Gave Up

Once again, I am unemployed. I cannot say too much more about the circumstances of my unemployment because I signed paperwork, but suffice to say that it was not my decision.

That's it. I am done. I do not intend to pursue full time work again. To a first approximation, I doubt I will ever work for money again. This employment experience has taught me that I cannot hold down a job. All the criticisms I documented in 2016 apply. Most of the fears I documented when accepting this job proved prescient. I took a gamble and I lost.

I have some money saved up. When that is gone there will be no more coming in. I will not be applying for Ontario Works or Ontario Disability.

When I applied to this job I did not disclose my poor mental health status. That was the right thing to do in the sense that I had a chance of getting a job. Admitting to mental health issues (actual mental health issues, not just "I'm a perfectionist and thus give 110% at work!!!1!") is a sure way to be rejected by any and every employer. But I am broken -- probably too broken to hold down a job -- and it is unfair to any potential employer to withold that information. But if I admit this information I am immediately ruled out of contention for employment. So there will be no more employment.

I cannot work full time. Nobody will want to hire me part time. So there will be no more employment. (This is not strictly true. I know people who do IT support for small businesses, all of whom pay part time. But I do not see self-employment working out for me any better than it worked out for my father, for similar reasons.)

I despise the job search process. It makes my stomach churn. It took me 15 months to find a job last time. I was not diligently searching for work that entire 15 months. Mostly, I felt nauseated by the job search process. Then the job I landed didn't last 15 months. So I am done.

Disabled

Am I disabled? I have been thinking about this question a fair bit. My tentative answer is that I am not capable of holding down a job, but that all these deficiencies are self-inflicted. I am not on meds. I am not in therapy. I am not willing to deal with my sleep schedule, or my anger, or my laziness, or how slowly I work. I am not willing to compromise by learning to drive, by accepting the tradeoffs involved in capitalism. Other people in my situation put in the work to fix themselves. I am not willing to do this. So I don't get to call myself disabled, because I don't have to be disabled. I am choosing to be disabled.

Will I get better? I doubt it. I am not willing to put in the work.

Graybeard

I have fallen into a trap I have seen several times in others: I have become inflexible about technology. Sysadmins start out working with particular technologies and then become resistant to change, insisting that everybody work with text files or rejecting Javascript or whatever. But the field of systems administration is constantly changing, and there is no room for grouchy old sysadmins there. I always knew I was a bad fit for IT, but I got by for a while via problem-solving skills. Now those skills have faded and my lack of technological enthusiasm has shot me in the foot.

Eventually people like me retire and pursue their retro hobbies, or they fall into destitution and work in minimum wage service jobs. Given that I will not have money to retire, I guess it is pretty clear what my path will be.

The other career trajectory for graybeards is management. People think I should go into management because I am a loudmouth with strong opinions. But I am terrible at management, and have no interest in it whatsoever.

Career Futility

Nothing I have done in my career has amounted to much.

My last employer is in the process of replacing me, and I have no doubt they will be better off with the replacement than they were with me.

Most other employers have done better without me than with me.

On the one hand, I wanted to "make a difference". But making a difference involves taking responsibility for one's actions, and I want to avoid that responsibility.

Ethics

As far as I can tell there is no ethical way to make a living. Maybe I should be more precise. There appears to be no ethically pure way to make a living. Every job involves tradeoffs. Even the Cult came with ethical tradeoffs -- it was a nonprofit, but its funding came from somewhere, and some of those somewheres were unsavory. (Let's not forget that nonprofits have to spend a lot of their energy begging for money. That is unsavory in itself.) In addition it involved propping up some unjust systems (such as the job search process, and soup kitchens. Don't ask why these need to exist, because you won't like the answers). I was shielded from much of that, but that did not make my job ethical.

Teaching at the university was a deeply unethical machine. I was teaching a course most students did not want to take, and we rewarded psychopaths (many of whom are now making good money in Silicon Valley) without teaching them the least smidgen of ethics.

Working under capitalism ought to be the most honest way to make a living, but in many ways it suited me the least.

Work tasks could sometimes be engaging, and I tried to take those tasks seriously. But I was wary of taking a step back and considering my tasks in the bigger picture.

I wish I could reconcile how to live in the world. Clearly I don't have that many ethical problems with participating in the capitalist economy as a consumer. So why do I drag my feet so much as a producer?

Sustainable Work

I do not understand what it means to hold down a job. I don't think I understand what it means for one to have work-life balance (the all or nothing issue hangs over my head always).

There is a lot of cultural humor about how terrible Mondays are and how much of a slog working is. I have never felt the pain behind that humor so strongly as during my latest job. It did not help that too many of the people I have been associating with were retired, and they all expressed joy at not having to work any more.

When I was teaching I counted down the weeks until the semester was over. When I was working full time there was no countdown. I thought I was serving a life sentence (but of course I wasn't, because I can't hold down a job). I cannot even conceive of what it feels like to look forward to going to work each day. Work has never felt like something to look forward to. It has always felt like something to endure.

What Next?

I don't know.

Maybe some volunteer project will catch my eye. I doubt that this will happen and I doubt I can make a positive contribution to anything. Certainly my current volunteering has proven to be futile. Whenever I try to contribute I do more harm than good. So I am probably done with trying to contribute.

Maybe some other job will catch my eye and I will make another gamble. More likely I will get scared when the money is almost gone and then I will desperately look for work. But by that time my skills will be even more out of date.

I very much doubt I will recredential for a different job. All jobs seem gross to me. I cannot envision a single thing I would want to do every day for 40 hours a week, every week. I guess I am just too lazy to work.

Possibly I will blog more, but I doubt this. Blogging is just another futile, self-indulgent activity. It is painfully apparent that anything I say has been said better by others.

Most likely I will live up to the family curse and do mostly nothing until the clock runs out.

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