Most the seven years I’ve worked at this megacorporation I’ve ignored “reorgs.” Who cares? The guy seven levels above me is a different guy now. So what?

So much, it turns out. In the second half of September, my eyes were opened to the petty and political motivations that determine the destiny of corporate products. No, it doesn’t matter what customers want, unless enough of them want something that will move the bottom line. What matters – if the earnest don’t or can’t intervene – is the retaining of power, the retaining of influence. I’m reminded of the passage in Bullshit Jobs in which David Graeber recounts the story of an employee who excitedly presented to upper management a substantial optimization of corporate process he had developed. The VPs whose departments would benefit from the proposal reacted not with gratitude or excitement but anger. What mattered most to them was having as many underlings as possible, no matter how needlessly they were employed.

In these last few weeks I’ve learned I must keep in contact with certain coworkers so that I might collect information about the fate of our projects. I’ve learned that in this environment too I must withold trust that decisions will be made for the right reasons. I regret the demise of worthy visions at the hands of the fearful and jealous.

On an evening in late September, before my weekly Wednesday night soccer game, I drove downtown to attend an event called the “Municipal Election Assembly.” I was one of two maybe three hundred people in attendance. Looking around the church I saw many of the bald and whitehaired heads that usually predominate events of local politics but I saw also enclaves and smatterings of “young people” like me, people under the age of forty.

At the foot of the altar facing back at the crowd sat two or three dozen people including the four mayoral candidates who had accepted to invitation. They were here to hear four proposals and to declare whether they committed to enacting them when and if they won the upcoming election. The organization that put on the event has no direct political or governmental power. It is a “grassroots coalition of community, faith, labour, and nonprofit organizations” and the influence they manage to exert is due to the sheer number of people they represent across the metropolitan area. These were their demands. Firstly, the new mayor would meet with the organization’s leaders within 30 days of taking office. The new mayor would remove barriers that prevent non-profit, faith, and community organizations from building housing on their own land. The new mayor would push the federal government for $2 billion in funding for deeply affordable homes. The new mayor would reduce traffic to improve transit and safety on Hastings Street in the Downtown East Side by piloting a new traffic pattern modeled on Toronto’s 2017 King Street Pilot. Finally, the new mayor would expand the city’s tree canopy by funding the first Youth Climate Corps program.

All four mayoral candidates in attendance agreed to all five demands. Their commitment does not mean they will succeed in each of these initiatives nor does it mean that they will even try. Politicians promise things all the time. Their agreement is in no way legally binding. But it is socially binding. If one of these six candidates becomes mayor, they and their party will have four specific ways to gain or lose the trust of tens of thousands of people all at once, whether by disappointing them directly or by betraying an organization that can sway elections by influencing how their members vote. Soft power is still power.

That same week I attended a smaller event in my neighborhood hosted in a gym at the beloved local community center. The same four mayoral candidates were joined this time by councilor candidates of six different parties and they all mingled and spoke with voters. After an hour the format was reshuffled into a Q&A panel where voters could ask a question and pick three candidates to answer. Here too the age of participants skewed older but was nonetheless attended by some “young people.”

This event was organized by a different grassroots organization with a drastically smaller scope of concern: a rectangle of 4.45km² on the east side of the city. I approached a young couple I recognized from a similar event in January and they encouraged me to get involved with the organization. We exchanged emails and I made a meeting with the president of the “Area Council.” (It is a reasonable if unusual name that I assume they chose because the area is too big and too arbitrary to be called a neighborhood.) A week and a half later I went to his home and we sat in his living room and talked for an hour about decisions made already and decisions to be made that will transform the city for better and worse. He told me that a significant achievement in the organization’s history was when in the late 1960s they protested against and defeated the plan to build a freeway that would have obliterated swaths of Strathcona and the Downtown Eastside. I’d been aware already of this moment in Vancouver’s history but while reading about it later I couldn’t help but feel amazed and enormously thankful that the project was halted. This organization, like the other, has no direct power. And yet when it mobilizes and joins with an organized and willful public, it can shape reality itself.

My adventures continue online as well. I recently made vanvotes.ca in an effort to encourage uninformed citizens to educate themselves and vote in the municipal election. Bizarrely, while writing this, I asked google who was the creator of that site and ended up stumbling across northvanvotes.ca. What perplexed me is the similarity in URLs and in UI style, which is admittedly generic. I had not been so surprised when I had learned, after I made my quiz, that someone else had also made a quiz for the Vancouver municipal election. Luckily it complements mine.

Most recently, I joined a discord server for urbanists in the region. I requested to join months ago but their admins never followed up with me. I left it. But then the other day Russil – of morehousing.ca, who I had been emailing with and who had told me about canadianveggie.com’s quiz – asked me if I was on the discord. He told the admin about my lost request and now I’m on the discord.

