Waiting to Vest While the World Burns
On doing your silly little corporate job when it feels especially silly and little
What a bad January. I won’t harp on it. You already know: fires, executive orders, plane crashes… the general descent into global democratic backsliding. That stuff.
Personally, I’ve always been inclined to believe that if you randomly sampled people at any single moment in history, they would tell you that things were both the “worst they’ve ever been” and “the best they’ve ever been” at that precise moment. Realistically, January 2025 is not the worst things have ever been. However, our human tendency to overstate the peril and glory of our present situation brings with it the full emotional weight of that hyperbole—even if hyperbole is what it is.
Trying to understand whether AI will save us or destroy the planet, how we built so much interconnectedness with so little earnest connection, and what it means to be a good citizen in a failing system—it’s exhausting. Multiply that exhaustion by the all-too-heavy weight of gorging ourselves on gratuitous information about our peers and strangers and where they went on vacation, and the sum total is a sharp, hefty thing to hold.
It is in the act of holding my own share of this hyper-consumable pain that I find myself trying to write you a nifty little Substack post about how to be a better employee or employer. Don’t get me wrong: I do sincerely believe in this practice of sharing information in hopes of helping people find more human, intelligent, purposeful ways of working. But as I battle this “what exactly is the point of all of this cross-functional aligning?” feeling that followed me through January, what I have to offer you today is advice-light and commiseration-heavy.
Because let’s be real… waking up to a Slack message that you didn’t update a GANTT chart (!) and an NYT notification that Trump wants to take over Gaza in the same eyeful is fucking disorienting. And I think we might all benefit from acknowledging that.
While plenty of people put their hands directly on the world’s biggest problems for a living, if you read this newsletter, it’s more likely that you work somewhere upstream of global good. You probably enable someone… who builds something… that goes to someone… who is now more free to do something else… that could hypothetically do great societal good! Or maybe you’re doing something lucrative now in the name of using your capital to go do something really good later (you know, when you’re fully vested).
Neither of these choices is wrong. But these well-intended rationales often do little to abate the gnawing feeling that sitting down at a desk to email, sync, and sign off on whatever little corner of capitalism you garden is a fundamental failing of perspective. Is it offensive to be left-aligning objects when the world is burning? We’re upstream! We’re building up the money to do something really important at scale! Someone has to be upstream… don’t they? You have to have money to make a true difference… don’t you?
There is no one motivation nor one uniquely good justification for working a silly little corporate job (SLCJ, if you will). Some of us do it out of financial necessity, some of us do it because upstream sincerely is where we’re at our most potent, and some of us do it because it actually is OK to be a human who just wants to pay rent, get back to the people and things we love most, and maybe see the pyramids one day. The great thing about being a person is there’s no right way to do it. And feeling like you’re doing the wrong thing isn’t the same thing as doing wrong.
When I find myself sinking into this type of existential questioning, my mind often wanders into a fictitious version of my life where I’m doing something very important (read: not telling people their OKRs aren’t measurable enough for a living). Surely, there is a parallel universe where my daily tasks are urgent, righteous, and good. I reforest the Amazon. I teach women to read. It’s all quite crucial. And in that world, certainly, I don’t wonder whether I’m failing the whole planet by taking meetings about Q2 instead of protecting voting rights. In this fantasy job, work is a purposeful and integrous act of meaning-making. I am a bonafide good person.
Except I often forget to ask myself what that person is like when she clocks out. If she has the energy to be kind to her hardworking partner who is also exhausted. If she has the goodness left to help her friends when they’re in need. If she feels OK most days.
Maybe she does. Maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she goes home fulfilled, or maybe she, too, wonders if she’s doing enough and would have had a greater impact if she’d just made some money first. Maybe she’s as tired as I am—as tired as you are—and maybe she lies awake at night, exhausted but unable to sleep because it feels like a silly little thing to have your hands on a sliver of the problem without ever being able to wrap your arms around the whole thing.
My hearty suspicion is that the world is always going to be burning in some way while life simultaneously feels brilliant and bright. And while we always have the power to choose new and different ways to touch the world’s problems, it’s okay if, for this week, you’re just tending to the life in front of you—the one where emails have to be answered, guilt can be shouldered, joy can still be felt without minimizing tragedy, our complicated lives can be held in our palms, and Q2 does, in fact, need to be planned. Maybe—for this week—that’s enough.
Thank you for reading. Especially this week. Talk soon.