The Discreet Harm of the Bourgeois Workplace
This past week a year ago was my last at my old job. If I can help it, it will remain my last ever in the bourgeois workplace. I’m a year removed from that gig, and I feel like anything approaching a full recovery is going to take another year or two. That’s like two to three years of rehab for every four years at a toxic job—the last three months of which I even worked remotely after relocating.
If I had to start this process from the top, even if I could somehow survive it a second time, nothing about that ratio seems sustainable.
I’m only now starting to understand why this reboot was bound to be slow. I’ve been developing a greater appreciation for how much trauma and micro-exhaustion came to define the lion’s share of my professional life at this time a year ago. I know my experience is not unique in that respect. But I think some recent reading has made me finally feel like I have permission to process it all.
I thought I had a decent handle on the extent to which poverty has shaped my outcomes and lived experience. But I have to say Anne Helen Peterson’s book about millennial burnout (aptly titled Can’t Even) schooled me completely. Beyond that, it helped me recognize just how long of a shadow class inevitably casts on formative experiences in this racist, capitalist shitstorm currently known as the United States. The millennial generation’s relationship to work may just be a microcosm of bigger systemic failings, but it sure is an incisive prism to examine them through. And Peterson does it deftly in her book.
I always hesitate to explicitly recommend content—be it writing, film, music, or internet minutiae—for two main reasons. First, I consume a lot of it and know that there’s always a backlog of more that I want to get to, and I don’t want to overwhelm people who might have similar habits. Second, I tend to recoil at recommendations that feel sweeping and impersonal. And outside of deliberate research, I am a big believer in a more analog approach to discovery and personal taste-making. With that said, the reason I’m inclined to break from tradition and hype Can’t Even to no end is because, for me, reading it had the effect of both great therapy and great historical commentary. Like effective therapy, it helped me acknowledge that I’m not entirely to blame for my circumstances and outcomes. Like sharp historical commentary, it helped me understand the trends and policy decisions that are. And like both effective therapy and historical commentary, it made me realize that on top of programming us to blame ourselves on impulse, our culture has for years wrought the additional harm of convincing so many of us that we need to perform a class status that is not (and likely never will be) our own.
I suppose the charge of feigning middle-class-ness is difficult up to the point that you decide to reject it. And I count myself lucky to have come around and done that with some productive life (hopefully) still ahead of me. Rejecting it is leagues better than torturing ourselves and resenting everyone else’s successes as we continue to fail our way through a system that was designed to fail us. But that doesn’t mean the labor of healing from a lifetime of the imposed shame baked into that process just takes care of itself.
If you keep up with me here, you’ve probably noticed that healing has been on my mind lately. But “rehab from the insidious toxicity of the bourgeois workplace” was definitely not on my bingo card of anticipated areas of recovery prior to reading Can’t Even. What’s more, only since reading that book am I seeing that there is a class component to much of the healing work ahead of me. I know this shouldn’t surprise me. But I am so, so surprised by how class has managed to leach into everything—from the most personal shit like my relationship to intimacy, to the most theoretically communal shit like my relationship to organized religion. By the way, I’m committed to publicly reckoning with both those things and more in months ahead. More to come on that front, but for now, while I’m trying to make sense of how much an old job on the East Coast fucked me up, I want to go back to where my head was at around this time a year ago. Because believe it or not, I wasn’t enraged and reeling. I was amicable and thoughtful—mature, even. I only know that because I took several hours to write a bon voyage letter to my coworkers and posted it in our all-staff Slack channel on my last day, which was November 23, 2019. I went dark on that Slack workspace long ago, but I composed the letter in a Google doc, so it’s warehoused on my Google drive in perpetuity. And I’m completely surprised by how well it’s aged. Like, rereading it now, I’m honestly afraid I’ll never again write anything that big-hearted and lucid yet still sardonic and entertaining.
The meat of the letter was a list of things I learned in the course of my time in that job. But they were the kind of lessons that don’t reflect flatteringly on the environment that fomented them. In the letter, I described them as convictions “predicated on experiences where I was hurt or otherwise affected enough to take a harder line or decide to stop tolerating certain behaviors.” Besides being cathartic to write, that I did so with the intent to share it with folks—many of whom were complicit in what was kind of an abusive dynamic—seems really generous in hindsight. That seems maybe not entirely out of character for me. But it’s not something I readily do anymore in dynamics that don’t feel symbiotic. So in the spirit of researching myself, I had to wonder what the hell compelled me to do it. And there’s actually a clue in the first few paragraphs of the letter, where I note an old coworker had left an impression with his exit tactics.
