The Gen X complex: Seeking meaning for life away from my tech job
The Gen X complex: Seeking meaning for life away from my tech job
Ariel Greisas resigned from a prestigious position in high-tech about a year ago, because he could no longer take it. Since then he has been at home, looking for a purpose in life other than work, oscillating between the need to relax and anxiety for his generation, which was brought up to keep running and not stop even for a moment to catch its breath
July 14, 2022 was not supposed to be a special day. In the morning I was debating whether to go to work or work from home, and finally decided to go because I wanted to meet some people. At lunch I sat down to eat with a friend and told her that I was having a hard time with work and I was tired of it and I wasn't sure what to do. Two hours later I sent a message to my wife: "I'm going to resign, is that okay with you?". She replied of course. It didn't hit her out of left field, because we had been talking about this option for several months. It's just that up until that point I couldn't muster up the courage to leave without having any alternative in hand. "We'll get along, it'll be fine," she always told me.
I waited for my boss to come back from another meeting, hoping my courage wouldn't leave me, and I asked her to meet. The courage did not leave. Two weeks later I returned my things, brought a cake and said goodbye to my friends. I've been home since then, a little over a year now.
In October I will be 48 years old. Generation X, to which I belong, does not receive too much media coverage these days, certainly compared to Millennials or Generation Z. Nobody talks anymore about the characteristics of our generation, about its desires. Not even about why it’s screwed. And it is screwed, just in a different way than the others.
True, unlike the generations after us, my generation was privileged to enter a world of work where apartment prices were sane and savings from a reasonable salary allowed you to buy a house, so we don't suffer from the financial despair of our younger generation. But mentally we are stuck in the middle: between the generation of our parents, who instilled in us an ethos according to which work is for life and therefore we should start as early as possible and get as much done as possible - and the generation of our children, who already understand that work can be also a means and not just an end.
More than a decade ago I was a strong runner, and even ran several marathons. When you run a marathon you learn that the most dangerous thing is to start too hard. You come to the race after strenuous training and a two-three week rest, so at first the body feels good. The temptation to increase the pace beyond what you planned is very great. But you pay the price for that in the second part of the race. If you think: "At most I will run a little slower in the second half", you can forget about it. The body simply refuses to continue. You have used up your energy and you have nothing left.
That's how I felt when I resigned. I was completely out of energy. If we look at the first half of my life as an adult, you can say that I started too strong. I started studying in university five months after I was released from the army, and I started working already in my second year of studies. Since then I worked all the time, until a year ago. No big trip to the Far East in the beginning or in the middle, no break, nothing. I was left without energy.
In my first marathon there were pacers - people whose job it is to dictate a running pace according to degrees of difficulty. I stuck to one pacer, but while running I discovered that he has a strange method: for half an hour he runs faster than I planned, then switches to a slow walk for five minutes. At first I didn’t get what he was doing. I mean you're already at a certain pace, so why stop and then start again? I'm used to running non-stop.
In retrospect, I realized that this method makes a lot of sense, certainly in life. When I announced that I was leaving my job, a colleague under the age of 30 told me that she asked the employer for a two-month sabbatical because she felt she couldn't take it anymore. She had graduated four years earlier, and had worked for us for a little over two years. I had been working in the field for more than 20 years, and at no point did I take a break of more than a month. I didn't even know the concept of stopping.
Oddly enough, my parents' generation did know about it. When I was a child shops would close at noon and people would go to rest. My wife says that her pharmacist father would come home from the pharmacy, have lunch with them and sleep for an hour or two. In the building where I grew up, we knew that it was forbidden to play ball between 2 and 4pm because these are the hours of rest. The teachers, who are unionized in so-called old-fashioned organizations, even have a sabbatical - a break of a whole year, once every seven years, in which there is time to study, catch up, and also rest. There was a deep social understanding that workers needed breaks. But now we all work all the time, all day. Energy is running out.
And yet the transition to unemployment was difficult, perhaps because of the habit of working non-stop. It turns out that it is very difficult to do nothing. It is true that there are all kinds of tasks (as a parent of three there are always tasks) but for quite a few periods during the day you are free to do whatever you want. Seemingly - paradise. You can read a book, finish watching a TV series, go to the beach, write or just scroll on the phone. But for someone like me, this nothingness was terrible at first.
In "About the Boy" by Nick Hornby the protagonist is an unemployed guy who lives on royalties from a song his father wrote. To pass the time he divides his day into half hour segments. I decided to try it: to watch a series for an hour, then to go for a walk with the dog for half an hour, half an hour to tidy the house, half an hour to prepare food for the children. The day goes by pretty fast like that, and I was able to finish it with a certain sense of accomplishment: I got things done! But there are days when I really have nothing, I spend two or three hours in front of the TV and at the end of the day I feel a great emptiness. I did not do anything.
For years I defined myself by the things I did. It's not accidental. Not only our parents taught us that work is our life, the whole world around us is designed this way, especially in high-tech, an industry that wants you to feel at home in the workplace as well. After all, you have an amazing kitchenette and an even more abundant dining room than your kitchen at home. There are companies such as Intel, where I worked for 13 years, that also provide you with a gym and even laundry services. Many companies define themselves as a "family". Well, at least until the moment when they have to make cutbacks, and fire you in a clearly unfamily-like manner.
