I have stopped writing here and am publishing over at Fountain Pen. You can subscribe there to follow along:
I’ve read that losing a job is one of the most harrowing events that a human can experience (even for those who are not poor). Thus, I was expecting it to be your-wife-is-sleeping-with-the-plumber-traumatic when I was laid off last month. But it wasn’t—it was exciting.
The desire for change had been stirring within me since 2018 when I started working in big tech where companies function as quasi-retirement homes with furtive cultural cornerstones: do as little as you can and don’t ruffle any feathers so everyone else can do the same. The city of San Jose was equally uninspiring and going into San Francisco every weekend was even worse: I thought I’d find the future there, but I mostly found broken glass:
By the late 2010s, however, Silicon Valley’s idols were nowhere to be found, and the utopia we dreamed of seemed impossibly far away. This sentiment was plastered all over the run-down city at the end of the rainbow: it was frozen onto engineers’ grimaces; it could be heard in the shattering of car windows; and it foamed out of entrepreneurs’ mouths as they pitched new versions of payroll software. Silicon Valley’s God was also, seemingly, dead.
I thought that the problem was with big companies, not technology, so I moved to a startup. For six months, my problem was solved: the culture was fast-paced, the freedom was refreshing, and the cryptocurrency space was growing at hyper-speed. I was working six days a week and loving it. I forgot about the big questions.
But one week when work slowed down, they assaulted my mind: How important is the work that I’m doing? Why do graphs that track suicide rates resemble the ones that startups use to tell compelling growth stories? Why are the smartest people in the world working on delivery food?
This second bout of disillusionment was more brutal than the first. Work, in its ideal form, should give you meaning, status, long-lasting pleasure, community, and money; the tech industry primarily gave me the latter two, and—even though I was friends with many of my co-workers—remote work took away its fraternal aspect. I was left doing something that I no longer enjoyed, just for the money.
Doing What You Love
As Paul Graham writes, it’s hard to do what you love:
With such powerful forces leading us astray, it's not surprising we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on. Most people are doomed in childhood by accepting the axiom that work = pain. Those who escape this are nearly all lured onto the rocks by prestige or money. How many even discover something they love to work on? A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions.
I discovered that I do not love software engineering in 2019, yet continued doing it for three more years because I became financially trapped. As I earned more money, I spent more money, and I tricked myself into thinking that I needed more money. This was a delusion: if I had closely monitored my happiness, I would’ve realized that the marginal dollar after a certain level (my financial “sweet-spot”) provided little long-lasting value.
But it is hard to escape from this trap: After frequenting penthouses, the thought of hostels that used to be exciting becomes repulsive, and the idea of not going to St. Tropez this summer is too frustrating to imagine. Your friends can’t help but spend $500 a night, and the mimetic desire that drives us to pine for ugly Gucci clothes “because they’re from Gucci” rages more wildly than ever. How do you walk away from six figures and vesting heaps of stock options each month? How do you replace the Dom at L’Arc with cheap beer at home?
You become addicted to a certain lifestyle, and it is hard to break free of its grip even though it doesn’t meaningfully contribute to your happiness. This miscalculation leads us to do work that we dislike and strips us of financial freedom: a monk is more financially independent than a hedge fund manager with a Lamborghini addiction.
Herein lies the strongest argument for working on what you love right after university: you aren’t addicted to expensive tastes; you don’t have a friend group with a high minimum buy-in; and your struggles are more socially acceptable because of your age (this is part of the reason that many actors give themselves an artificial deadline to make it in Hollywood). The longer you wait, the more life’s web envelopes you; eventually, it becomes impossible to break free.
Hero’s Journey
The cycle that I was in represents the first three parts of the hero’s journey: I felt called towards creative pursuits (The Call to Adventure) but refused them (Refusal of the Call) because I was trapped. I needed to get laid off (Supernatural Aid) to force me to embark on the adventure.
Over the coming months, tens (if not hundreds) of thousands will be laid off. This event will be the call to adventure for those that were disillusioned but hadn’t considered changing their professions. A few will boldly answer it in the face of sharp criticism, endless adversity, and incredible risk. Some will hear it but forever refuse it, preferring the well-lit path to the unknown’s blackness. Most, unfortunately, will never hear it over their newborn’s cries or the deafening financial storms that suffocate them.
For those that already heard the heroic call but had refused it—like myself—this event will serve as supernatural aid: the newfound freedom will be their life rafts and their severance packages and savings will be their life jackets. They will not travel comfortably, but they will have what they need to attempt the journey.
Forcing Functions
Supernatural aid and the call to adventure are forcing functions, and everyone needs a forcing function to take bold action. Forcing functions are a reaction between the internal and external world: some event triggers something inside of you because of your specific constitution. Thus, one must have latent heroism within himself for an external event to inspire action.
The stronger the bonds of life are, the greater the internal or external force required: it may take terminal cancer for a married man with children to quit his job as a trader and write a book, whereas it only took a suggestion from a friend for Matthew McConaughey to go to film school instead of law school. The Buddha was so dismayed by the awareness of suffering that he felt that he had to leave his wealth and family to find everlasting peace. Jeff Bezos was so amazed by the exponential rate of internet adoption that he felt that he had to leave his high-paying job and build something in the space.
I needed to get laid off to commit to writing a book, but what if I hadn’t? How long would it have taken me to walk away of my own accord? The counterfactual is scarier than the possibility of failure: the idea that I never would’ve attempted to pursue my passions. How many people die without ever trying to do what they love?
Success does not make one a hero, answering the call to adventure does. And while it’s possible to re-frame “traumatic” events as a part of the hero’s journey, a hero does not need to wait for one—all he needs to do is feel the adventure within himself and say: “Yes.”
It pays to get laid off, not to quit. A simple way to get laid off quickly is to reply LoL to everything your boss says, and soon also in channels. If it doesn't work, say LoLo, extending it by further one character to LoLoL (and so on) as necessary. At least it will be a funny ending. Make sure they give you at least two months of severance for the terror they inflicted on you; accept nothing less.
I enjoyed this very much, Arjun. Thank you.