In the interest of protecting that old coworker’s identity (sort of), let’s call him Jameson® Irish Whiskey. Or, Jameson for short. About 17 months before I left, Jameson left. His spouse was offered a job out of state, so they relocated, and Jameson stayed on remotely long enough to smooth the transition and help identify his replacement. As a parting gesture, he gave everyone personalized, hand-written notes. In mine, he conceded that it was a bit of a platitude to say, but that the paradox of being great is that most people will overlook it completely, but some people will never forget you for it. He followed that by saying he’d never forget me. Now, I didn’t say anything that kind or individualized to any of my coworkers when my time came to hang up the skates. Frankly, I’ve been known to handle comings and goings with all the inelegance of an Irish exit—ducking out without fanfare, usually from one soul-corroding slog to the next. But Anne Helen Peterson may have even given me new insight into that phenomenon. In addition to the perspective on class, Can’t Even made me aware that my exit tendencies may be more of an acquired symptom of burnout than a reflection of my innate impropriety (though I have no shortage of that).
In my teens, I think I actually used to have a healthy way of treating endings more ceremoniously—like a rite to be carried out in a shared way. But somewhere in undergrad, I must have abandoned that spirit altogether because I remember completely opting out of any recognition or celebration when I finished in December 2014. And I hadn’t really thought much of it until recently, but I was the only person among my friends and roommates who did that. I don’t think I was always that way. And I don’t know that Jameson’s parting conduct alone prodded awake some long-dormant habits in me. But I do think the memory of it made me want to try to at least live up to my own ideals, even if I was burnt out to a crisp and totally rusty at being sincere.
The reference to Jameson’s departure in the letter to my coworkers is interesting to me for a few reasons. Like I said, it does feel like a clue into the uncharacteristic fellow-feeling that somehow possessed me to address coworkers that I mostly would not miss for a final time. But it’s also interesting to me for an entirely isolated reason that connects to some other recent reading.
Back in September, I read Jon Tester’s book Grounded. For those who don’t know, Jon Tester is a U.S. senator. He’s the only working farmer in that chamber of Congress (maybe in either chamber?). Alongside Jeff Ament, he’d be well described as the pride of the Hi-Line town of Big Sandy, which is smaller than my hometown, and you bet I fucking love to see it (Class C, represent). He proudly holds the seat once occupied by Mike Mansfield, the longest-serving senate majority leader (Mansfield mention: take a drink if you’re playing, Montanans). Tester also lost three fingers to a meat grinder the summer before he started fifth grade. I mention that detail because it came up in one of my early interactions with Jameson in our old shared workplace. He had visited the senator’s office in a previous job with a Parkinson’s advocacy organization and heard the anecdote from the source.
Beyond the soaring COVID case numbers, I don’t know what the bigger world knows about Montana these days, but back then it wasn’t much, and what was widely known was generally not nuanced. So it cheered me to know that Jameson knew about the permanent left-hand shaka of my home state’s senior senator. Naturally, I thought of Jameson when, early in Tester’s book, he recounts the incident with the meat grinder. I was not, however, prepared while reading to relate so much to the telling of it:
I wrapped my hand with gauze and bandages for the rest of the summer and into the first few weeks of fifth grade as I healed up. The scar hurt for months and remained tender to the touch well into my twenties. For more than a decade, every time I bumped my left hand against something hard, like a desk or the handle of a pitchfork, searing, aching pain would buckle me over.
I have all the fingers and toes I was born with, but I almost lost one of my big toes to a rusty saw lodged in some exposed tree roots the summer before I started third grade. I’ll spare you the gory details, but suffice to say it was ugly but also not as hardcore as Tester’s meat grinder incident, which feels like the stuff of origin story at this point. Anyway, my scar tissue from the saw is pretty damn discreet—invisible, even, unless you know to look for it. And something I have the luxury of forgetting except for the rare occasion when I hit the inside of my right big toe is how damn sensitive the nerves around that scar tissue are. It’s an awkward and specific enough place that I rarely have cause to remember. But every now and then I clip a table, chair, or bed-frame leg just right and need a minute to collect myself as that creepy shockwave reminiscent of a pinched nerve surges and subsides.
