I thought for a living. Social scientists might review my path from a zealous idealist
to a corporate executive as a natural progression in our modern workforce. The
case study may be named, “the rise and fall of a knowledge worker.” But the progression was anything but natural, and I’m not a single case study.
Knowledge workers generate value through knowledge, they drive business forward. The challenge was that I was renting out my mental capacity, my brain power, to the company. I was thinking for a living.
It wasn’t always that way. In the wild west telco of the 90s, our start up had both physical and mental tasks. I worked for a passionate entrepreneur seeking to remove the barriers of global communication. We had a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG, for those in the know) and we believed.
I would literally roll up my sleeves and do anything for our fledging company, including the dishes in our ‘communist kitchen’ where all were required to help and at least, do our own.
Manual work, fruitful soul-satisfying labor changed as we were doing it. Picture the movie sequence: you see the tools in our hands morph in a time-lapse to keyboards and us, oblivious or obliging, not missing a beat.
When our largest customer invited us to communicate via “AT&T Mail” (instead of phone, fax or DHL), I managed the digital mail account. I had Eudora software, named for Eudora Welty’s short story “Why I live at the PO,” as if this fact was proof that the internet was good and smart.
We were passionately pursuing ‘the death of distance’ that economists predicted, a revolution in communications! Clearly you see it, my heart led me into this mess.
By 1996, I had to repeatedly call the local bank branch to find out and confirm if our $2 million seed money had arrived. Think about that – “Hi, me again, did the $2 mil arrive yet?”
By ’98, my first child was born, as was Google. By 2000, my second child was born into a new century that could have been killed by ‘Y2K’ but wasn’t, and the internet’s march into our world was secured.
It was slow but we were moving so fast, so busy, so damn productive, that we didn’t even see it. Like the Weeping Angels in one of my favorite Dr Who episodes, when you look, they are frozen. When you blink, they move ridiculously fast until they are up in your face. So too it happened, to us blinking fools.
The sustained pace was bound to catch up to us, and when the world shut down, the Great Pause, we had a non-blinking moment to see, eyes wide open, the mess we, with the internet, had created.
All of us workers changed behaviors. We migrated freely from essential job to anything else, or resigned without even having a job lined up. Overseas, we were lying flat on our backs, a protest of the overwork culture called 996: 9am to 9pm for 6 days a week. Here in the US, we watched the ‘lie down’ and thought we were so different, “thank god we’re not that bad!” Blink.
Some, ever-so-radically, declared they would do ‘what the job requires and no more’. Once-upon-a-time, this was what a job was – payment for set tasks, before ‘always on’ blurred boundaries and seeped into our minds. For the record, anyone calling it ‘quiet quitting’ fears their loss, not yours.
I was caught in it, addicted to the perfect presentation, the dopamine rush of
a team win, the steady pay and perks that helped me pretend to balance my life. And then my liberation was handed to me, and more importantly, with it, my mind.
We all have squatter’s rights. I don’t need to tell you that your mind is your own. However, it’s strange to be here, in my head, not worrying about the next meeting, not holding onto foreign acronyms or convoluted processes, or long-range plans that are not my own. This place, my mind, is a mess. There’s definitely restoration needed, but it’s mine to restore, all mine. And the price to rent it has forever changed.
