[This is the last issue of Season 2, after which I’ll take a small break. I know these don’t come out with any regularity, and you wouldn’t have noticed anyway. This is mostly just for me to say, ok, we’re done with this part now. I’ll send a short one before the start of Season 3, which will commence exactly on June 13, 2025. I’ll explain more about why that date and what comes next then, although some of you will have guessed as to the former.
As always, thanks for reading. I’m glad I get to write for other people, because, and please don’t take this as an insult, I’m mostly writing for myself as a way to work things out. Having an audience means I actually get motivated to do it. So, once again, thank you.]
My very first paying job not funded by my parents was delivering papers. Once a week I’d load a big, over-the-shoulder bag from a central lockbox and walk about 20 blocks handing them out. The paper was free, supported entirely by advertising revenue, and almost no one wanted to get it except people with pet birds or a fireplace.
The job wasn’t hard, but knowing I was delivering an unwanted, physical item genuinely sucked. It felt indefensible. Sometimes people would be outside their house and wave me off, or verbally confirm how much they didn’t want this community paper I was carrying.
Once a man accused me of working for the government and wasting his tax dollars. He’d gotten it into his head that a publication covering high school sports and really big pumpkins was a provincial or federal undertaking.
I’d like to think I learned something pushing through snow drifts and almost dying on black ice to deliver this cursed object to resistant homes, but all I really gained was an unintended vision of every job I’d have once the internet took over.
I have never liked jobs.
It’s been a long time since anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, but back when they did I had an answer locked and loaded: scientist. What did I know about being a scientist?1 Absolutely nothing. Movies taught me they worked in secret labs that you accessed with security cards, and you spent a lot of time looking serious and saying “you have to see this” or “something changed” or “we were wrong”.
For a long time (some might say too long), any job I had was at the insistence of another person, usually my parents. This is probably the time to mention I lived at home until I was 28. I’ve never asked them but I’m sure there was a significant worry on their part over what was going to become of me, generally, and whether I would, in fact, ever leave the house, specifically.
I am not, and have never been, independently wealthy. I need paid employment. But its entire structure is so antithetical to the way I think and feel about life it’s a genuine miracle I can hold down a job. My imposter syndrome is based on the demonstrable fact I am, undeniably, an imposter, a cosplayer in full “functional employee” regalia.
I used to think I was lazy. Thanks Protestantism! Then I thought I just hadn’t found my passion. Thanks TED Talks! Some days I still do, when I worry about the next job I’ll need to find, because there’s always a next job, where only an absolute cretin would deign to hire me. Me, a person who clearly doesn’t like jobs.
The amount of energy I put into navigating being employed is truly deranged. It would be easier just to, you know, do a job normally.
Except I hate jobs.
I hate jobs but, thankfully, blessedly, praise be to Mammon, I really like people. And that’s how I fudge it. Talk to me about delivering impact for an OKR and my soul inverts. But if I can figure out how doing my job helps someone else, a tall, Burj Khalifa ask in tech, I’ll run through walls.
Ok, not walls. But I’ll at least fill in the right paperwork. I’ll do what needs doing, just to make whatever they’re doing better or easier.
You’d be forgiven for thinking we’re on the brink of worldwide economic collapse. At the very least we’re all on Linkedin a lot more, surely a forebearer of the apocalypse.2 I can’t remember the last time someone said “dream job” to me and it wasn’t laced with bitter, crushing irony, the way you might say “morning routine” or “sleep schedule”.
About 80% of my circle is either changing jobs, talking about changing jobs, looking for a job different from the one they had, looking for a job and hoping it will be different, or just abandoning the whole enterprise and building an off-grid house in a field. (Just the one person but still.)
Me? Every day I come up with a new motivation. I wish this was an exaggeration. I wish that because it’s not very efficient to begin each new day looking for a reaso to do the thing you’re being paid to do. If I wasn’t almost 50 I’d think I was maybe one of those snowflakes people yammer on about, some layabout waster spoiled rotten on privilege and afraid of hard work.
But then, why am I working so hard at it?
It seems we’ve hit peak “job”. Where the abstraction layer between what you do and why you do it is so vast and opaque cog in the machine is no longer an apt metaphor. We’re cogs in a machine being viewed from the moon through a layer of Jello.
As I was in the process of writing this very thing you are reading now, the wonderfully erudite Rosie Spinks released her own newsletter encapsulating the feeling at the center of this one. I haven’t read it yet but I trust in my bones it is brilliant.
I’ve been writing through the framing device of “forgetting what things mean so you can enjoy what they are”. I don’t think this makes sense for jobs, so we’re going to have to focus on work. Work here not meaning the things we do for money, but the things we do so we can live with other people. The things we do to make sure people have the stuff they need, which yes means food and shelter but also roads and libraries and health care. [Aragorn voice] Change is coming whether we wish it or not, and, it seems to me, a big part of that change will require some level of self-organization.
I don’t think systems will collapse so much as they will slump really, really badly, like a Christmas tree 4 months after Santa’s visit, and we’ll look around at each other and wonder now what. I think the what will be us helping each other out in ways we hadn’t previously considered, to an extent we would have hitherto believed impossible. This probably sounds wildly pessimistic but I think this is the best case scenario for the future. That it will take the near or actual collapse of governance is not ideal, but that’s not really how we work, is it?
We don’t tend to take action at the ideal times to take it. But we also do tend to rise to occasions, and I think we’ll do so again.
I’m guessing you’ve seen the phrase, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” This quote, attributed to Margaret Mead, was first published in a book by Donald Keys, and doesn’t appear in any of Mead’s written output. It’s possible she said it to Keys, or that someone reported the saying to him, or that Keys himself wrote it based on her writings as a tidy summary. If the latter it has certainly worked, as it’s been repeated more vigorously than anything Mead actually wrote.
Does it matter? I think as a general principle we shouldn’t be in the business of misattributing quotes, with the OG “Hitler quotes on pictures of Taylor Swift” serving as Exhibit A.
However… doesn’t this sentiment stand on its own, without the Margaret Mead attribution? Does the fact it would fit easily into, say, a Charles Manson chapbook, negate its essential usefulness? Should we be quoting Charles Manson for motivation?
Probably not. But wouldn’t it be a fantastic irony, the highest form of poetic justice, for a Charles Manson quote to become a rallying cry for civic duty and community action? Wouldn’t that be the craziest turn of events?
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” - Charles Manson
At the very least it would get the edgelords on board.
In as much as “scientist” is a specific profession, it’s one of the few that actually lives up to its movie rep. All the scientists I know investigate cool shit, do important work, and, yes, need a key card to get into work. Except unlike in the movies where scientists are believed immediately and without question (“Dinosaurs? Shit!”, “Asteroid? Shit!”, “Aliens? Shit!”), real-world scientists mostly seem to be shouting into an indifferent void.
That literally no one has stepped up to challenge its tedious supremacy proves the open market doesn’t work.
Good luck with the journey! I can't wait to follow season 3 and hope our paths cross soon.