It’s such a specific and strange relic of childhood summers in Dogshit Alley. And the older I get, the more I appreciate that I have it. I think something that has come with the willful rejection of performing a class status that I don’t identify with is a more unflinching sense of identity in the things that will make me a grubby little proletarian to my dying day. I think stories of playtime bloodshed that ended in stitches and a tetanus booster shot years ahead of schedule were, maybe not endemic, but more likely to occur within my peer group growing up in Gardiner. And while I recognize that such stories and scars aren’t a perfect proxy for class background, I noticed fewer peers could relate to fateful encounters with the likes of meat grinders and rusty saws as I moved through undergrad, the bourgeois workplace, and a graduate writing program—all on the East Coast.
In hindsight, I think something those spaces have in common is that it was aggressively normalized for people to behave and communicate with the assumption that everyone is economically mobile. In fairness, that was somewhat the case where I grew up as well. Even as a kid, I didn’t know why, but I definitely felt pressure to obscure what I now realize were economic identifiers. But that perceived pressure always felt more acute in the world beyond Montana.
Honestly, if not for the fever pitch this strange class performance exercise hits in the bourgeois workplace, I don’t know that I would’ve ever figured out I could reject it. I may well have never been so upset by it if I had never been in an environment that felt so at odds with my existence. Only once it was utterly oppressive did it become plain that institutions had only ever made me deny realites of my lived experience. And I guess that observation alone feels like a referendum on the general theme of that letter to my coworkers a year ago: I only realized what bullshit I didn’t have to put up with once I ran out of the wherewithal to tolerate any.
You won’t hear me knocking the singular evolutionary power of regret. My core values owe almost exclusively to formative experiences of shame and regret that prompted me to change course. Nonetheless, I think that can be true without insisting that everybody has to start from the same place I did.
I don’t necessarily think everybody who hasn’t yet felt permission to reject the socially sanctioned class performance routine that defines most institutions these days should have to just suffer the exhaustion and indignity of that independently. Don’t get me wrong, everyone has to learn and get about what they’re about on their own terms and timeline. But I think that process is needlessly delayed when we don’t normalize different ways of being as acceptable. And I think I must be paraphrasing Peterson again here because I know I’ve heard her talk and write about this concept, but I think one of the prolific failings of how much our culture is driven by individualism and personal responsibility is that it stunts our imagination. There are just less possibilities in our minds when we are indoctrinated in this idea that there’s a monolithic template for a productive existence. Few perceived possibilities means few ways into institutions, and in my experience, even fewer ways out once you’ve assimilated.
Busting out is hard enough to do. But it’s impossible if you can’t even begin to imagine doing it. Which is why, at long last, I’d like to bring this image into the conversation:
For the uninitiated, this gif is a riff on an existing image spread far and wide on the internet in recent years. In it, the cartoon dog outfitted with a hat and mug sits in a burning room while repeatedly saying, “this is fine.” Appropriately, this gif of the dog finally getting rescued a la Backdraft started cropping up in my Twitter feed the weekend that the 2020 presidential election was called. It’s really effective. And it made me think a lot about the feeling of escape or rescue from figurative fires we didn’t start.
The last time I remember thinking about the “this is fine” dog prior to this clever reprise of it was at my old job. To what I’m sure was many of my coworkers’ dismay, I had already started expressing my rejection of the bourgeois standards for comportment in my last several months there. And because of that, I constantly felt like I was the sole lucid witness in a room full of “this is fine” dogs.
