I have been reading posts here for a year or so and having recently quit a high-paying job thought I would post about my background, experience and thought process for a slightly different perspective.
An older Millennial, I grew up in a working class family and saw education as the way to climb to a higher social status and achieve the financial freedom my parents didn't have. I did college and grad school, enticed by the prospect of a more comfortable life for myself and my family than I had access to as a child. By 31, I was making 6 figures for the first time in my life. At that point I had barely any savings and had substantial student loans and credit card debt. But once my salary crept over $100k, I was able to start saving and eventually get the debt paid off. By 38, I had continued to advance at my job and was making around $500k/year, counting bonus.
As always, there way a catch — or a few if being honest:
- I was constantly working 60-80 hours a week and sometimes more. All the while I constantly felt like I was never doing enough, was pressured by management to do more, do things faster, take on more projects, be more productive, etc. I was routinely treated with lack of civility and decency, yelled at and berated by more senior people. There was a constant theme from my managers — sometimes subtle/implied, sometimes more explicit — along the lines “we are paying you really well, how dare you complain about being overworked or refuse to take on more work.” And I knew that in a sense I should be grateful to make many multiples of the average American and felt guilty pushing back to achieve a semblance of work life balance (or even to achieve a reasonable amount of sleep).
- My last boss was very much a stereotypical “get off my lawn” boomer. He constantly berated people, mansplained everything to women, acted surprised if any women ever had what he considered to be a good idea, and had zero concern for anything going on in anyone’s life outside of work. He would go around spouting things like “no one wants to work anymore”, “this generation is so entitled and lazy”, “when I was coming up, people put their job first and worked around the clock if needed – no questions asked” and “I missed the birth of my firstborn for a business trip, and now men think they’re entitled to a month of vacation for depositing a sperm.” Also constantly complaining about how hard it is to be a white man these days because all anyone cares about is “diversity”.
- On paper, I had 4 weeks of PTO but it became increasingly hard to ever use it. I routinely was told things were too busy to take PTO or denied requests for PTO. Same undertones as above, where I would be reminded subtly or not so subtly that I am being paid a lot and should be willing to put company deadlines before vacation. I would usually end up taking off a week around Christmas, which was used to visit family out of state, and one additional week during the year, leaving up to 2 weeks of PTO unused. And I’d usually end up working. 2-3 hours a day even when on vacation. Yes, it’s nice to be able to afford to take a nice vacation, but it’s not worth it to work 60-80 hours a week, 50-51 weeks a year, just to be able to spend one week of the year on a nice vacation. Especially when most weekends are not truly downtime. I would usually work half days from home on Saturday and Sunday, although sometimes I was able to limit it to just an hour or two. One week when the worst of COVID had passed but coming to the office was still optional, my spouse was so anxious to go somewhere and annoyed at my work schedule that we went to the Caribbean for a week and I didn’t tell my boss because he had just imposed a “no PTO until we meet our deadline” edict. I just worked all day from the resort Monday-Friday and took Zoom calls without video on (I did treat myself to a relatively uninterrupted weekend so got two days of vacation out of it.
- Buying fancy things doesn’t appeal to me, so other than accumulating a bit of a nest egg and buying a house, there was no practical day to day benefit from being a high wage earner. My car is more than 10 years old, I don’t wear expensive clothes and don’t have expensive hobbies (not that I had time for hobbies). My spouse and I own a decent home but it is not bigger or more extravagant than we need. We do our own cleaning, cooking and child care, other than hiring a babysitter as needed and things like a guy to mow the lawn. Yes, it’s nice to be able to order takeout when we want, but (other than during COVID) I typically ate lunch and dinner at work Monday-Friday.
- I felt the dual anguish and guilt from having one foot in the working class and one foot in the exploitative class, especially after reading Marx. Although I live in a high cost, high tax area. I am not going to make a foolish argument you see from time to time that $500k a year is middle class. I was not living paycheck to paycheck or one bad break from homelessness. But I also was not so well off that I didn’t have to sell my life-time to make a living. Even if focusing on being more frugal, by my calculations, I would have had to work at least another 6-8 years think about early retirement. I get it that I’m fortunate and most people don’t even have the option to retire before 50 no matter how hard they work. But I never felt like I was so well off that I could choose not to work. And I was obviously a sacrifice at the altar (albeit a high-paid sacrifice) of making other people multimillionaires and billionaires. I delivered millions of dollars of value to my employer every year and was paid a fraction of that. At the same time, especially as I became more senior, I felt like I was becoming an exploiter too. As more people reported to me, I dished out the same as I received from my bosses — I gave people work after hours and on weekends and insisted they do it, asked people to skip vacations and holidays, and so on (everyone reporting to me made at least $100k which made it feel more justified, but still…). The pressure from above to squeeze productivity from my team was relentless. I hated being that kind of manager and sometimes would stay up past midnight or work through the weekend doing work myself that I could have given to someone else to do, because I felt bad ruining their night or weekend. But that is only a short term solution. The corporate world is designed to push work down. Not to mention that my spouse would get irritated that I wasn’t delegating to others and I would feel guilty for missing my kids’ childhood.
- My physical and mental health suffered. I gained 20 lbs in 3 years, and felt and looked like I aged 10 years in that span. I felt like I never had any time to exercise unless it was at the expense of sleep or family time. I was constantly depressed and contemplated self harm more than once.
So, I quit my job a few months ago. I took a job at about half the pay of my old job. No one reports to me. It is a much more decentralized setting. Much more flexibility to work remotely. I have a decent and respectful employer, work humane hours and am treated respectfully. I’m not depressed anymore because it was the shitty job, shitty people and unrelenting stress that was the issue.
No, I don’t expect anyone to feel sorry for me. I realize I’m in a much more fortunate position than most of my fellow older Millennials. Over the course of my 30s I was able to save up a nest egg, even if at the expense of health, sleep and enjoying the scenery. Not nearly enough to retire (I mean maybe enough to retire to a cheap foreign country, but I have young kids here with extended family in the US and don’t think that would be ideal).
Along the way I’ve come to learn that high earners can be exploited too, and the system is designed to graduate the exploited into the hybrid exploited/exploiters, and to hold a brass ring to the hybrids the hope that if you are truly lucky, one day you may have the opportunity to be a full exploiter.