The Greatest Resignation

• Bored and/or disillusioned at work and rethinking your options?
• Heartbroken for Ukraine but feel helpless?
• Tired of an endless news cycle of negativity?
• Want work with meaning but not sure where to start?

There is an answer to these problems.

Like every AA meeting, like every visit to the doctor; it starts with some home truths.

I promise you it gets easier. But before the light comes dark. The day you'll never forget. The Doctor comes in with a clipboard and a concerned expression.

They've found a lump.

Bad News

We'll start with the prognosis and work backwards from there.

SPM.D.5.3 The cumulative scientific evidence is unequivocal: Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health.

Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.?

This is from this weeks IPCC report.

Our planet's doctor.

Telling us what we knew deep down, the bad habits are manifest.

Theres a black blob on the screen. Brief... rapidly closing. 'A few years at best.'

We never think we'll get cancer until that day at the doctors. Everything we spend our time on: career, mortgage, media, success, money and recognition suddenly mean nothing.

Denial. It simply cant be. So we get a second opinion... Then we get the opinion of the entire global scientific community and they tell us the same thing.

A few years.... at best.

It dawns on you. You're f*cked.

And when you've stopped pretending it isn't happening, when you stop crying, when you realise all the time you wasted chasing 'success', and you break the news to the people who actually matter in your life, you start looking at options.

Immunotherapy

Hormone therapy

Chemotherapy,

Options. None of them easy, but each representing a way out, a chance. Hope.

Today, this is the place we find ourselves in, the doctors waiting room with a leaflet that says IPCC 22 on it.

Our careers, our politics, our spending habits our ideals fuelled by poison gases, predicated on a dogma of GDP infinite growth, means we have funded a war in Ukraine, we have trashed the planet we have made ourselves very sick.

Bad Habits

We never think we will become an addict. Then one day we wake up in bed next to a disgusting old Russian, a man we know is a killer, just to secure our next fix. We know he is spending the money on killing people, yet we make sure the sanctions don't apply to oil and gas - we still buy our fix.

Then we look around the room and realise we have sold everything we had to fuel our addiction.

Today Russia.

Yesterday it was Iraq.

Tomorrow it will be Saudi Arabia bombing Yemen. Again.

And no matter what we'll keep sponsoring the expansion and exporting their oil.

Last week I shared the data on this pattern, a correlation between oil producers, war and the erosion of democracy and the destruction of the planet. This week Politico explains that climate change is the 'ultimate threat multiplier'

The Russian guy selling you your next fix as our world falls apart.

The guy talking about nuclear weapons, and attacking nuclear power plants.

That guy. He is not our friend, we've blocked him on facebook. We've unfollowed him. So why are we sponsoring him?

Time to go to rehab.

Rehab

Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous have 'sponsors,' real people who have achieved the impossible, overcome it and come out the other side.

Sadly I am not one of these people. I love bacon beyond all rationality, I like to pay Ryanair twelve quid to take me somewhere warm. I've been lucky. Because I am stupidly privileged in a sheltered life.

But like a lot of people the futility and the guilt ate at me. I moved to the country. I sold my flashy car. I stopped flying as much. I cut meat down to once or twice a week. It wasn't that big a deal.

So I went further. I set up a not for profit that tries to equip young people for a sustainable future, I am all in, but still I write this on a computer powered by Russian energy, I still travel in cars in part powered by its oil. I suckle from the Russian teat like everyone else.

I am recovering. I am not in a place to sponsor other people who are making the leap, yet.

But after the last few years I can imagine a new economy. One that isn't dependent on GDP growth and climate disaster inducing fossil fuels. Evolution. It does seem beyond reach right now I grant you. Like flying and electric cars once did.

But first of all let's recap.

What exactly are we letting go?

Dreamers

I have worked across over 20 countries over 20 years, I started out in New York and have worked in China, Russia the Middle East and Europe. Across Finance, Management Consultancy, Education and Charities.

I have spent an inordinate amount of time at Town Halls with no Town or Hall. I have dutifully attended the Fireside Chats where there was no fireside or chatting. I have spent two decades trying to persuade people that top down organisations with infinite agendaless meetings and passive aggressive emails cc'ing everyone aren't a good way to work. (I failed)

In total I've probably worked directly with a few thousand good, decent hardworking people from all over the world.

I noticed a trend.

From the Taxi Driver to the Managing Director the majority of those people were unhappy. And for the majority work was a huge factor. Either their backs were shot from hunching like crumpled croissants in front of a screen all day or they were burning up on the inside from stress.

At first I thought it was just me, or maybe the places I worked, which is why I switched careers, countries and industries. But it's the same everywhere you go, the world of work is by and large, frustrating and disappointing for people.

The data backs this. According to huge Gallup poll a massive 85% of people are disengaged at work and that was pre pandemic, pre 'great resignation'. Today "Up to 40% of us secretly believe our jobs probably aren't necessary. In other words: they are?bullshit jobs."

