I quit Meta over almost three years ago, after being there for ~10 years. I deleted my LinkedIn the day after. That was it, I had decided to retire.
About a year prior to quitting I found myself crying, howling over a deep loss, such as I had only felt prior when I lost my parents. It was the sudden (or suddenly strong) realization that I was no longer a scientist. Others thrive scientifically and professionally in a corporate environment, but I ultimately wasn’t able to. For almost all of the 10 years at Facebook->Meta, I had been a manager, a role I had reluctantly assumed and then was too cowardly to try to get out of. As incredibly privileged and happy as I felt to head a team of brilliant, deeply-care-about-the-world scientists, whose self-selected work drove impact across the company, I felt stressed and out of place. Over the years both the opportunity (or ability?) to contribute my own novel research and to publish it, had diminished.
With hindsight, I think I could have/should have stayed in academia forever (hard to know though about the path not taken). Originally the plan had been to spend just a sabbatical year at Facebook and then return to the University of Michigan. But it became apparent that my husband’s career and social home was here in the SF Bay Area. So we stayed an extra year, and then another. I could have pushed for us to move back (while I still had not given up the position at UofM) or moved us somewhere else in search of another academic job. But could I have lived with myself after?
And academia is a tough job. Sure, some of the hard work was self-imposed. The way I taught courses involved hands-on labs and projects that took a lot of preparation and grading time. I think it’s important for students to learn by doing and then be able to go do things. I had the good fortune of ending up on a few multi-university grants, and some of my own, so there was a lot of research and coordination to do too. But other aspects seemed just how things were: lots of email, travel, meetings, letter writing, reviewing, etc. etc. After leaving academia, I once again had free time. And I liked it.
Besides the actual time spent working, there was the weight of worry about work. Managing a computational social science team at Facebook/Meta meant having the excitement and accompanying stress of supporting work that impacted a lot of people. It wasn’t like worrying about all the world’s problems, but it was still worrying about a lot of problems (and opportunities). The scientist in me was most excited working on a few things at a time where I could substantively contribute, something I found hard to do while tracking many projects.
There was also a growing gulf between Meta’s focus (e.g. video) and what I felt the world needed (social interaction, community building, and access to good information). It’s not that Meta’s strategy was wrong, video grew just as predicted, but personally I think that occasionally a video is worth a thousand words, but more often it’s worth 5 words and personally I’d rather read them. Studies (e.g. a natural experiment which occurred in Italy [1]) have linked the staggered introduction of entertainment media TV that supplemented and displaced national TV, with a decrease in civic engagement and interest in politics (and more populist votes). Moving toward showing people engaging videos in endless feeds is not what I want to be a part of.
So that was the push out of the corporate world, with re-entering the academic one seeming remote and daunting. What if I chose to not work any more? I’d saved up, and my husband is still working, and maybe that would be enough. If not, then you can laugh when I run into the ground.
What to do if not work? Like many people, I chose one path (science) and not another (art). It felt like it was too late to get seriously into art, but who had to be serious? Especially if one’s livelihood does not depend on it. There’s a bit of guilt over not doing something more useful. There appears to be a dearth of workers in some professions. Maybe I could re-train and do something pro-bono, fight some good fight? But the prospect of doing nothing useful is too tempting. Even more so when I can do a lot of nothing useful in my favorite place: Bol, Croatia.
When I was little my grandmother sang to me as we gazed together out at the sea in Bol:
Tamo daleko, daleko kraj mora, Tamo je selo moje, tamo je ljubav moja. Dođi, mi dođi, da skupa živimo mi. Jer vrijeme prolazi brzo, i život taj nesretni. | There far, far by the sea, There is my village, there is my love. Come, come to me, so that we can live together. Because time passes quickly, and this unfortunate life too. |
My memories of the happy summers with her in Bol anchored that longing in my heart to be there. All my life I had wanted to spend more time there. I would anticipate the vacation, and then get horribly depressed every time I had to leave, and then it was the countdown again. But what if I didn’t have to leave?
Bol has also been undergoing a lot of change, and not for the better. The sea, the view from the cottage, maybe it would have waited for me until I retired in old(er) age, or maybe not. The neighbors whose property is between ours and the sea just planted a small aleppo pine. One day it will be a big beautiful aleppo pine and the view won’t be the same. Seize today’s view, I say.