Two instances from all-staff interactions come to mind. In the first, the check-in question at the top of the meeting was about where we’d take our next vacations. When it got to me, I said something like, “I think vacations are kind of a capitalist implement that keeps people at jobs they dislike in places they don’t enjoy living, all while condoning a fly-by style of tourism that’s entirely consumer-based.” I’m sure it wasn’t that well-worded on the spot, but that was the general spirit of it. I concluded on the less dark point that I wanted to try to start living in places I wanted to be, so I didn’t feel like I needed to plan expensive, transitory escapes every year. After all, I didn’t grow up with the concept of vacations—just time off from school spent mostly at my mom’s apartment. So the whole enterprise always felt like an act once I was at a salaried job anyway. I was definitely not the last person to be called on for that check-in, and there was definitely a tense (but in retrospect, hilarious) pearl-clutching silence that followed before we moved on.
In the second memorable episode of Jackie among the “this is fine” dogs, we were doing a mandatory, multi-day workshop as a whole staff with external facilitators. In advance, our organization had paid for all of us to take Myers-Briggs tests. We got into the interpretive component of our results with the facilitators, and I was just that crank who felt like I had to speak out about the whole exercise at earliest opportunity. So when that opportunity came, I griped that we were talking about a pseudo-scientific thing somebody found a way to monetize that, worst of all, completely fails to account for the nuances and multivalence of personalities in neurodivergent folks like yours truly.
I’m sure my execution was pretty inauspicious in both scenarios. But I still think back on them constantly because I believe in everything I put out there as a sort of “hail mary” with so much more clarity now. And I just cannot get my mind around how we got to this place where folks who push back get written off as the gratuitous cage-rattlers who shouldn’t be taken seriously. Even so, I think the only reason I had the emotional energy in the home stretch of that old job—at least in time to lambast the Myers-Briggs stuff as a sham—is because I knew I was getting out. This was something I actually didn’t already know at the time that I made the comment about why the bourgeois relationship to vacations is fucked up, but I ultimately followed through on my own vision of trying to live in a place I wanted to be.
By early June 2019, I had hatched this pie-in-the-sky plan to move to the Olympic Peninsula by the end of August, not really thinking all the pieces that needed to come together to make that possible would. But they fucking did. And not even as a matter of conscious contemplation, my outlook changed noticeably as soon as I knew I was getting out. My therapist, my supervisor, and my dentist (pretty much an exhaustive list of everyone in DC whose opinions still mattered to me at that point) noticed immediate changes in my mood and were over the moon for me. The difference was night-and-day—all because of a plan that at the time still felt like it could be derailed at any moment.
I think what was going on there was this sudden reacquaintance with a wider field of vision and possibility than what I had limited myself to for at least four years. If you had known me before seeing me in this period, you’d have thought I’d undergone a George Bailey-level transformation based on the way I suddenly gave a damn about people I couldn’t previously stand. I think that’s telling of another thing Peterson gets at towards the end of Can’t Even, when she makes the point that empathy does have a place in how we address and eliminate the culture that has enabled widespread burnout. As she says it, “Think not just about how to reduce your own, but how your own actions are sparking and fanning burnout in others.” I could always tell that my most insufferable office mates were the most unhappy. Once I had an exit plan, I was relieved that I’d at least temporarily avoided the same trap of perpetuating the cycle. But I also wished all the Ebenezer Scrooges I’d encountered thought they had a way out.
To be fair, it’s not as though relocating to Washington last year radically altered my circumstances. Quite the contrary, in terms of income and healthcare, it marked a return to the precarity that defined most of my life prior to entering the bourgeois workplace in 2015. I moved in August 2019 and had an agreement with my organization to stay on remotely through that November. I had no reason to be optimistic about my ability to land paying gigs when that commitment was up. I’m sorely lacking in the smarts and talent needed to ever stand out in a competitive hiring process, and famously insubordinate (and yes, occasionally churlish) to boot.
