Real Real Gone

By DUFF MCDONALD

This was my daughter’s favorite song when she was six years old. She thought “took my baby to the hop last night” was referring to her, my baby girl.

If you’re trolling around online in search of insight into the post-pandemic era, it won’t take you too long to find stories about “The Great Resignation.” Like all good memes, once floated, the idea immediately saturated the Internet like a tablespoon of salt in a pot of warm water. It’s already got its own page on Wikipedia.

Read one story about The Great Resignation, though, and you’ve pretty much read them all. They’ll tell you that a lot of people are quitting their jobs, and then generalize about why that is the case. And in doing so, they will ultimately tell you almost nothing at all. The data is supposed to tell us something, but the data ultimately feels empty when all is said and done. And that’s because it is.

In 2021, we are so far into the era of quantification that we have become incapable of grasping change until and unless it shows up in the numbers. The data we most obsess over, of course, is invariably related to the economy: jobs, salaries, gross domestic product. Hypnotized by capitalism, we find the most meaning in data that is somehow related to money, to the almighty dollar.

Or at least we think we do.

For most of my adult life, I have been a business journalist and author. And I believed, like so many of my colleagues and peers, that if you had the numbers, you had the…