Philosophy got its start in slave and serf societies, so it is no wonder that it is structured, systematically, around the master – slave (or serf) encounter. All of modernity is summed up in the simple phrase: I quit. The slave or serf can escape – which is at the root of adventure – but they cannot simply quit.
Modern philosophy should, then, be able to tell us something about quitting. Mostly, though, it doesn’t. It is most unhelpful about this simple fact of secular life. Heidegger in Being and Time can start a discourse about technology with some observations on a tool or instrument breaking – that is, no longer working. But the idea of no longer working as a voluntary act for someone, stopping doing this or that for pay, which is a small baseline for understanding one’s whole adult life in the "Free World", is part of the modernization project he rejects.
Myself, I’ve had, I reckon, at least thirty jobs in my life, from the time I was eleven and started bagging ice for my Pa’s ice company up until I had a part time job trying to sell over the phone a software designed for doctor’s offices. In the 00s, I’ve basically lived a hit and miss life on gigs, writing or editing, freelancing my way to the poorhouse.
I sort of miss quitting.
Quitting is a very context-specific kind of deal. It has inherited the slave’s escape, at least unconsciously, but the quitter is not pursued. Or, if pursued, only by the usual suspects – the landlord, the power company, the peep’s you owe five hundred more dollars to on the used jalopy you are tooling in. Sometimes, quitting is resigning, and has that sad little dignity, crowned by going out for drinks somewhere with your fellow workers. Sometimes, not. One inglorious job that sticks out in my mind was working as a laborer at a site where they were building warehouses, which I got via a highschool friend, Woody. We worked in the Atlanta summer heat – which was not great – and we did things like put down the asphalt for the parking lot, etc. I would have stuck it out except that somehow, I got assigned to follow around a spoiled son of one of the warehouse owners – or, perhaps, the son of some bigshot in the construction company that was erecting said warehouses. In any case, he was a rare combination of stupid, arrogant, and bully. Not my friend! I’m averse to the put on servility that is the mask demanded in such situations – I just can’t do it.
I remember little about that job, but I do remember the day I quit. I had no money nor prospects, and I was thus in a pickle – but that quitting was a high like unto some heroin user’s finest shot. It glows in my past. Sometimes, quitting is the best thing.
Other times, it isn’t. Quitting for instance a job I had as a searcher for a real estate insurance company in Santa Fe was a sad thing. I was leaving town. My supervisor said I was blowing my chance, and that was true – I probs could have stayed there and climbed the ladder of real estate insurance searching, such as it is. But I had wandering feet, at the time. Still, it was a big suppressed sob laden farewell.
As everybody knows now, the air of freedom is being sucked out of the Western neo-lib societies, and nowhere is that truer than in the way quitting has dropped out of our popular imaginations, except for those on the upper level – the top echelon can be seen to quit on tv shows and movies and in newspapers in the same way they take vacations to beach destinations in the far niente. Beyond our means, viewer.
You can dream a little dream, but can you afford it?
Bring back quitting.
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