Forget the Big Quit, Your Employees are Having a Work-Life Awakening
While Employers Try to Keep Workers Working, Workers are Busy Taking Back Their Lives
As a child of the 80’s and 90’s, going to the mall to hangout was our equivalent of today’s teenagers with mobile phones, text chats, and TikTok videos. Instagram was literally leaning up against a wall in the food court and checking people out as they walked by, you’d like what you saw by lifting up your chin to nod at someone, and to comment, you would simply say “what’s up?!” [Author’s note: this was before the famous original Budweiser “whassup?!” campaign in ‘99 or the current just “sup?”]
Each time we went to the mall, I will never forget taking the requisite stroll through Spencer’s Gifts as a harmless way to misbehave — they had all the naughty and edgy games (precursors to Cards Against Humanity), gag gifts, sex toys, and rebellious apparel (it’s where I got all my Public Enemy t-shirts see embarrassing photo below for proof — you can clearly see Flavor Flav).
They sold a lot of posters (that used to be a thing) and there was one poster that stuck with me — on the surface it wasn’t all that controversial, but for some reason the image and words seared deep into my psyche: It read “He Who Has The Most Toys When He Dies…Wins.” In the photo on the poster, you can see a massive mansion on a lake with numerous expensive cars, a motorcycle, a helicopter on the lawn, and no less than 4 attractive and nicely dressed young ladies standing by the cars. In the foreground you see 6 male pallbearers in dark suits carrying a casket to a hearse with another Cadillac limousine behind it with a driver awaiting the delivery.
At the time, I think the message was here’s a guy who has lived the most awesome life because he accumulated all these cool and expensive toys and appears to have had multiple attractive partners— and if you don’t achieve this, then you’re a loser. It was a poster equivalent of holding up Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in the Wolf of Wall Street as the ideal role model. What made it stick with me for over 30 years is that all I could think of then and now is this: he who has the most toys when he dies, still dies and you can’t take any of that crap with you.
At the same time, most of us like to act like we are not materialistic, we “put family first,” and we work for more than just money. The reality, for many of us, is we have put off what is most important to us in this life until we have made enough money to then pursue it or enjoy it — and by then, it may be too late. Have you ever said, “I will finally do X once I have earned enough money?” I will finally write that book, I will finally teach, I will finally start that business, I will finally take those salsa lessons with my wife, I will finally take that trip, I will finally make time to go visit my mom before it's too late. This money-based procrastination to then finally pursue X allows us to keep moving the goalposts out further and further on ourselves so that we don’t ever end up doing it. And like the Parable of the Rich Fool, what if this very night your life is demanded from you? “Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?”
The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered “Man! Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”
Lately, I have read a lot of research about the great resignation or the big quit as some are calling it. Most of the insights and recommendations focus on what companies and employers get wrong in their employee value proposition and what, as an organization, you can do to improve retention— you need better bosses / managers, you need to reward and recognize people more fairly and frequently — even care about them as human beings (I cannot believe in 2021 this has to be said), help them find meaning in their work, and create an environment of inclusivity, belonging, and psychological safety. All of these things are focused on preventing employees from leaving. To truly understand what is going on, there needs to be much more attention placed on what is the “burning yes” your employees are leaving you for…I believe many people are using the pandemic to reset their priorities with a renewed emphasis on life and then work. It is about work being a part of our lives, but not defining who we are or life itself. It’s like the collective global workforce received a terminal diagnosis, decided to once and for all put first things first, and then got a second lease on life. I hope we do not go back to our old ways.
My personal hero, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., famously said, “If a man hasn’t found something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.” I like to flip this around and say if a man hasn’t found something worth living for, then death will make haste, or you will be an insufferable curmudgeon until it does. Notice I did not say find something worth working for…what do YOU live for? do you live for the adventures? The experiences? Seeing the world? The growth and learning? To love and be loved? To coach your kid’s little league team? Walk them down the aisle one day? Stick around so you can play with the grandkids and share some wisdom with them? Do you live to create something that will last beyond you? I am not talking about generational wealth (which often arrests the development of kids and their parents — just look at most trust fund babies as adults), I am talking about tapping into your natural talents and using them to make your unique contribution to the world. I am guessing it is not amassing expensive toys.
A good friend recently sent me Stephen Pressfield’s The War of Art and I devoured it in one sitting. Pressfield literally went through all these jobs before finally finding his calling as an author: United States Marine, advertising copywriter, schoolteacher, tractor-trailer driver, bartender, oilfield roustabout, attendant in a mental hospital, fruit-picker in Washington state, and failed screenwriter (before he was a successful one). Pressfield nails what I believe is at the core of the awakening we are witnessing in people right now. “Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.” Our job in this life is not accumulating material things, it is not a zero-sum competition against our fellow men and women, in fact there are no winners or losers in life — there are only those who let others write their life story for them (conformists) and those brave souls who venture out and write their own biographies.
In business school, one of my professors proclaimed there are 3 distinct phases to life, each being roughly 25–30 years (if you are lucky enough to live that long) — learning, followed by earning, and finally returning. I believe he ascribed this concept to J.P. Morgan, the rich Wall Street financier. This idea seems like total bull shit to me. Shouldn’t we be learning all the time and returning all the time and if we do both of these with discipline as a part of our life’s work, then we shouldn’t have to worry about earning…it is an outcome of the other two. I believe the younger generations got wise to this idea of learning and returning is the purpose of life much quicker than Boomers and Gen X. Sorry, but we are catching up!
We were conditioned to put our noses to the grindstone. If you had a decent paying job with decent benefits, then you better keep it regardless of whether or not it’s killing a part of your soul. I’ll never forget my great Uncle encouraging me to stay in the military until I got a government pension and turn down my opportunity to go to graduate school because the military had guaranteed pay and benefits — even if it was a relatively small paycheck. In our parents’ and grandparents' generations, you would spend 20, 30, 40+ years slogging it out at the same company — often in the same role for the same boss. Job hopping was a sin. “Same shit, different day” could have been their slogan.
Loyalty to your employer was everything. Then, overtime, employers stopped being loyal to their employees while still expecting it in return. Funded pension plans became unfunded and eventually non-existent. Retirement, healthcare, vacation, and other benefits got squeezed and cut back. According to the Economic Policy Institute, “From 1978 to 2020, CEO pay based on realized compensation grew by 1,322%. . .In contrast, compensation of the typical worker grew by just 18.0% from 1978 to 2020.” The bosses got the most toys while the workers were told to be more productive, essentially do more with less. Oh, and flexibility, to have a life outside of work, that was just a pipedream of those petulant kiddos that did not know that life is all about working for the man. If you want a fun glimpse in to what the younger generations think about our dogmatic dedication to working ourselves to death, then simply watch the band Surfaces’ catchy feel-good hit Sunday Best:
With our eyes wide open, maybe we will see that this great resignation really isn’t a resignation at all. People are not just quitting their jobs; they are embracing their lives unlived. Work is not worth it if you can’t have time to do what is most valuable to you. People have decided to stop waiting for that. It is a realization that there is more to life than work and employers better start recognizing that life comes first or there won’t be many people lining up to do your bidding.
