Today’s accompanying tune: “the lakes” by Taylor Swift
The sunlight poured into the kitchen from my front window, lighting up the coffee machine and the microwave in a warm orange glow that can only come with the sun’s arrival, the start of a new day. I bought this house for the windows, the small panes of glass the only barrier between myself and the desert, for all its good and bad. I had spent plenty of time in small, nearly windowless apartments and smaller, darker office buildings. If I was to make the desert my home, I wanted to be consumed by it. I wanted the birds to drown out the appliance noise and the sun to paint the walls at every hour of the day. If I had to be stuck inside most days, the least I could do was make the inside as close to the outside as possible.
There I was, last May, constrained to the only unnatural glow in the house — the blue-tinged glow of my computer screen, perched on the end of the kitchen island, my interactions with coworkers relegated to words in a messaging app or small video squares on the screen. More than once, my coworkers would remark on how beautiful my background was. Did I feel so lucky, they asked, to live in such a beautiful place? I never had the heart to tell them I spent more time inside, in front of my screen, than away from it.
I worked for a national media company based on the East Coast, so more often than not my computer was my only light source when I logged on in the early hours of the California morning. And there I stayed, through the slanted sun of late morning, into the high sun of the afternoon, before finally stretching my legs when my coworkers logged off for the day just as the sun tipped towards the west. If I was lucky, I would stand in the yard, letting the sun warm my hands that had cramped up on the keyboard throughout the day. I could watch the birds complete their afternoon aerial acrobatics routine while the dogs sunbathed. We relished our brief recess, the only time we stepped outside and into the world.
As much as I loved what I was working on, and how hard I had worked just to land the job in the first place, I felt out of place. Not only among my coworkers, many of whom had a very different idea of work-life balance than I did, but among the world, something kicked off-center so strongly as to pull everything else down with it. I would watch the sun rise, peak, and then begin its decline all while stationed in front of my computer, its glow never fading, never changing. I was living off the rhythms of the day in such a way that felt thoroughly destabilizing, but also entirely natural in the world of always-on technology. The thing they don’t tell you about technology and all its wonders is that it works ceaselessly, never resting, never exhaling. There is no rest for a computer, or a smart device, or the wifi router. And in a way, we’ve molded ourselves in technology’s image — we expect these devices to work day in and day out so that we may work day in and day out. The smart camera watches while we are out of town or sleeping, keeping a watchful eye so we can get some rest. The computer powers up at all hours of the day, if it powers down at all (Seriously, when was the last time you actually shut off your phone or computer? Not just for a hard reset, but so that it would be off entirely?). An internet outage is stressful instead of restorative. The exhale an inconvenience to our 24/7, always-on lives.
Even the most expensive computer will slow over time, its lifespan directly intertwined with its daily use. And like technology, we humans wear out over time, first slowing down before refusing to turn on at all. By May of last year, my run was up. I had convinced myself I could last one more month for over half a year — I’d made it longer than I ever expected but was more bruised by it than I had ever been. I tried to negotiate a sabbatical because I was nervous about what leaving a job, this job in particular, without a backup plan would mean for my future. Could I get a job, any job, again? Is another job really what I wanted?
I entered the workforce at 15 years old with what I thought was a pretty sweet gig — I wrapped gifts for a toy store from October through January for $7 an hour. The hours were relatively short, I was exempt from most customer-facing responsibilities, and I got to hone my gift-wrapping abilities. All in all, it was a good experience, save for my learning I was let go when my name was mysteriously absent the next week’s schedule and without word from the manager as to when I could come back.
I treated work like I treated school — that is, way too seriously with an eye on being the best gift wrapper, waitress, employee the world had ever seen. It didn’t matter what dead-end job I landed at over the next decade — I gave it my all for as long as I could, regard for my sleep and general well-being shrinking with each day. I needed to pay for college, among other things, and didn’t feel like I had much luxury to coast when the stakes of every paycheck felt monumental. But even after I got to college, I worked, balancing shifts at fast casual restaurants with extended course loads so I could graduate early and save a few thousand dollars on tuition. I worked overtime in the summers, filling the days with internships and wrapping up with closing shifts that often ended after 1 a.m. There were no vacations, no days off, no breaks. No exhale.
Part of that was undoubtedly due to my own financial precarity. Even in my most overworked, I didn’t have the option to step away. I couldn’t just work the internship most summers because they weren’t paid, and I needed to make rent. I squirreled away food from my restaurant for lunches and dinners. At one point, I made a deep dish pizza ($19.86) last an entire week. The only way out of this cycle, I told myself, was to get an office job, something stable with a reliable schedule that paid above minimum wage. I didn’t dare dream of paid time off — getting paid to take a vacation seemed like a completely ridiculous idea that was surely not meant for me. If I could just make it to the next job, through the next year, maybe I could ease the urgent discomfort of living so close to the edge of financial calamity.
