All Haste is of the Devil: Why I Quit My Corporate "Dream" Job
I spent 12+ years working hard for the job I finally had.
It was exactly what I sought in so many ways:
A 15 minute commute in my hometown and community that I love
A hybrid work environment which allowed for a blend of socializing (office) and focus (home)
A great boss who golfed with me over a beer on Friday after work
A great team with a ton of talent and a collaborative environment
A data analyst role which I had worked hard to become qualified for
A comfortable salary which, for my lifestyle, allowed me not to worry about money
A secure future with a good company helping build important products for the government
And, I was DEEPLY unhappy.
It felt meaningless.
I felt like I was going faster and faster in the wrong direction.
I had thought about quitting for a long time but I was afraid of the unknown.
What will my friends and family think?
Will my boss and coworkers feel betrayed?
What will I do about money?
What will I do with my time?
Eventually, I came across a passage in Carl Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections that struck me to the core.
I realized with certainty that the specifics of my job were not going to provide meaning. My questions were bigger, existential in nature. What is meaning? Was my work bringing me closer to it or further from it?
Carl Jung writes …
Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The “newness” in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in such things. We are very far from having finished completely with the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend. Nevertheless, we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots. Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated, and there is no stopping the forward motion. But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the “discontents” of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up. We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of greater freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to the state. The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of the gravity.
Reforms by advances, that is, by new methods or gadgets, are of course impressive at first, but in the long run they are dubious and in any case dearly paid for. They by no means increase the contentment or happiness of people on the whole. Mostly, they are deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever before. Omnis festination ex parte diaboli est – all haste is of the devil, as the old masters used to say.
Reforms by retrogressions, on the other hand, are as a rule less expensive and in addition more lasting, for they return to the simpler, tried and tested ways of the past and make the sparsest use of newspapers, radio, television, and all supposedly timesaving innovations.
I decided to approach my career crises with what Jung calls “reform by retrogression”. Five months ago I quit my corporate job. I am now a certified executive leadership coach, a mindfulness meditation teacher, and a part-time employee.
I traded speed for depth, complexity for simplicity, money for time, quantity for quality. It is not easy, but I have never felt more alive.
Wish me luck ! 🙏
Who is with me?
What am I missing?
What are your thoughts on Carl Jung’s passage?
What does meaning mean to you?
Bold move, Tyler! I wish you well as you go where you’re being led.
This line jumped out at me:
We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise