances forced me to resume working. But these two years did not in my mind constitute an abandonment of my decision to leave: they were driven by the simple need to keep a roof over my head. At the very first opportunity, I left again, and for the next sixteen years did very little that I did not want to do. I went back to school and then to graduate school, I moved to Los Angeles, I worked in video games, television and film, and I wrote, wrote, and wrote some more. If I was not always happy, I was generally content, and even at my worst, when I was struggling to make a living in Hollywood, I had the comfort of knowing I was where I wanted to be, doing, at least superficially, the things I wanted to do.

Then, one day -- so to speak -- I got off the couch, turned off the television, and went back to work in the courthouse. I traded the big city and the entertainment industry for that same old smallish town and and its courthouse. I even moved back into the same apartment building.

Why do I mention all of this? Because America is currently in the grips of what is being called The Great Resignation or The Big Quit. I ran a search on these terms and got 2.4 billion results in .64 seconds. Some of the definitions:

"The Great Resignation (as economists have coined the employee exodus) reflects a deep dissatisfaction with previous employment situations. The ongoing global pandemic has enabled workers to rethink their careers, work/life balance, long-term goals, and working conditions." -- Google

"The Great Resignation, also known as the Big Quit, is an economic trend in which employees voluntarily resign from their jobs en masse, beginning in early 2021, primarily in the United States." -- Wikipedia

"The Great Resignation is a phenomenon that describes record numbers of people leaving their jobs after the COVID-19 pandemic ends." -- Weforum

At my present place of employment, I am seeing The Big Quit up close. The casualty rate among the staff is like something out of a WW2 movie. I have been back "at my desk" for 17 months, and am already high on the seniority list in my office. It's difficult to keep anyone, regardless of age: the new hires, some as young as 19, are just as likely to shrug and walk out as disgruntled, embittered veterans in their 40s. The willingness of people to endure what we generally refer to as "the grind" ("the ratrace" was a good description of it as well, though it has fallen out of favor for some reason) seems to be plummetting like a 1929 stockbroker off a skyscraper. Having worked from home, or not at all, for a lengthy period of time due to the pandemic, many people are reconnecting with the basic ideas driven home to me by Clockwatchers, to wit: life is short, and we owe it to ourselves to find meaning in the time we have, rather than squander it in soulless drudgery.

Obviously people can't quit their jobs cold without having some resources, and most of the "Quitters" will return to the workforce in some capacity almost immediately, hence the third name for the phenomenon: The Great Reshuffle. But it's important to grasp that what is going on here is more than a migration of workers from one grind to another. It is a fundamental rejection of the old way of doing things, driven by the epiphany that happiness is more important than job security or money. In a Puritan-based, capitalist-driven society like ours, which has programmed people to view life and self-worth solely through the lens of economic success and societial status, and to regard existence itself as a punishing grind (the more punishing the better), this is a massive development: a sea change, a tectonic shift. And contrary to what some people maintain,
it has more to do with a refusal to accept a series of bad choices than with weakness, selfishness or entitlement.

In his lesser-known novels like KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING, COMING UP FOR AIR, BURMESE DAYS, and A CLERGYMAN'S DAUGHTER, and in his brutal expose of British poverty, THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER, George Orwell often explored the misery, both spiritual-emotional and financial, which 20th century life inflicted upon human beings. A great deal of the suffering he documented stemmed not just from an unjust and exploitative economic system but from a mentality which he summed up in a single sentence: "I was getting acquainted with 'real life' -- meaning unpleasantness." Not only the British school system of his day but the whole of society was designed to inculcate children of the lower and middle classes with the idea that adulthood was a series of unpleasant tasks and grim responsibilities, and that one of the worst crimes a person could commit was to have unrealistic expectations about the possibilities of life. The reasoning behind this was obvious:
curb expectation and you curb ambition and prevent, or at least retard, social change.

In America, thanks to Puritanism and an even more aggressive strain of capitalist thought, these ideas were bred into our people in an more exaggerated way, with the caveat that "through hard work you can get rich." In other words, we doubled down on the idea that life was "unpleasantness" and real virtue lay in "working hard" while dangling a gold-plated carrot which for the vast majoriity remained permanently out of reach.