When you run, you’re instructed to not look at your feet directly below you, but instead pick a spot on the horizon and focus on that, as long as your path allows. Looking down can not only slow your stride because of bad form, but it also creates a negative feedback loop in your mind about how hard you are working and how nice it would feel to just stop. In essence, that’s what I was doing in my relationship to work. I kept my focus trained on the horizon — the next job, the next career, the next paycheck — to justify the effort I was putting into just getting there. Even after I graduated college, I landed a series of grunt-work jobs that asked way too much of me for way too little money, tied together with the promise of bigger things to come. I hadn’t worked in many white collar jobs at that point, and my family had their own extremely limited experiences with office work, so I figured this was how it was done. Just like I had worked up from cashier to waitress, I had to work up from lowly intern to account executive, or some version of that. Then, I could land a bigger, fancier job. The next target on the horizon, where surely I would start to feel more comfortable, more at ease in the working world and its benefits.
I started speaking corporate language. I was climbing the ladder, paying my dues, leaning in. I was making more money than my parents ever had in their 40-year careers. My student loan payments were shrinking. I had paid time off. By all accounts, I had achieved exactly what I set out to do. All of my hard work was paying off, but the reward was only harder work. The ladder always had another rung, one that promised security and fulfillment. I would feel better, I thought, once I got there.
Time and time again, I only disproved my own line of thinking. Each job I took lost its appeal almost instantly. The pay increases were nice and I thoroughly enjoyed learning about new industries, technology, and topics. But more and more, I only looked forward to the week or two I allowed myself to take off between jobs more than the job itself. I would quit once I had a new job lined up and luxuriate in the openness of time that comes when responsibilities aren’t waiting in the wings for your eventual return. There would be no inbox to maintain, no projects to check on, no coworkers that retaliated for my time off by disappearing for the next two weeks. Nothing was expected of me, so I let my own expectations go. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, relishing the emptiness of my lungs and clarity in my mind. It might go without saying — but for the purposes of getting to know each other a bit more I’ll reiterate — I spent a majority of these weeks outside, driving to local parks for weekday hikes or taking bigger excursions out to places I had been meaning to go but could never manage the time off to do so. I wandered among the Bay Area’s rolling hills, sometimes green but most often brown, with friends that didn’t have a 9-5 schedule. I camped in Death Valley on a solo trip, taking in the otherworldly formations and reveling in the all-encompassing constellations that seemed to swallow me whole.
I hadn’t realized that what I was seeking was a world in which work comes second, at best. My own happiness, my fulfillment, could come from somewhere else, something bigger than any key performance indicator or readership number. That staying on the ladder, holding my breath, was a great way to lose myself. That my anxiety was merely a symptom of a larger disconnect, my body and mind knowing we weren’t where we were supposed to be. Chasing a new goal is exhilarating but it’s also exhausting, and I was running out of career goals that were big enough to motivate me. The sun, the mountains, the desert. Those motivated me. The sun, peering around the mountains to the east, warming the day in all its might, motivated me. How could a job — one I loved and worked hard to get in the first place — even come close?
Anecdotally, it seems like a lot of folks my age are hitting a similar breaking point. I have friends that have quit successful corporate careers to apprentice as bakers, explore creative careers like voice acting, or start newsletters as an income-generating side project. We’re all a bit disillusioned, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence many of us are turning to nature and creative outlets to reacquaint ourselves with ourselves. After all, there’s nothing more human than sitting in the sun and listening to the birds and taking away from that inspiration to create something beautiful. If our work lives are wholly self-centric — we are on that ladder alone — our personal lives are exactly the opposite, full of wonder and smallness in light of the vast world around us. Reconciling those two cultures is nearly impossible while still on the ladder, so sometimes it helps to jump off.
Relearning to walk at ground level is a long process, I’ve found. Many months on, and I’m only starting to adjust to life without corporate work at the center. In its place has been a different kind of work — work on myself, work for others, and work on this new project. I can feel this new chapter unfolding even as I struggle to find its ending, or even its direction. I know that, with time and trust, it can turn into something magical.
Here’s to many more breaths together, and, as always, more time outside.
- Megan
Good for you for "leaning "back." There's a lot of talk today about how GenZ doesn't want to work as hard as older generations, but I truly think it's more a matter of age rather than generation. It's been my experience as a younger Boomer to see my own co-hort "step back" until their mid-40s or so, then members of GenX work themselves silly until they are the same age. Now it's Millennials (the oldest of which are hitting their mid-40s) doing the same.
If GenZ can figure out a better way to balance work/money and having a life, I hope -- so HOPE -- they can. Our culture has been too much of "I need to make a lot to be able to buy, this, that and the other" thing we truly don't need for FAR too long. (I know that wasn't why you worked so hard, but I think too many of us do for that reason.)
I hope your freelance work goes really well. I've been doing corporate/content writing for about 15 years now as a freelancer, so if there's anything I could help you with, ask away! (But I've a feeling you're doing just fine. ;-)
I assume you have enough money to "lose your busy self". I'd like to see a follow-up piece on losing yourself when one doesn't have ample money. Mary Sojourner