Our Death of a Salesman: The Great Resignation

Much has already been written about the mass exodus of workers from their professions during the ongoing pandemic. There are academics across the world studying America’s workforce “problem” using game theory to psychology in hopes to understand exactly why no one wants to live to work anymore.

My immigrant grandparents never went to college. They worked multiple jobs to make ends meet. This kind of “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality was instilled in their baby-boom children. Hard work is honorable. Hard work will pay off and you will rise up the ladder. It was ingrained, on an almost biblical level. However, when the parents of my generation tried to instill this idea that hard work gets rewarded and that “life is about work and that’s just the way it is” mentality, it turned into a form of gaslighting.

Saying something over and over again doesn’t make it true, and the reality is, hard work doesn’t necessarily pay off in our world today.

My generation was told you go to college, put yourself in debt, get a job, pay off your debt, retire if you are lucky, and then you die. However, the pandemic tossed this work until you die mentality on its head and it seems many employers haven’t gotten the message.

We have seen the American workforce leave in droves during the pandemic. Corporate America and higher-ups seem to believe it is because of government incentives. This shortsighted and disconnected view of what is happening with workers highlights the very problem in the American workforce. To think a couple thousand dollars and better unemployment benefits is the cause of the mass resignations we are seeing when the average rent is over $1500 and gas nearing $4 a gallon is obtuse.

According to a study by MIT, more than 40% of employees contemplated leaving their jobs at the beginning of 2021 and between April and by September 24 million did, which is the most ever in recorded history. There is no way one can say this is solely due to better government benefits. Some of it, possibly. All of it, no way. So what is driving this?

In a recent 60 Minutes special on CBS, LinkedIn’s Chief Economist Karin Kimbrough said, “People have been living to work for a very long time. And I think the pandemic brought that moment of reflection for everyone. “What do I wanna do? What makes my heart sing?” And people are thinking, “If not now, then when?”

There is a revelation within American culture, one that combats the gaslighting by previous generations. When the pandemic shut down our world we were forced to retreat into our homes, and while working through a screen we started to see how much our jobs took from our life. Not just in time, but in energy and stress. Do not get me wrong, I am not anti-work or even anti-hard work. I hope my future child works hard, is persistent, and goes after whatever career they want. As well, I appreciate all that previous generations laid before us and do not wish to go back to the working conditions of the mid-twentieth century.

However, I am for the value proposition. I am for being paid your worth and your time. And to not lose your dignity in the process.

But for the first time, we were able to step away from the hullabaloo and commotion of our world and truly rekindle a love of family, quality time, and simpler moments.

Many people spoke of the joy of being able to make breakfast for their family or run an errand during the day without being docked pay or chastised by a boss. People refound a love of childhood activities, ones that adult time at work did not allow for. We saw baseball cards and statue collectors come out of the woodwork. People picked up hobbies that spoke to their soul, learning to cook or sew and read more. It seems as though society was awakening to what we should have been valuing all along in life.

To live a life of balance between their profession and everything that profession is supposed to allow us to enjoy. Our jobs should fund our lives, not be our lives.

And now, as we are asked to return to work, we see a massive shift of employees refusing to adhere to pre-pandemic norms. Workers have now returned with the understanding of how mistreated and misvalued they truly were. The workplace norms that have been passed down since the early days of the 20th century were no longer going to suffice. So workers asked for better wages, improved working and safety conditions, fewer hours, and options for remote or hybrid work. These did not seem crazy as companies and the economy boomed. Despite many companies knowing we can accomplish just as much, if not more from home than we could from our cubicles, they insisted people return to the office.

Companies still believe that forced interaction, the ability to micromanage and reward their workers with a Patagonia vest, and free lunch Fridays were integral to company success when they should have been prioritizing the well-being and mental health of their workers.

People are now quitting jobs across the board. Some bosses and organizations want you to believe this is a market for employees and jobs are everywhere to be had. However, not if those jobs ignore basic workplace standards we now expect. According to CBS, 4.4% of all positions in education are open, over 6% in retail, and more than 8% in health care. Hotels and restaurants are at nearly 9%.

In total that is almost 1.5 million jobs available in careers that have ignored their worker’s basic needs for so long. This isn’t an employer’s market, this is a market of exploitation and it is finally coming to a head.

Unfortunately, it seems many of the fields that have seen this mass exodus of workers don’t view it as a self-created problem. The phrase titled to this mass exodus, “The Great Resignation” is also viewed with side-eyes in corporate America, another glorification and overreaction of the social media age, instead of as an inherent problem within American corporate society. A recent NPR article highlighted the work of Texas A&M psychologist Anthony Klotz who coined the term this past May. He “credits pandemic epiphanies with motivating many workers to depart their jobs for greener pastures. But “experience effects” … remain remarkably under-investigated in economics, which tends to be more focused on the cold, material incentives that influence our behavior.”

In short, no one is looking at the psychology behind American workplace culture.

But this story isn’t new. It has been one told many times in every culture. How do we balance making money and being subservient good little worker bees with having a life, accomplishing goals and dreams? Some are lucky and their career is their dream job. They make enough to be comfortable, have the flexibility, and don’t dread waking up every day to go to work. Most are not that lucky.

I envy and applaud these people, for this is not meant for them. This is meant for the malcontent. The searcher. The person who desires the whole world. The person whose safe place is one outside their comfort zone. This is for the person who wishes to see change and to experience life for what it should be, a great adventure and not one in front of a screen for ten hours a day for a company that does not care about them.

A story that parallels this the best is Arthur Miller’s A Death of a Salesman. In February 1949 Death of a Salesman premiered on Broadway and was instantly recognized as one of the greatest tragic playwrights of the twentieth century. The tragedy was not an uncommon one. It was the tragedy of a man whose pursuit of riches in an unfulfilling career eventually destroyed him. If you have never read it and are wondering what role work should play in your life, I urge you to order a copy today.

As Biff said, why are we “To suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off.”

We are all Biff and Willy Loman. Biff the idealist, wants to live his life, not slaving his precious time away for a corporation to make money while he lives a life of mediocre means and adventure. Willy is the man who judges a life’s success by one’s professional success. We teeter between the two as a culture at the moment and as we saw in the play, these two cannot coexist.

How much more are we willing to sacrifice love, life, and happiness at the altar of the sacred dollar? Biff later said, “I get here, and I don’t know what to do with myself. I’ve always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I’ve done is to waste my life”

So as we see this shift, what will become of the worker? What will become of our hopes and dreams as we realize life should not just be about our professions, but our professions should just be a part of our lives? Will it end in a tragedy? Or was the pandemic the catalyst to a new era? An era that will prove Arthur Miller wrong, one where we rekindle a love for living and not for just working.