After I published vanvotes.ca I wanted to share it with as many people as possible. Reddit turned out to be a poor place to do so – to my frustration, moderators would not relent in judging my posts as self-promotion. I’ve relied mostly on group chats and social media to broadcast it and hope people use it.

Witnessing various events hosted by grassroots organizations and attended by small and large groups of people has stirred in me a desire to create something similar. Although I have no interest in managing people at work, I do fancy the prospect – at work and beyond – of managing coordinated efforts towards a coherent vision for which I am responsible. I have strong opinions and convictions, I have good social skills and communication skills, and I have a sometimes obsessive attention to detail but also a pragmatic tendency. For the time being I am satisfied with the minor leadership roles I play in my life – senior software engineer, captain of a recreational soccer team, older brother, opinionated friend, to name a few. There are bigger roles in my future, father and parent the most obvious ones. But maybe there are other big ones in my future, too.

There was a time in the late 2010s and the very early 2020s when opportunities seemed endless to me. As a single young man gliding out of university and moving straight to a big city on megacorporate dollar to start a lucrative job I felt like a wealth of opportunities awaited outside my frontdoor if I felt so inclined to go out and engage them. I lacked nothing so obvious. And yet in my new life I found little satisfaction. I worked everyday in an office at the edge of a forest where began a wasteland of freeways, strip malls, car dealerships, and corporate campuses. Many other fortunates had like me arrived into these circumstances to be inducted as new professionals and to step gladly onto the conveyor belt of wealth accumulation and career progression. These were nice people but I found myself disinclined to meld into this social milieu.

Seven years on I am much happier. Although I work at the same company, life is much more my own. I work in the comfort and convenience of my own home, at a desk windowside. I deliver what is expected of me, at least, and retain the freedom to tend to personal and domestic tasks when they need tending. I work on a project I chose to join more than four years ago because I was interested in it. I work on the web frontend, despite the stigma the would claim it’s not “real software engineering.”

No doubt I’ve dabbled in audiobooks and investments, I’ve driven my career forward. But after these same seven years I don’t worry so much about keeping up with my peers. I realize I don’t care so much that my company isn’t cool, I care more for contentment at work, good compensation, and stability, now and in the future. All of a sudden I’m not so anxious about delving into a new world, a new company, a new experience. I like what I have. I want to stabilize it, sink stakes into the ground, and set up camp for a while. I yearn now not for breadth, but depth. I want to go deeper, not farther.

The first question is Do I want to do this? The next is Do I really not want to do this or am I just having pre-socialization anxiety? Maybe I need to change my attitude. But finally Am I pressuring myself to say yes out of social obligation in a way that is unfair to myself? How do I say No?

I had never heard of it until I

last year. In a small bookshop I spoke with the attendant a young man roughly my age about books and when I told him I admired Cormac McCarthy’s prose he brought up Paul Bowles’s most wellknown novel. A day or two later while perusing charity shops in Dublin I came across a copy. So I bought it. And a year on, I read it. I see no similarity to McCarthy’s writing. In fact, the introduction talks of Bowles’s use of automatic writing, which in my mind only amplifies the distance between these two writers. I am more inclined (apparently I like that word today) to liken The Sheltering Sky to

and to Wise Blood, most obviously for Kit’s obsession with omens and irresistability to premonitions. The key image – the “sheltering sky” that Port describes as “a solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind” and that Kit later recalls as “[hiding] the night behind it, [sheltering] the person beneath from the horror that lies above” – reminds me of the Gnostic theory of a deity that intervenes between humanity and the greater, more fearsome power of an indifferent God. At least this aspect of the novel may be comparable to Cormac McCarthy’s work, if its style of prose cannot be.

An affordable, challenging, and grounding way to enjoy the outdoors, in company of friends or of one’s own thoughts. Who knows – like I said to my friend Da, maybe playing golf well will become a new endeavour of mine. Its cost and culture might prevent it, however. The endeavor might be something else: how to foment golf for everyone, including women and working class people. The problem is the usual one with sharing something one loves: ruining it by overloading it. The pitch ‘n’ putt courses are busy enough in the summer.

I’m enjoying my work tasks. Today I worked until 10am - 6:30pm and felt tempted to return to my desk in the evening. But I find it impossible to work after dinner. It just feels wrong. Gross.

I play soccer three evenings per week. Sevens on Monday and Wednesday nights, indoor fours on Sunday evening. I spend time with people I like and play the game I know (and love) best. Oh, also, it’s exercise. It’s invaluable.

I’m trying to schedule enough activities on weekends. I’ve noticed Friday nights feel wasted if I don’t do something social. It suffices to have a good friend come over. One of the best Fridays I had recently consisted of three activities. First, I went to a free, public Nathanial Young concert with (the same) friend Da. Then I went to a political “FUNdraiser” for a municipal city council candidate with my wife and another friend Ro. Finally, I went with my wife and our friend Ro to “Good Times Vinyl Night” at my favorite neighborhood haunt. Perfect night.