Not at the cottage that my parents built twenty years ago (view pictured above), but in the condo in town where I visited my grandmother, the terrace she and I used to sit out on was separated from the sea by a narrow one-lane road. In the winter the waves generated by the strong southerly wind would throw beach pebbles up onto the terrace. The sea was that close. During the day we watched the ever changing colors of the water’s surface and waxed poetic about it; at night we would look up at the stars. Then as part of progress, the road was widened. A bright streetlight was installed that shone onto the terrace. One could no longer see stars. The wider road allowed passers-by to look onto the terrace, we watchers of the sea became the watched. Where small dinghies were once anchored off of small private anchors, now larger boats could dock. Flotillas of rowdy sailboats arrive a couple of times a week in summer and clamor into the early morning hours. For years now Bol has been planning to build an entire marina that will swallow up the remaining two little beaches in front of the terrace in favor of more boats and diesel fumes.
Giving up on work, in a way, is giving up on being part of the future. And giving up on the future requires some pessimism. That I have plenty of. When I was considering bringing a child into the world, I feared that the future would not be as good as the present and ever since then I have been grateful for each year he has been alive and things have not gone to shit. I think he has so much to bring to the world, so the world should pull itself together and be around to receive it.
Though I don’t expect nuclear armageddon, I also wouldn’t be surprised if it occurred, or if we continue to fail to stop catastrophic climate change, or we’re wiped out or nearly wiped out by a pathogen. Some days I look around and I remember the reflections Feynman wrote in Surely you’re joking Mr. Feynman after the first atomic bombs were dropped: “And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they’d be making a new road, and I thought, they’re crazy, they just don’t understand, they don’t understand. Why are they making new things? It’s so useless.” He goes on to say that he was glad he was wrong about impending doom, and that he hopes that he will continue to be wrong. I also hope that I’m wrong.
But still the calculation changes a bit if one suspects that this is the best things are going to be for a while, and one can either stop and enjoy these things, or trudge through hoping that there will still be opportunity to enjoy something once the trudgery is over. I feared that Trump would get re-elected, and that this would bring worse times (because a major world power would be headed by someone not able to do the job); that it is as if we are all living in pre-WWI Vienna, enjoying our consumer renaissance and not knowing what is about to happen. I’m glad I got two and a half years to enjoy pre-2nd Trump term, not that all was entirely well in the world. Now that Trump is in office again, I may start wishing for the distraction of a job.
Even if the world does not decline, I certainly will sooner or later. It was before my father passed away about ten years ago, that it struck me how odd it is that we’re all running around, striving, trying, worrying about this or that thing, but we’re all going to die. My dad worked hard all his life, at work, and at home, keeping busy with various projects. Same, probably even more so, with my mom. I looked up both of their publication records some time after they had retired. I thought about all those weekends we all drove to my mom’s chemistry lab so she could tend to some reaction, or the Saturdays she would spend in the CU Boulder library looking up papers she could use in her research, the nights they worked on their presentations, or the magazine my dad edited until the early morning hours. And then once they retired, it was behind them. In retirement, they built a little cottage in Croatia with a garden, and from what they constructed you could see that they had ambitious plans, to work the land, to make things. And they enjoyed about a decade or so, but my dad often complained that he wasn’t in form any more to do what he wanted to do, and part of the planned projects never came to fruition.
The fact that they are no longer around, that they can’t see me giving up, made the decision to retire easier. Maybe they would have understood. I won’t know.
But back to doing nothing. I want to enjoy life by being more aware of my and other beings living. As I wrote before, in my younger years understanding more and more about life, the universe, and everything, seemed to satisfy my need for making sense of life. But the longer I’ve been around, the stranger existing feels and the more I want to have the time to just contemplate and experience it. I like to contemplate the plants and insects and birds and sip tea and go for a swim and not feel like I was wasting time. In the movie Nomadland, a woman with terminal cancer describes kayaking somewhere with swallows flying over her and how in that moment she felt that her life was complete and that if she died then it would be perfectly fine. I have felt like that myself sometimes when I swim in the sea in Croatia by the cottage my parents built. The sense of completeness and happiness, maybe it diminishes the desire to get back to the grind, if one feels one has lived.
Although I enjoy seeing the swallows swooping over as I kayak in Croatia, it is the elusive tiny kingfishers that are the most magical to me, with bright blue wings and back, bright orange on the belly. My mom had spotted one as we were swimming near a shallow cave in the cliffs, and I felt like it was my dad’s spirit, coming to say hello to us. Then after my mom passed away, a pair of kingfishers flew one after the other over me as I swam, and I thought, that’s the both of them, visiting. Last summer I saw just a single kingfisher, and as it fluttered by, I thought, that’s my career. Just kidding.
I follow up with a post about what retirement is like.
[1] Durante, R., Pinotti, P., & Tesei, A. (2019). The political legacy of entertainment TV. American Economic Review, 109(7), 2497-2530.
“… I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar.”
https://www.amherstlecture.org/perry2007/Borges%20and%20I.pdf
Thanks for sharing this.