gentleness

From my friend @milkjuus

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I can't bear talking about work anymore. I don't know if that's an indication that I'm doing the wrong thing for eight hours a day, five days a week, or if I'm just disillusioned with the grind. There's a good chance that I'm going to have to look for a new job again in a few weeks, given that tech is kind of tanking and my company is riding that plummet like a cowboy rodeo atomic bomb. But I don't want to think about that right now.

My brief experience with working in tech is that lots of people tend to extensively discuss tech outside of work (well duh, Jaron). In between stretches of remote calls I meet up with coworkers from my job and of course a chunk of conversation devolves into back-and-forths about return offers, about company performance and layoffs, about the latest startup they're using as a pivot to hopefully coast out this downturn with a mounting wave of nascent performance, launching themselves into career hyperspace with 27-engine-Falcon-9-tier propulsion. Or, if it's not work, it's about the next funding round they're trying to line up as they're teetering the careful balance of a Harvard 2+2 MBA or Wharton deferred admission or somehow applying to medical school (?!) at the same time as working their SWE or design job.

Impressive on some arbitrary scale, sure. But all of these subjects feel so… tough. Rigid. I mean, don't we have anything else going on in our lives? What do you have going on in yours? No, really. Outside of work, what do you actually like?

I'm also not a shining example of work-life separation. A year ago I was deliberately locking myself in my dimly lit room days at a time to grind out UX portfolio pieces and chunk out spreadsheets and timelines, an elaborate dress rehearsal to become the greatest performance of myself to land the most 'legitimate' company I could in a condensed six-month timeframe. That murky period was the worst I ever felt. Shutting out all face-to-face interaction and quite literally not stepping outside in an obsessive search over the right badge to adorn myself with. Blanking in conversation if prompted with what I've been up to other than design work. The illumination of Figma files piercing through my darkened bedroom, the empty companionship of design software and lines of code. Yet I kept pushing, enthralled by the thought that once I broke through to the light I would feel satisfied, whole again, all of the fractures in me patched up by intelligent, driven people and meaningful work.

Of course, as you can tell by the fact that I’m writing out another one of these pedestrian blog posts that seemingly every single young person in tech has on life and purpose, it didn’t work out so cleanly. I feel like I didn't get the memo, as if I'm missing the elation everyone else feels by being shunted into a world scaffolded by the tiered, spiraling towers of product, design, engineering.

Despite my concerted efforts to enter this world out of college, I still can’t bring myself to understand obsession with work, or the perspective of viewing tech as a force for personal salvation. I read this well-written post by Brie Wolfson a little while ago about her time working early at Stripe:

"But I do think work can be a source of real meaning in life. But, we’ll only ever get out what we put in. And in the case of work life, it is kind of a collective decision. Once your neighbor starts signing off Slack at 3:30 consistently, it’s hard not to do the same. If your closest collaborators don’t turn stuff around quickly, why would you? If there’s no one in the room agitating for doing that extra copy pass to punch up that blog post, why not just ship the meh version and use the extra time for a jog or a drink with friends? The path of least resistance is right in front of us, and we are taking it."

I get where she's coming from. Those times where you're completely invested, devoured by an uplifting culture where you're all committed to do something, together is an intoxicating, bubbly feeling. But thousands of people aren't signing off early just because they're lazy. Even further than that, I wouldn't say these people shutting their screens early are making the wrong choice. I don't feel like it's the path of least resistance. People are searching for the right answers in their life, and those answers aren't coming from their 9 to 5. Is that really so wrong?

There's some quality missing from these work-adjacent experiences that I can't quite place. It's all omitting an aspect of richness I can only describe as something discovered in the flowing, golden thrum of living life for life's sake alone.

One interpretation of this ephemeral quality that I like is Henri Nouwen's gentleness. A quote from him on this (there are religious undertones to the original context, but I think the phrasing is beautiful so it's relevant here):

"Gentle is the one who is attentive to the strengths and weaknesses of the other and enjoys being together more than accomplishing something. A gentle person treads lightly, listens carefully, looks tenderly, and touches with reverence."

But to where does our gentleness fly? Where is its place in our vogue, impatient, performative lives? Perhaps it is trampled, broken underfoot? Or is gentleness deserted, left to crumble to pieces and lie derelict, covered in dust by the wayside?

As I'm sitting here, writing this in my usual coffee spot I can see the beveled screens of people around me. One girl spitting out code, another guy checking tasks off his Notion sheet, a group of computer science students debating total compensation while browsing levels.fyi. Somehow, there is legitimately no one having a regular (read: non-professional) conversation here. And for 9:34 in the morning, the place is packed. Meanwhile, far outside this shop and across an array of state lines and city boundaries, I have a friend disillusioned about working on internal HR software at a FAANG company, another friend who looks exhausted every time I see him after his 2.5 hour round-trip commute to his real estate job, still many others who just received notice that their implicitly-stable job offers have been rescinded. Am I strange for finding this reality so bleak? There is no space for gentleness in 1 pixel, in between the delineated lines of the terminal, in the systems and baked-in bureaucracy of Slack channels and its abundance of emoji reactions, all of it neatly bundled into a Workday hiring bubble.

Sometimes I catch myself fantasizing about the myriad of things I could be spending my hours on instead. I could be dropping flowers at my grandparents. I could be reading a book at the park. We could be sitting together on the floor, having tea. I'm getting better at scheduling lunches and making lists to wring dry the minutes of my day, but why are the moments still evaporating faster than ever?

We’re absorbed into the flickering invitations of what we worship, entangled under the looming shadows of where we’re going. We jaunt off from space to space racking up copious amounts of kaleidoscopic blurs of income and caffeine and faces framed in squares, yet we remember very little in this process, and it sounds incredibly stupid, like a child’s wish, like every cliché that you have ever read or watched or heard, but I wish to see it all to be good and true and gentle, and for you and me to be okay.