We also learned to search for our life challenges through work. After all, this is the place where we spend most of our waking hours, so it makes sense that through it we look for what to learn, where to progress, and how to challenge ourselves. And so, without noticing, work becomes such an integral part of your life that you have no idea how to define yourself without it. Even if you have hobbies outside of work, even if you have a family - work is the thing through which it is easy for you to define yourself.
When I left my last job I reached my professional peak - something I worked very hard to achieve. Here's something I was good at - really good at. It is very easy to find yourself identifying with the profession perfectly. And suddenly, it's not there. And more than that you need to find a way to fill the free time, you mainly need to find a new meaning for yourself.
It took me almost six months to find meaning in life outside of work. At first I was sure that very quickly I would understand what I wanted to do. When it didn't happen, I started to get stressed. We went on vacation in Scotland, which was planned long before the resignation, and I was unable to enjoy it, because it was clear to me that after the holidays I would start working, probably in the same profession, only as a freelancer. But I couldn't.
Two months passed, I received job offers but gradually turned them down one after the other, until I realized that what was happening was much bigger than me - I was stuck between the past and the future, unable to break free from what I was before. Two more months of unemployment passed before I was able to recognize that this part of my life was over, at least for now. I no longer thought about what I would do, but I just did it. Everyone tells you to live in the moment, but it doesn't help until you actually live it.
Only in February, seven months after the resignation, I finally registered for unemployment for the first time. Officially, I waited because at first I had to wait three months until I could apply, after which I received a small salary from the university for a course I taught. But in reality I waited because I was afraid of that word, "unemployed". It is impossible not to be afraid of the accompanying image, an unshaven and scrawny guy in a sleeveless undershirt, sitting with his friends over a cup of black coffee at a corner kiosk where they sell lottery tickets.
When I once complained on Twitter about how stupid the signing for unemployment at the bureau is, which requires me to spend an hour driving once a week to swipe an automated device and then return home, people replied that it was so that people wouldn't "take advantage" of unemployment and move to a beach in Thailand. Because in the Israeli public an unemployed person is perceived as someone who is a burden on the public. It’s something wrong and inappropriate. Never mind that I paid social security for more than 20 years, and now I only get a fraction of a fraction of that money back. I felt that way too. It took me a long time to be able to tell people directly- "I'm unemployed".
Here is a partial list of things I did in my year of unemployment: I taught a university course; I took four courses in the humanities; I finished writing my novel; I wrote several articles for Calcalist’s supplement, I was a mentor for a robotics class; And I started a podcast in which I have already recorded more than 20 episodes. On top of that I regularly cooked lunch with my children, and sat down to eat it with them; I went to the beach once a week and met a lot of friends.
Last semester I took a course on French cinema given by the legendary Israeli journalist Emmanuel Halperin. Once a week I would sit in class and think to myself "God, how lucky I am that I can afford to sit and enjoy this endless stream of knowledge." Around me the classroom was almost empty. In a hall with more than 200 seats, there were maybe 30 students, the vast majority of them senior citizens, the rest were young. Not even one my age. Because that's what we do at our age - wait for retirement so we can afford to expand our horizons. As if broadening your horizons means not working, which is a bad thing.
I have no illusions here. It is clear to me that I enjoy a huge privilege that allowed me to sit at home for a year. I have a wonderful and supportive partner who works hard in high-tech, we have savings that we worked hard on for years, and I was lucky enough to grow up in a place and time that allowed me to save like that. It is easy to preach going for a year of studies and expanding the mind, but the absolute majority of Israelis cannot do that here. Everything here is too expensive.
And not only does the Israeli market not understand this, the problem with it is only getting worse: the number of vacation days we are entitled to is too small, and what is available is also not synchronized with the school holidays; The requirement to work long hours still exists; And the cost of living just doesn't allow people to take the breaks they so much need. And all this before even talking about the retirement age, which is only going to rise due to the increase in life expectancy.
It’s not for nothing that we are convinced that our workplace is our home. Otherwise, we will become depressed when we find that this is all we have—simply because we won't have the means to achieve anything else.
In October I will go back to work. I'm going to start a new role in a new field, something I've been waiting for and hoping for for a long time. It's stressful, because I'll need new training and I'll have to demonstrate skills I'm not even sure I have. But it's also exciting, because it's a challenge, and there are few places in life that can challenge you like work. My ambition is that the break I took recharged my batteries to get back to work, this time maybe with an understanding of how important it is to take breaks every now and then, and not to run at full speed all the time.
Israelis like to say that there is a feeling here that every time you leave the house you are going to war. It has to do with the weather, the aggression in the street and on the road, the cost of living, the security situation - and above all the feeling that we all have to fight for our sanity all the time. And how is a person supposed to stay sane if they work non-stop all their life, stuck in traffic for hours on the way to and from work, and yet the money and time just slip out of their fingers.
I could afford a long break in the middle of my life, but most Israelis cannot afford it. No one in the leadership thinks this is a problem that needs treatment, even though we are all tired, irritable, exhausted and angry. Someday this pressure cooker will explode and everyone will talk about the security, economic, and social situation, but no one will talk about the fact that we are simply completely worn out. Maybe it's time we learn from the French and take to the streets for that too.