A few days into writing this, Chris La Tray made a guest appearance in the Wednesday edition of Culture Study, the Substack newsletter of the Can’t Even author I’ve been citing left and right here. Besides being probably my favorite active writer these days, La Tray completely nailed one part of how I feel about my professional prospects since defecting the steady office job:
I’m essentially unemployable because the level of bullshit I’m willing to accept probably doesn’t work in the modern workplace. I have no problem freezing to death in my car rather than answer to some over-mortgaged asshat boss again…
Like many people who can probably relate to any of this, I’ve since made ends meet by cobbling together hustles—a part-time gig with my county’s historical society supplemented by enough steady freelance work to offset a bill or two each month. It’s stressful in its own way. It feels like a lot of legwork to be just breaking even every month (not counting my debt, which will of course outlive me!). I’m fortunate to live in Washington because I earn at a low enough level that I’m eligible for free healthcare. I haven’t utilized the coverage, but I’m grateful to be enrolled in case I run afoul of some violent sea otters. Plus, I will eventually need to get another eye exam before I exhaust my current supply of contacts because my glasses don’t play super well with masks. But I’ve noticed that practical kind of stress feels far more innocuous than the permanent existential dread of operating in an environment that feels so synthetic, largely because it’s governed by conventions that are performative and impossible to disrupt as one individual. I’ve found the day-to-day just feels so much less oppressive now that I’m no longer a pawn in a machine that feels antithetical to so many of my values.
But in the spirit of imagining different possibilities, the idea that emerges for me when I reflect on all of this is that we should aspire to a world where we can have our cake and eat it too. Like, people shouldn’t have to break themselves—mind, body, and spirit—in order to have financial stability and healthcare. It seems like a fatal design flaw that you can only really have one or the other. And maybe that sounds like a blanket assumption that most people who are holding down oppressive jobs are struggling to survive in other areas of their life, but aren’t they?
I mentioned that I loved Peterson’s invocation of the role of empathy in all of this because it acknowledges that so many of the people that we write off as serial jerks are probably the foremost burnouts among us. They’re the “this is fine” dogs that any given bourgeois workplace has in spades, and they tend to take an outsize toll on their coworkers whose souls are still basically intact, but nonetheless on-pace for a full incineration in the absence of radical Backdraft style rescues and interventions. Do we really have to put people—to put each other—in these do-or-die situations? Situations that we can’t recognize as crises only because they’re so normalized? I have to believe we can do better.
I’ve made much ado in recent months of how grateful I was to get out of the Mid-Atlantic before I could experience anything on the magnitude of a psychotic break. And getting out has afforded me a lot I thought I’d never have. Like, the fact that I’m even able to flirt with the concept of healing in areas of my life that I’ve completely repressed and never paused to process, examine, and ultimately allow myself a different narrative around—that feels like a big deal. And I feel a responsibility to do the legwork, somewhat out of gratitude for getting to a place where I have the determination and wherewithal to do it. But I also kind of feel responsible to document it—I guess kind of as proof of concept, in case it helps anybody out there imagine a different possibility for themselves.
So, just to go on the record with it, what follows is my Backdraft style aid offering to the “this is fine” pups out there who are in the process of identifying and navigating their way out of a burning building. Some of y’all may already know this about me, but my relationship to suicidality dates back to when I was in second grade. So believe me when I say nobody is as surprised as I am that I’ll be 28 by this winter solstice. And I don’t know what it is about the onset of this particular treering, but it makes me want to publicly wrestle with the stuff that I have the most shame, embarrassment, and confusion around. So I’m going to try to do that here in months ahead.
I don’t know how successful I’ll be. I don’t know if any of it will speak to anybody who reads it. I have a running list of the topics that feel most personal and pressing. I don’t know how faithful I’ll stay to it, or how it will evolve as my own healing process unfolds and we enter the inner sanctum of 2021 and whatever unholy rapture lays in wait for us then. But I’m going to keep showing up and plumbing the depths. If it helps anybody reading out there, that’s who it’s for.
Within hours of committing an initial pass of this indulgent, cranky missive to a Google doc, I was delighted to see Chris La Tray griping (among other things) about the workplace he left in 2015 for a new lease on life in the latest edition of his own Substack newsletter. Chris is one of my favorite voices out there, and I don’t take for granted that he may well be the reason some of you have found my writing here in the past. So hyping his work and urging y’all to sign up to receive his weekly Substack dispatches is probably unnecessary. But if you’ve been meaning to and haven’t done so already, consider this your reminder.
I would also be remiss not to mention that my personal copies of Grounded and Can’t Even came from Fact & Fiction in Missoula. None other than the illustrious Chris La Tray is also a bookseller there, and was kind enough to assist the respective authors of those two books in signing them before entrusting the postal service to deliver them to my door in recent months. So, if you have occasion to be patron of the wonderful Fact & Fiction, just know you may be lucky enough to hear from Chris about your order.
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