I quit my job. With no plan and no next job lined up, I quit.I sent my two weeks notice via email to my boss and his boss and waited. After years of corporate nonsense, the burn out had left me a husk of who I was. My girlfriend noticed it every day and begged me to quit. I could see it as well but continued to let it happen. After many self imposed deadlines had come and gone, I finally told myself I had to stand by one of them. And I did. I had quit.

Growing up, my father was an entrepreneur. He had a painting business when I was young. It was just him and my step mom doing the work. Occasionally he’d hire a couple guys to help on bigger jobs but it was relatively small. Then when we moved to Oregon, he and my step mom started a janitorial company. Just him, my step mom, and my child labor. I would help out when I visited on school breaks. Essentially, I have been in the work force since I was 10 years old.. None of these businesses set the world on fire but they kept food on the table and a roof over our heads. Watching this while growing up instilled an entrepreneurial mindset with myself. A desire for self sufficiency.

What I am trying to get across is that I was never going to make it in the corporate world and that is my fault for trying. The nonsensical standards and procedures these corporations come up with is mind numbing to me. The talking in circles and made up vocabulary is laughable. Useless meetings and trainings that get in the way of doing the actual job. The incessant preaching of community while their actions consistently put down the average worker. Everyday seemed like I was wearing a mask to play along with the corporate live action role playing going on. Meanwhile, my coworkers ate it up. They relished in the corporate tom foolery and aimed to please the corporate overlords watching. All I could think was that I am putting all my time and effort into making someone else a buck.

Burn out has hit me a couple times now in my life and I am only 30 years old. While I feel old, I know I am in no way “fully seasoned”. I have been asking myself “why is it that I keep getting burnt out?” I have now gotten burned out twice in two different jobs with two different companies. Most people are able to power through their daily life and toil away at the jobs and keep going, but not me. What is wrong with me? What in me is programmed differently than everyone else? But as I have reflected, I don’t think we are all that different. The only thing is that I have allowed myself to quit and change course. And I will tell you that it was incredibly hard to let myself do that. Ask my girlfriend and she will recite all the moments she begged me to quit because of how my job was affecting me. 

The entrepreneurial drive that was instilled in me so early, I believe, has made me a great employee. I see the value of my work and the value it has for a business. I put my all into the job I am doing. To my own detriment. Everything becomes personal and I can’t disconnect because I get invested in it like it is my own personal business. That’s all on me. And when I see myself caring more than my middle manager boss does, it rubs me the wrong way. As it would anyone. My boss is obviously getting paid more than me so therefore they should be caring more than me, but that is not always the case.

One main reason I left is because while my company preached a “pro employee and community” culture, I found they were not in fact that at all. I was in a middle manager role and I had 14 people on my team. I tried my best to listen to all of them and help them best I could. Several came to me for wage increases and based on their work and my knowledge of the industry, they had merit to get a pay increase. I ran it up the corporate chain of command and was met with stiff pushback each time. Management would even interpret the same job qualifications differently to fit their reason for denial of a workers promotion. Pointing this out to HR and the management team only put me in the cross hairs even more. And when I had to tell the employee the company is not able to help them, they grew frustrated and took out their anger on me. So now I was in the middle of a rock and a hard place with both my team and my own managers. The same story I am sure is shared by every middle manager in the U.S. 

Now I had saved up some money, giving me a few months of a safety net. I was incredibly lucky to have this as I know a lot of people are not in the same boat and that’s why they put up with soulless deadend jobs. Where do I go from here? I have no clue honestly. I am tired of toiling away for corporate overlords who do not know which of that they speak. Metrics, KPI’s, and SOP’s be damned! 

Artificial intelligence was one of the breaking points for me. The consistent push to use it in every aspect of my day to day workings was irritating. I managed an automotive shop. How the hell is AI supposed to help us? I had my managers send me AI diagnosis on cars that my techs were having trouble with and they were so wildly inaccurate that I had to start teaching an Auto Shop 101 and Diagnosis class via email to educate them on how vehicles work. Our general manager once asked us to input a prompt asking the AI to give us an in depth and thoughtful review of each of us. I was curious and I tried it. I had only used it a few times to help spruce up an email or two, so I wondered how it could know anything about me. The response by the AI was very in depth but sounded somewhat generic. So I pushed it. I kept asking how it could know that much about me. After a few responses, it finally said that it did not know that much about me and made assumptions based on my position with the company and how typical middle managers are. Utterly useless. I showed the conversation to everyone including the manager who asked us to do this. There was no change in their attitude toward AI and they continued to push it. The few times I have used AI, it has made me feel completely stupid. That feeling when the teacher would call on you and you’d blank out is what I experienced. The feeling engulfed me and I felt like an absolute idiot. What was produced had no life or humanity. It was just an email but it sounded so corporate and lifeless. And it wasn’t me. I put in no effort. It felt wrong.

Another AI blunder was when a coworker and I were discussing a vehicle and he informed me it had a diesel engine. This intrigued me as this vehicle never came with a diesel engine until this newer model year. So I Googled it to get the specs on it. Google’s AI popped up first on the search results and while it was listing off the specs it also suggested that for best results on MPG in the vehicle to run either diesel or 92 octane gasoline. That is so blatantly wrong and dangerous to let AI suggest to someone that they can run gasoline in their diesel engine. This is what people are blindly putting their trust in.

With the state of the world currently and my pessimistic view on it all, I decided that I no longer wanted to waste my days for someone else. While I am not starting my own business as of yet, I am taking time to enjoy my time off and the things I took for granted before. The other day, we pulled out the little blue kiddie pool for our dogs. Simon, a little terrier with husky-like fur, jumped and splashed around in it and went berserk. I rarely have seen him have so much fun. That day alone made it worth it to have quit. To see him having so much fun filled my heart with so much joy. We have been able to go camping and I am planning on going on motorcycle trips this summer. I am going to make the most of my time off so when I eventually have to reenter the work force, I won’t have any regrets.

When I do go back, I want to do something meaningful. Something that helps society. Even if it’s working for the local parks department, taking care of our lovely parks system for people to use. It’s impactful. I no longer want my lifeforce being used to help a large and lifeless corporation. The world is on a bad trajectory and I do not want to feed into it.