Getting laid off has its perks I guess. I can apply for unemployment, a chance to pull from a system that my kind rarely benefit from despite paying thousands into. I would be the first to admit my job was on the border of fakery but in the American system that is just par the course. White collar work always tends to border on fakery and reality, there were of course many aspects that were real about my last job and perhaps if I shift industries I’ll write more about the learnings from that industry. Suffice to say it is a real one that powers much of the internet and my role was real in the sense we produced online products used by real people.
Being a rare in office employee I actually had the rare distinction of being called up to an office instead of the mass invite mass lay off call (20% in a fell swoop). My boss, delivering the news was more emotional than I was - an over feeling man of good intentions but warped by the hyper-sensitivity of modern life and an abandonment of masculine notions of the stiff upper lip. A few short sentences and then pack your things. A few shocked goodbyes from other in office colleagues and then a mid morning drive home to drink some lager and touch literal grass.
I’m not fortunate enough to be a home owner so there isn’t a mortgage to worry about, rent yes and the severance is good enough for a little while at least. The worrying part is of course what comes next. The white collar industry I’ve carved a ‘career’ out in is openly hostile to white men such as myself. It’s not just patently obvious with all the signaling openly but also subtly. In previous roles I’ve even been privy to conversations that have explicitly discussed hiring a ‘minority’ candidate over a white man - if only there was a friendly regime in charge to rat out these anti-whites to. There will be a bitter tooth and claw fight I’m sure to find a new job - merit doesn’t count for much until you are in the door these days.
Companies can still be effective and interesting places to work, even surrounded by liberals and bugmen there is some solace in real work being done. A small enough company by and large avoids much of the prevailing dogma, it is still there of course but less potent and humiliating. The humiliating part is getting past the gate keepers of HR. That is where the young single college females end up, being nurtured by older embittered females. Bitterness and ideology creating a barrier that you have to get by as a white man. You have to somehow squeeze pass the algorithmic checks (that they would of course deny) and the anti-white bias (from fellow whites 90% of the time) and only then do you get in front of the mildly competent people who you might actually be working for.
There feels like there is a contraction going on in general. Even the Hegelian dialect that so many people passively subscribe to feels shakier. A cursory glance at some of the options out there with similar titles suggest salaries are perhaps shrunken or mine was overblown, though with inflation and living costs I am leaning towards some companies realizing they can pay less again. Or is it all a plot to drive towards the H1B hiring… Such thoughts are never far away. Everything feels hollow to me now, freed in one sense from the mundanity of an online job in the knowledge economy you look at the entire sector more critically. What kind of wealth is being generated, what kind of life being built? What are these products that are out there?
There is some hope of course - New Founding - appears to be a promising venture. An attempt to right the ship both ideologically but also with meaning to the work. The job board is small for now but shows promise. Debating about the rise of a parallel economy is interesting but the nitty gritty fact is to some extent we are in it together, that is society. Work and attitudes at work can make huge changes to the culture as a whole. Any attempt to right the ship matters at the base level because that is where most of us actually live. We’re in normal jobs living normal lives when not posting online. Most of our peers have same fears we do and during times of hardship those fears and priorities shift. I’m not able to make a money from poetry or punditry, it’s just not possible. I need healthcare coverage and money for food on the table - that means a job.
The last moment of reflection here circles back to what I knew of the situation at my last job. That company was around 240 people and I had seen a big round of layoffs before. In fact that appeared to have been the pattern. Grow, hire, miss plan, lay people off. The curious fact to the ordinary person would be that even though we were “missing plan” the company had grown YoY. We were still making more than before and there was a chance to continue to do that. Now of course hearing from those that remain things look even more perilous. Lay offs can preserve a CEO’s position but the talent beneath might decide to start making moves. How many times can a CEO repeat the same pattern before a board realize this man is just not capable of taking the company to the ‘next step’. Our current capitalist system is haunted by this kind of manageralism - where board and investor profits tower so high that the duty to the employee is long lost and abandoned. People shouldn’t be just ‘kept around’ but there is a vicious element at play here any in this sector will know, smoke and mirrors and numbers.
If you do feel like supporting me during what I hope is temporary unemployment buying a copy of either of my poetry books remains the best way to do so. My chapbook and my debut collection