My father certainly believed in the Puritan work ethic, and I'm sure my laziness exasperated him to the point of dementia; but my laziness was not entirely laziness for its own sake. Even as a child I understood that to some extent the modern outlook on life was a swindle, designed to turn the great masses of the people into faceless, hopeless worker ants toiling ceaselessly for the benefit of others. I was observant enough to see how tired, how unhappy and anxiety-ridden, most adults were, and how much time they spent bickering over money and complaining about the petty politics of their respective jobs. To me they seemed joyless and miserable figures, almost cartoonish in the way they seemed to work frantically without reaping any benefits. But I was a member of Generation X, and while it's perhaps as foolish to ascribe millions of people with specific characteristics because of the timeframe into which they were born as it is to believe an astrological sign has the faintest effect on one's personality, it can be said with some assurance that every generation does share certain generalized traits born out of shared experience: and the outstanding quality of Generation X was our bizarre combination of being able to clearly see, and to ridicule, every fault-line, crack, absurdity and injustice in modern life, without necessarily being willing to change any of them. In a broad sense, Generation X was comprised of tens of millions of anarchs -- not anarchists, but anarchs (the Anarch is a metaphysical ideal figure of a sovereign individual, conceived by the German writer Ernst Jünger in his novel Eumeswil.). That is to say, we were "sovereign individuals," who were "in" society without being "of" it, and who did not really share its values or respect its beliefs. We understood, we even accepted and resigned ourselves, but only to the degree necessary to exist. We were, in retrospect, a necessary intervening stage between the generation of our parents and the generations which followed us -- the Millennials and Gen Z. In order for them to abruptly quit their shitty jobs by the millions, we had to lay the groundwork of recognizing the absurdity of suffering in a shitty job for decades in the vague belief that "you can enjoy life when you retire."

In walking away from my original career without a safety net or even a plan, simply because I was unhappy, I was perhaps a few years ahead of my time, and like most people in that position, I faced a good deal of ridicule and some well-meaning dismay. I will never forget a woman I worked for in Maryland saying, in a plaintive voice after I put in my notice, "But we get cost of living increases, and you can retire in eighteen years!" It was simply no use pointing out that I was not about to burn eighteen years of my life in a job I detested for periodic 7% raises. She had accepted a certain way of looking at the world which I had explicity rejected, and in any event, she did not hate her job. More power to you, I thought, but your path is not mine. The "sovereign individual" must find their own, and this is at the core of so much of the anger directed at The Quitters today. When I was a child, few insults carried more impact that being called a quitter: it implied not only weakness but a lack of character. Virtue, on the other hand, rested in seeing a thing through to the end, even if the end brought no benefit to anyone. I imagine if the people who had kept us in Vietnam and later, Afghanistan, year after bloody futile year, were polled, a great many of them would have put "perseverence" and "sticktoitiveness" at the top of the scale of virtues. And of course, there are times when one must see a thing through despite all hazards: but the times for such fanaticism are relatively rare. To mindlessly apply that metric to everything in life, including soul-murdering jobs, is simply stupid.

All of this brings me back to Clockwatchers, and the curiously imitative nature of my own life in respect to the film. In the movie, the shy, retiring main character, Iris, ultimately decides that in order to connect with life, she must quit her temp job, but at the end of the film it is also implied that she has become a much more aggressive and ambitious person, ready to succeed in the job market by exploiting what she has learned about office culture. Some critics drew from this that the film misses some of its own point, but I would argue that in one sense anyway, the ending is the entire point: Iris is miserable for much of the movie precisely because she contents herself with a mindless and intolerable dead-end job. She grasps, quite against her will, that modern life is all about learning how the system really works and then operating ruthlessly upon that knowledge for your own advantage. It is a very much Generation X moral; had the movie been set today, she would have "rescued" the other temps and started her own business which was the antilogy of Global Credit: a fun, happy place to work that filled its employees with a sense of fulfillment. The point I'm trying to make is that in order for a film like that to even exist, however, Iris had to exist first, just as the passive but knowing attitude of Gen X had to precede the active, knowing attitude of the two generations which have followed it into the workforce. Everything in life that is not mutation is progression, and every progression comes by degrees, sometimes too small to discern as they occur. When I decided to leave Hollywood and "go back to my desk," I had a whole host of motivations, but foremost among them was the need to occupy a more selfless space in the universe. For sixteen years I had followed only my own desires: first, the desire to have an easy and comfortable life, and later, the desire to satisfy my creative side, and my vanity, by working in the entertainment industry. For a long time I found this deeply satisfying, but the last three years rang increasingly hollow, and the idea of a return to public service, despite all of its frustrations and silliness, increasingly appealing. My main concern was that I would feel as if I had betrayed myself by returning, that I would be selling out the epiphany of 2002 for good benefits, a short commute and a lower cost of living. So far this has not been the case. I realize that what I am doing is temporary, serving a temporary need, and that I am not destined to run out my own personal clock "behind the desk": so the existential horror I felt in that position as a young man does not obtain as a middle-aged one. I also realize that it is necessary to re-evaluate the course of one's life every few years, and to quit, if necessary, any situation which has outlived its usefulness, no matter how glamorous it might seem to others.

There is a great deal to be anxious about nowadays. The great event of my lifetime, the end of the Cold War, has actually proven to be a terribly destabilizing influence on the world, one whose effects are only just now being realized. The climate catastrophe seems to worsen every season with no end in sight. America is openly flirting with fascism, and the pandemic has been a psychological disaster as well as a plague. Yet in the end, I think the Great Resignation is proof that no matter how bleak a situation may be, there are always movements toward the light. Millions of people have realized by force of circumstance that much of their anxiety and suffering were unecessary, and are demanding more and more of a say in how they live their own lives. They are not anarchs. They are activisits for their own good, and whatever discomfort this may cause the job market and businesses generally, if it helps drive a few more nails in the coffin of the great cult of mindless suffering into which I was born, I say full speed ahead.