Across two decades I noticed the growing sense of frustration everywhere I went. I have met with Managers to Maintenance guys from Moscow to Manchester, all playing make-believe and talking about 'teams' 'purpose' and 'values' while resenting their boss feeling insecure and eeking out lives of quiet desperation, in a system they don't believe in so that someone else can feel important, or buy a second home.

In those same 20 years the world has become less equitable

and a lot warmer

and if you are reading this on linked in thats specifically down to you and me.

But in 2019, I stumbled across a group of hardworking people who seem weirdly happy. Weird because they are those at the sharp end of the hardest problems. Those running their own businesses, and initiatives in sustainability, on carbon reduction or green projects, happy because they had hope.

Rather than keeping the wheels turning on a broken system, or getting co-opted into the CSR or ESG fig leafs for incumbents, these pioneers build new companies in a new system for a better tomorrow.

They have a glint in the eye, and courage. It's inspiring.

So inspiring I built a company around them, to share the stories, to help young people with mental health while thinking about their futures. It's the reason the experiences work. Careers that tackle the worlds biggest challenges, are attracting the best minds. These are also the careers of hope.

Schemers

Today we watch the grandson of Stalin's cook (seriously) wage war on his neighbours.

Today the prevalent paradigms of war and growth are such that the Financial Times argues that building multimillion dollar jets to burn hundreds of thousands of dollars of fossil fuel to drop poisonous and explosive materials to kill people at scale counts as 'ESG'.

Theres tidy profit to be made after all. Look at the caption and image from todays FT.

30% in five days! Business as usual is sponsoring old men to decide on wars for young people go and fight. But we can choose not to be part of this, to stop working for the companies that invest in and support this.

To do the right work is harder, but it feels so much better.

Choice

What this years IPCC report makes clear and what we know deep down about our work are the same. What we need is new kinds of work in a new system. But as we lurch from a pandemic to a war it seems almost impossible that we could change society in the narrow window we have.

*Almost.

Here are five Sponsors for our addiction. Examples from recent history where we upended society because it no longer served us.

• 1857-1947 Indian independence movement. Culminating in the non- violence and civil disobedience protests asserted by Mahatma Gandhi this *peaceful* paradigm shift completely outfoxed the British and finds a modern corollary in our children's school strikes for climate.
• 1913- Women's Suffrage. Today, in business there is a lot of talk about 'disruption'. In most cases that has become short hand for a rebrand of the status quo. The militant action of the Women' Social and Political Union, Emily Davidson stepping out in front of the King's horse- that is what disruption really looks like. Emmiline Pankhurst's policy of 'deeds not words' are echoed today in the plea's of Greta Thunberg.
• 1955 - Civil rights. Rosa Parks gets on a bus and sits on a seat reserved for white people. There is a golden thread from that woman's audacity to the hope of a Black man in the White House just over fifty years later. The fight against racism is sadly a fight that rages to this day, the whiteness of the Ukrainian refugees somehow meaning that the rules on asylum are different than for those from Arica or the Middle East. The institutional racism so blatant. Nevertheless, the recent withdrawal of Big Oil from Russia reminds us of the immediate impact of coordinated boycotts and protest by everyday people- the art of the possible.
• 1969 - The Stonewall Uprising. Community resistance to police agression around a small bar in Greenwich Village led to a global protest movement and a catalyst for gay rights around the world.
• 1989 German people pulled the Berlin wall down. As well as mightily pissing off a young KGB officer Vladimir Putin, the fall of the Berlin wall led to a halt in Russian imperialism and the reimagining of the world order. None of the experts saw it coming. It had such a colossal impact in international relations, and happened so fast they had to invent a new clunky word for it 'constructivism' - a world where we build our own reality.

All of these movements started 'bottom up' with incredibly small groups of determined people with no official standing.

Today the jarring clunk of another hastily made-up word 'degrowth' is the only realistic alternative to our children fighting over whats left on a dying planet.

Degrowth: The bitter medicine of chemo on a planetary scale. Giving up everything we have built for a better tomorrow.

It seems almost impossible.

*Almost*

Over the last few years the companies I have seen and the people I have met are a constant source of inspiration and hope. Organisations like Sustainable Ventures and Carbon13 building prosperous companies that help the planet while empowering their people.

I have found people like Erin Remblance and Roberta Boscolo regularly speaking truth to power here on linkedin.

Or the hundreds of teachers students and careers leaders I have met over the last few years who to get involved in meaningful work on an inhabitable earth.

They are building something better.

This has given me hope. Along with two key facts.

Peaceful protests are twice as likely to succeed as wars.

That it takes 3.5% of people to overhaul entire systems.

We are sick, and addicted, but we can get better.

I have found that you can kill two birds with one stone. You can quit your bullshit job and you can help. Each of us can undergo the sort of radical systemic change together, one that lets you be ourselves at work as we all work together to take the medicine of degrowth.

There is worthwhile work for us out there. Work that lets us stop the fighting over finite resources while giving us a fighting chance of an infinite future, if only we are brave enough.

I will include more links below to job sites, learning, projects and on how you can get involved.

In the meantime here is some inspiration.

A video of the entire crew of the last Independent TV channel in Russia resigning live on air, closing with the phrase: No War.