Emotional and Professional Absenteeism
The older I get, the more I think that one of the most important skills of adulthood is just pretending to give a shit about stuff you could care less about in order to make the person presenting the care-less info to you feel better. I literally do this 10–12 times/day. People send me texts about inane shit, and I respond with an actual response. Most people I have in my orbit do the exact opposite, and just don’t respond. I literally texted a multi-decade friend of mine about IVF the other day — seems like a big topic — and, days on, no response. I can type “Good luck!” in 2 seconds. Why is this so hard for people? Maybe you don’t give a flying fuck about my wife’s egg retrieval. In reality, you probably don’t. But if I provided you the information, you should respond in kind with “Prayers!” or “Good luck!” or some such. At the point of response, I almost do not care whether you actually care. I just want the response. So lob that bad boy over the fence in 2–3 seconds, and go back to your actual life.
I would love to come out here and talk about “deeper connections” and the like. Talk about “being empathetic to others.” But the reality is, most people have a very specific nexus (locus) of control, and can only manage certain things in an hour, day, or week — and some days are bad, and you forget to respond, and yadda yadda yadda there are a million excuses we all give. So deeper connection is possible, but not at scale. Those are special relationships. For all the other relationships, just feign interest, acknowledge the text or email, and make the other person feel seen/heard before you return to your glorious existence.
It can be similar at work, of course.
A few years ago, I went to a mini-conference for recruiting in Arlington, VA. I had to be there at 7am to set up. Most employees of the place hosting it got there around 8:30am. As the conference is starting up, I notice this guy, maybe mid-40s, who gets to work at 9:15am. He leaves again, with seemingly a gym bag, at 10am. He comes back around 11:20. He leaves again at 12pm. He comes back at 1:30. He leaves again at 2:15, telling some people “Off to get the kids.”
I asked someone who worked there and, funnily enough, he was the “VP of Product.”
If you add the in-office time, he was probably at work about 1 hour or so max … and now maybe this guy burns the midnight oil or is excellent at providing context on email. Awesome. So maybe projects are moving along (good), but I doubt very few who report into this guy feel like they have a strong connection to him or career development possibilities or whatever else.
I could be wrong, but I bet I’m not.
I’ve had many bosses like this. I had a guy at ESPN, not my direct boss but on a bunch of work projects, who repeatedly called me “Andy.” My name is Ted. You didn’t even get the first letter right. So if you’re doing that constantly, do I assume you care? Do I want to work hard for you?
There are a lot of different types of bad bosses in the world — here’s one list and here’s another — but we spend a lot of our time and attention on either (a) the bullying kind or (b) the micromanaging kind. In reality we should be talking about all of these idiots more, because 82% of managers end up being the wrong hire , which is an astronomical fucking failure rate that would never be tolerated in other parts of the business, and because bad management is legitimately leading people to earlier deaths. These are important discussions.
It’s always interested me, though, that we don’t discuss the absentee manager more. This is the kind who does nothing — they barely talk to you, they almost never acknowledge your existence, and yet, when a train is coming for them, you’re the first one going under it. We’ve all had (sadly) or seen (also sadly) this type of person. They’re super, super common.
They’re getting more common with tech. All tech is from a management perspective is a way to hide. E-mail is a platform to hide behind. We all know face-to-face is more effective (been proven by research ), but we love e-mail because “it can scale” or whatever. But then we started hating e-mail (confusing), so we replaced it with Slack/other tools, but now we’re all bitching about those tools because it’s too much stuff to manage. Meanwhile, it’s just more platforms for managers to hide within, poorly contextualize assignments, and generally be asshats.
It’s hard to make this stuff better, unfortunately.
Bureaucracy allows people to hide and be absentee — essentially not do their job — but make more money in the process. All you need to do is:
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Tech made all this easier, unfortunately.
I write a lot about friendship and relationships, which is probably paradoxical to some who know me because I’m not always the greatest friend and I’m definitely not that great in relationships, i.e. I’ve been divorced. I drink like a fucking fish sometimes and can’t totally get that under control, and I’ve got a whole bunch of other problems around self-esteem, purpose, value, and the like. I’m a largely broken person, if we’re being self-aware.
But one thing I do semi-well, or at least periodically, is try to hit people up. I go through periods where these outreaches are insanely generic, like “Good weekend?” and they don’t get much response or engagement. When I go more specific like “How is your wife handling the passing of her dad?” it tends to be a bit better. But I do it. I could be better — we all could — but I do it.
One of the most distressing elements of adulthood to me has always been how people operate their lives according to checking boxes and subsequently hiding behind those boxes, i.e. “No time, busy with the kids!” or “No time, work has been crazy busy lately!” I fully understand that your profession and your offspring are ultimately two of the main — probably the two main — things you will define yourself by in waning moments, but I also think there’s a vast ecosystem and landscape of relationships beyond your partner and any potential offspring, biological or not.
Every single person in the world currently knows at least one person who is struggling with something — a passing of a loved one, generalized anxiety or depression, feeling alone, “trigger days” like Mother’s Day, etc. If you are reading these words right now, you know at least one person who is struggling. We all do. Reach out to them. And if you aren’t sure who “them” is because you don’t see people struggling in the platform economy, well, reach out to people in general and you’ll find out who’s struggling (and who’s thriving).
Just do that. Reach out. Be a human being. This stuff is significantly more important than you realize, and we know that both anecdotally and via research into suicide notes, hospice nurses, and more.
So just put it on the deck. Reach out. You could change someone’s entire day, week, month, or even year.
One of the best quotes I’ve come across in the last year is this one:
And as I thought about this, I realized it’s like we’ve all been fed since birth, a kind of KFC for the soul. We’ve been trained to look for happiness in all the wrong places, and just like junk food doesn’t meet your nutritional needs and actually makes you feel terrible, junk values don’t meet your psychological needs, and they take you away from a good life. But when I first spent time with professor Kasser and I was learning all this, I felt a really weird mixture of emotions. Because on the one hand, I found this really challenging. I could see how often in my own life, when I felt down, I tried to remedy it with some kind of show-offy, grand external solution. And I could see why that did not work well for me. I also thought, isn’t this kind of obvious? Isn’t this almost like banal, right? If I said to everyone here, none of you are going to lie on your deathbed and think about all the shoes you bought and all the retweets you got, you’re going to think about moments of love, meaning and connection in your life. I think that seems almost like a cliché. But I kept talking to professor Kasser and saying, “Why am I feeling this strange doubleness?” And he said, “At some level, we all know these things. But in this culture, we don’t live by them.” We know them so well they’ve become clichés, but we don’t live by them. I kept asking why, why would we know something so profound, but not live by it? And after a while, professor Kasser said to me, “Because we live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life.” I had to really think about that. “Because we live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life.”
I’ve written about this kind of stuff a million times; here’s one in the context of Sandy Hook.
Lemme ask you, then:
1. How do you foster relationships? 2. How do you find time for them? 3. What gets in the way?
Always excited to hear from people who read this stuff.