I recently had an uncomfortable conversation with an old friend. We’ve known each other for 10 years now, during which time we have been in touch sporadically.
The morning we met, I was barely holding myself up. In my lonely journey of making my own path* I was already bogged down by the tough market, writing work that had steadily dried up over the past couple of years, and a fatalist outlook that I was in a dying profession.
My friend is running a successful startup. Every time we have met over the last few years, she has hinted that I should return to full time work. Each time I have resisted, faking that my freelance career was doing so well, I didn’t need a full time job.
This time, when she brought up the same, beat up argument about full time work being “real” work, I broke down.
It is hard not to be earning as much as I used to, even when I’m working 5x harder.
What made this difficult situation almost unbearable (and unfathomable to her, I imagine) was that if I wanted, I could have gotten a marketing job yesterday. One that paid better than all the income from all my writing years combined.
I left marketing for writing in 2021 because I enjoyed writing and I didn’t like the kind of marketing I was expected to do when social media exploded. I felt that businesses were breaking unsaid moral mores, all for more revenue and because “everyone else is doing it too! So why not us?” This sounded eerily like what Wall Street would have told itself as it shattered the American housing market and brought the world economy to its knees in 2008.
Marketers haven’t triggered a market collapse yet, but short term practices have eroded consumer trust and touched a new low in “click bait-y” content, in my opinion. But that is for another post.
Shifting careers calmed my soul but barely added to my earnings. I’ve spent as much time getting more and more creative with economising as in finding new writing work. To say that the last five years have been a grind would be an understatement.
Still, I don’t miss corporate enough to want to go back to it. I really didn’t like who I had become when I was working for someone else. In the Jekyll-Hyde equation, corporate-me was Hyde all the way.
There were many things I didn’t like about that version of me, but the one quality I still think about and shudder is how greedy I had become. In business speak, this would be called “ambitious”.
Of course, both traits have nuances, and being ambitious isn’t bad. What is bad is the corporate tendency to misuse words that are slightly different in meaning, like deliberately blurring a clear picture.
So impossible situations become “challenges” to be overcome one way or the other, and morally ambiguous decisions become “tough calls” that are taken for the “good of the business”, or even better, “because of market forces”.
This is just another face of greed.
The kind of marketing I would have done if I hadn’t left when I did personified greed to levels of horror that terrified me in imagination itself.
In addition to this I resisted bending into all kinds of shapes to suit the boss’ or the company’s mission. Not doing this cost me multiple bonuses and promotions.
As my boss’ boss once told me, “Your work ethic is coming in the way of your growth.”
Greed. The Bible calls it “an immoderate love or desire for riches and earthly possessions.”
The Gita says it’s one of the three gates of hell, the other two being lust and anger.
For me, fiction says it best.
John Steinbeck demonstrates the power of greed to destroy a simple family in the allegorical tale, The Pearl. The infant son of a couple living a modest life in a shack by the sea falls dangerously ill. Unable to pay the medical bills, his father prays for a miracle and actually gets one. But no sooner does he possess the solution to his problems than their world begins to unravel.
Thomas Mann’s masterpiece Doctor Faustus is the modern adaptation of the Faustian bargain, also known as a deal with the Devil. In Mann’s version, a composer swaps his soul with the devil for 24 years of unparalleled artistic achievement.+
Real life is nowhere as dramatic. Part of why we don’t notice evil growing in us is because this change happens inch by inch. By the time we take notice it would have changed us irrevocably; we’d have come too far along to backtrack.
At a 2008 event with MBA students, Warren Buffet says this about correcting terrible behaviour early, “You can do it if you are your age, you can’t do it if you are my age. Basically these habits are built into you, by the time you are 60 it is too late to form them and they are too heavy to be broken.... If you are thinking about how to cause pain for somebody else rather than creating a situation that benefits yourself you are going to get a terrible result over time.”
A common corporate fallacy is believing that you can do whatever you have to and move up the ladder now and always backspace selective parts of you and become your old self again later. Because going against your values, ethics or morals now to grow through the ranks does not make you a bad person. It makes you ambitious, a go-getter, a hustler!
You tell yourself, you can always do what you want once you get to the top. What you don’t realise is that every time you let go of what is right, every time you do something because it’s in the best interests of anyone other than employees or humanity, you also let go a sliver of your soul - the beautiful, immortal, precious part of you that makes you, you. And so by the time you reach the artificial pinnacle, by the time you’re at the top of this stinking pyramid, there isn’t much of the real you left. You’ve discarded them on your path upwards, like empty packets of energy bars, like waste matter. At each of these times, you had to throw a part of yourself away because you couldn’t have done what you did, moved forward otherwise. So you rationalised selling yourself. Now you’ve got a great view and you’re rich, but you’re also lonely, unhappy and caught in a vicious circle of your own ambition. You barely recognise yourself.
Some of the richest people on the planet today are terrible human beings who even pride themselves on their inhumanity. Warren Buffet is a famous exception. But it’s very easy for Warren Buffet to tell us to be nice, you might retort. The man is 95 and a billionaire. He can afford to be nice. He doesn’t have insane sales targets, a sour boss or worry about paying his bills.
Forget the billionaires for a minute and ask yourself, how much money would you need to live a comfortable life? If you make a rational, objective calculation and you aren’t under massive debt or in an expensive medical situation, it’s not very much. You definitely don’t need billions. You don’t even need a million.
I don’t know how to work in a soul sucking job while keeping yourself intact. When I came to the fork in my path I took the easy way out and left. Now I’m trying to find a path to earning and living that nurtures whatever’s left of my soul. I still haven’t found it yet. But I’m happier than I’ve ever been.
"I got my ticket for the long way round."
Image: a multicursal maze puzzle - one with multiple ways from the entrance to the exit. The challenge is to find the shortest way possible
I know one more thing - what makes you, you is the most precious part of you. It’s one of those things that once you lose, you cannot get it back. Not fully, not the way it once was. At best it will be the hollow ring inside every time you wonder about the purpose of your life. At worst, it’s the performative slather of empty gestures and shallow platitudes that look like you have a soul, when you actually don’t. No one is fooled, least of all you.
I don’t want to be 95 and rich, if that means I’ll also be bitter, angry and full of regret. Regret is a poison as bad as greed. If this means that I have to struggle for another 5 years trying to find my sweet spot, that’s fine. I’ll put one foot in front of another, take each day as it comes.
"Only by listening to the voice of the soul — a voice by definition nonconformist, rising above the din of convention and expectation and should — do we become fully and happily ourselves. To be aware of ourselves is to hear that voice. To be content in ourselves is to listen to it." - Maria Popova, on the soul
*”The pathless path is an alternative to the default path. It is an embrace of uncertainty and discomfort. It’s a call to adventure in a world that tells us to conform. For me, it’s also a gentle reminder to laugh when things feel out of control and trusting that an uncertain future is not a problem to be solved.” - The Pathless Path, by Paul Millerd
+ Both Steinbeck and Mann recos are from the book 'The Novel Cure:An A-Z of Literary Remedies', under 'Greed' and 'Selling your soul', respectively.