I Quit My Job

Feb. 20, 2011

By Sam Dean info

Sam is from the Boston suburbs, which explains why he's such a big fan of biotechnology and weapons ...

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I know it seems unfathomably ungrateful, hubris again, to complain about being paid to do nothing, but 7 hours/day is a long time to do it. Friends with jobs in which work must be done make for bad gchatters. Books are too flagrantly un-work-like to just read at your desk, and there are enough scattered questions from the bosses surrounding you to make concentrated youtube-watching impossible. And at a certain, awful point, you reach the end of blogs, having read all posts. And past that point, there’s nothing, except yourself.

The experience of being forced to do nothing, being paid to do nothing, actually living nothingness as a daily activity with no conceivable purpose, puts a gut-level sense of your own nothingness within you. This becomes an obsession, how to fix this nothingness, but one about which nothing can be learned, and nothing can be changed. The result is a kind of awful office Zen. Rather than becoming one with a sword, or being both the arrow and the target, you are one with rolly chair, both the keyboard and the comment box; things that were never thoughtful in the first place have become the entirety of your being. Enlightenment is not an option.

This nothingness can be ridden like a wave throughout the afternoon (lunch being a reprieve, as you leave the office and read a book and taste General Gao’s chicken, rebuild the illusion of reality for an hour). In its more peaceful moments, you can try simply replacing the scene in front of you (a monitor, a low cubicle wall) with one from your head. I imagined building an igloo with a friend from grade school in a snowstorm, just piling up the blocks. I once managed, I think, to sleep with my eyes open, hand on the mouse, for about 45 seconds.

As this went on, the rot spread, and began to inflect my life beyond work. Standard suicidal inklings on the daily commute were no fun, but paled in comparison to the grasping social desperation that set in. Friends who have whole days filled with thoughts of things besides themselves, filled with work and tasks and spreadsheets, don’t need to fill the nighttime hours with other people to remind them that they aren’t nothingness. And the productivity they lived let them, in turn, function in the world of productive people.

In this city (unlike in college, where fecklessness was practically a virtue), as a non-rich-or-famous person, doing nothing robs you of the right to exist socially. The wasteland of my workday soon overwhelmed the night, flooded into every corner of my life. Of all the various vicious cycles I’ve jumped into, this one was pretty much the worst. I could sometimes forget about it and simmer down after dinner, alone or no, as I drank or read a book, but it came back in all its teeth-grinding melodrama at quitting time every single day, without fail.

I often thought of the Ren and Stimpy episode where they fly into a black hole, climb a mountain made of smelly socks, and at the end, just implode.

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  • http://twitter.com/azigra Azi

    Sam and Dean Winchester?

  • http://www.crazysexyfuntraveler.com Crazy sexy fun traveler

    Hahaha I know exactly how u feel! Im now gonna quit my 'great' job of a stewardess and going to Mexico to travel :)

  • http://somuchtocome.blogspot.com Aja

    People shouldn't work for free. I don't know where this 'free work” stuff/unpaid internship business started but it's pretty awful and it's allowing businesses to take total and utter advantage. I work in television full time freelance and it's really not so awesome out here. There's not a lot of opportunities and the most exciting jobs tend to be poorly paid to the point where no one could live off the check without help from the parents (which I do not receive). I would love to have a full time job, even if it bored me to tears.

  • ZANEEATSWORLD

    This was an awesome article.

    props.

  • Guest

    i am kind of tired hearing new grads whine about the recession. the problem is you didn't have a plan or a goal of your own, so you took the first job that came along and were shocked and inert when it didn't suit you. wtf did you go to school for? what did you WANT to do/be?

    and you're right, in a recession it does sound lame to whine about getting paid to do nothing. you could have used it as a platform to somewhere else. when you got done reading all the blogs you could have written one. you obviously like to write and seem decent at it; you could have written and developed an entire series of goal-oriented projects while you were waiting for some dude to come out of some doors.

    i feel like most 20-somethings 'in your predicament' are exactly like this. you didn't like your situation so you sat there doing nothing. you didn't have any better ideas. you waited to be told what to do. and now you're going to an 'unpaid internship', which is not a job — no one who believes in the strength of their goals would work for free. and what will you do when the unpaid internship is over and they don't want to keep you on? you now have a resume that has like a handful of months of this irrelevant TV job that you hated and an unpaid internship.

    the much-touted 'problem with 20somethings' isn't the recession or even that they were endowed with an inappropriately large sense of entitlement (although those are parts of the problem, true). the problem is that you have no ideas. you are consumers and not producers; you wait to be told what to do and when you don't like or can't fulfill the instructions you waggle your fingers helplessly and call your parents for money.

    • Yup

      I agree. There are so many of us out there losing homes, having to make rough decisions because we're competing with at least 1000 equally-qualified people for each job we can find listed (which are more difficult to find with all the asshole spammers out there), and it gets harder and harder to get an interview.

      I've had a soul-sucking, nothing-to-do job, too. And I understand how shitty that can be. Real life, though? Requires that you fucking stay there until you find another means of income.

      Unless you get laid off. Then you spend two years trying to find another job that pays even half of what you were making before, and facing awful decisions.

      • supporter

        To Guest: Why did you keep reading if you knew you were only going to have something mean to say in the end? Was it just for the satisfaction of feeling better than someone? Bug off. The fact that you felt the need to insult someone after sharing a personal story and being able to provide a glimpse of happiness and inspiration in the end only speaks to your lack of either.
        To Yup: If you're losing your home and trying to find another job, go spend your time doing that. Sitting around swearing at someone who figured out a way to live his life better than you doesn't make your life more righteous, important or commendable.

      • pfft

        oh get over it. i agree with 'guest'.

    • http://somuchtocome.blogspot.com Aja

      Guest, I see where you're going in a lot of ways but I also think you're being a bit harsh. Finding any work in television is tough right now (no matter how skilled you may be). Having a job which makes you unhappy isn't good for anyone (the employee or the employers). And if you find work, you could end up in a place where there's no room to move up. It can be incredibly frustrating. I thought being a freelancer meant the best of both worlds, but it has it's ups and downs. The downside includes weeks without a single paycheck, picking up lots of part time work unrelated to my industry, plenty of uncertainty and doubt and paying health insurance out of pocket (which is ridiculously expensive). The upside is hordes of free time to work on hobbies and personal development. Right now I would love to have a full time job but the reality is, they're simply not available.

    • http://twitter.com/dementia_inc dementia inc.

      I don't think that we, the ''20 somethings'' care about your opinion.

  • PERFECTCIRCLES

    I'm the boss. I was mad but now I understand. You have to do what makes you happy and you are replaceable.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Bee-Goode/100001676566533 Bee Goode

    “the end of blogs” … nice… i know the feeling

  • http://tumblrhome.tumblr.com izzybennet

    Relatable portrait of the Twenty-something-year-old. Breezily written and funny, thank god. The documentation on this topic always strikes me as so humorless and unapologetic. A little levity feels sort of liberating.

  • wit

    Great post that I can fully relate to, with a 'great job' where I actually work from home… there is something to say about our culture when money is no longer the biggest motivator for our generation.

  • Guest

    failure of imagination?

  • http://twitter.com/dementia_inc dementia inc.

    And what do you do Sam Dean when you are living in a country badly struck (and still struggling) from the financial crisis,but you have a well-paid job for your age,which is kinda boring/unfulfilling,and you want to immigrate but noone is going to back you up?

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