When Work Doesn't Work

Guest post: Drew Storment is a member of GSLC and a regular at our Monday Morning Crew donuts and church projects day. I recently invited him to write a guest post here on the blog about his experience being between professional jobs.

Do you ever wonder if there’s an exact instant in someone’s development as a person where their entire perception of something is irreversibly cured into a final, unmodifiable form that will never be changed no matter what? How many words do you need to exchange with a stranger before you identify them as friendly or irritating? How much of a new idea do you need to understand (or be completely baffled by) before you adopt it as a personal value or discard it as nonsense? As a concept becomes slowly entangled in one’s mind with the mess of past experiences, outside opinions, and preconceived notions, is there a single snarl that will cause these things to inextricably melt into a single, permanent attitude? Traumatic experiences aside can something like this even be granularized? Can we even be sure that some unconscious existing bias hasn’t already guided us to positions we didn’t even know we were forming?

Sure, it’s easy to determine certain opinions almost immediately – for instance I can point to the exact moment in my life that I associated negative feelings with the band Sublime: the first time I ever heard a song by the band Sublime. I was having an otherwise great afternoon at a friend’s house and he was excited to introduce me to his new favorite album, however without much deliberation I quickly decided that it just wasn’t for me and we went on to enjoy the rest of the afternoon. No outside negativity colored my view of this music but to this day I still can’t stand to listen to it. But that’s the nature of most media, our view of it falls somewhere between pleasure and disdain almost immediately. Conversely, I love blue spruce trees. From their almost geometric conic shape to their Namekian shade of blue I can list off everything about them that I find appealing, but unlike the music I’ve come to love or hate throughout my life it’s impossible to know when or even why this appreciation nucleated in my brain. These are trees that have lingered the background of my entire life, but I wouldn’t be able to pinpoint even when I learned they are called blue spruce.

Over the last year I’ve had an involuntary reckoning with this line of thinking on a more intangible scale and realized that trying to trace the evolution of my attitudes on life’s broader topics becomes an exercise eerily reminiscent of untangling Christmas lights. In June of 2025, eleven months prior to writing this piece, I found myself unemployed after the company I had worked for of two and a half years executed several waves of layoffs. It was a great job. It really was a dream situation that I never would have previously even allowed myself to fantasize about, and after only ten years with my mechanical engineering degree I had hardly even begun the prerequisite trudge through the sewer of entry jobs. Every item on my checklist of ideal working conditions was met. Heavy focus on thermodynamics – always my favorite subject: check. Working on something meaningful – I was in the renewables sector: check. Work life balance – never more than 40 hours a week: check. Dynamic environment – I was in the lab at least as much as the office: check. Ten-minute commute: huge check. This job even met criteria I didn’t know I had. Work from home allowance, almost everyone there was my age, great pay, great benefits, great culture… you get the point.

I guess the Christmas lights metaphor can apply to nearly every facet of life that has any complexity to it. If you look at it from a certain angle I guess that’s what life is as a whole; a deeply entangled glob of experiences that can’t be isolated or decontextualized. Because once a single piece of it becomes discrete then the composite image changes, even if you can’t really tell the difference. If you’ve ever been fortunate enough to be tasked as detangler around the holidays then you’ll know that the hardest part is often finding where the whole mess begins. I think that most of our problems are like that. I don’t know when my parents first told me that I was meant to do great things. It was probably before I could even understand them. I heard it countless times throughout my life. Looking back as an adult I’m thankful for the way they went about it. Always encouraging. “You are so gifted. All we ask is for you to do your best. Find what makes you happy and apply yourself. God has a plan for you.” I don’t know when I started to believe it either, but I do know when I started to doubt it. I still think my parents were right in that particular aspect of my upbringing. All things considered I believe that I’m a determined and resourceful person and that I stand strong in my own convictions and identity. There’s no question that these are traits that they instilled in me, but I’ve only realized such by subtracting layer after layer of tangled lights from that statement. It probably began a little further along in my development but as I grew I also gradually came to understand another pervasive sentiment that was deeply instilled in me, its own snaggled mess of ethos and mixed messaging that inevitably absorbed the unadulterated aspects of my identity.

My parents did life right. Went to college, studied hard, worked their way up, bought a house, had kids, had the retirement funds, etc. etc. etc. And it worked for them. And they expected it to work for everyone. It was so simple! That was life, that was the goal and anyone who deviated from the plan was a freak and anyone who tried but couldn’t follow through deserved what they got because it was their own fault for failing. You just have to work for it and the trickle-down economy will handle the rest. And so my life was launched on a precision trajectory before I could possibly know it. There were a few swift, brutal dream crushing course corrections but after twenty-two completely risk adverse years I had safely earned an engineering degree from my hometown college. With a girlfriend attending graduate school in another state it was time for the final push. The long anticipated but meticulously planned high arc shot into the splendor of working life. Within a year I found myself rejected from every engineering job in the state of Tennessee, fired from a scam of a 60 hour per week cold call sales job, and with carpal tunnel from hauling rocks from a demolition site as a replacement for the last guy who had smashed his hand off. By the time I had sought and accepted a manual labor job I knew that something was tangled. Here I had two lines of truth that were slowly coiling together, having to finally acknowledge that they were incompatible. I had put my head down, sacrificed more than one burning life dream, foregone so many typical high school and college experiences to excel in my chosen career path yet here I was, utterly defeated and risking permanent disfigurement for seven dollars an hour. I had followed the map my parents laid out for me long ago only to crash face first into a barricaded gate. No one had mentioned that part. Why hadn’t they mentioned this part. Did they know about it? Did they have to get past it during their own journey?

This is where I say that I think our attitudes in life are forged both gradually and instantaneously. This is where I finally accepted that my beliefs, even my own identity, were tangled in delusion and that I needed to dislodge myself from it, or dislodge it from me, and move forward. Here is where I also discovered that sometimes there’s more than one string of lights hiding in the mass. You find a nice tag end that you can start from and with one pull you discover that something you thought would at least be linear is actually three different strings knotted up together. I came out of that year of my life holding a few different lines, some that I was surprised to be tied to the matter of employment, all with their own level of disarray. The first and most immediate issue to be ironed out was political. There isn’t much to say about this one, it was really more of a matter of disillusionment than anything else. It’s one thing to be taught about society’s institutions when you’re sheltered from them by people who believe in one thing and have had success, but once you’re an active participant you have to lie to yourself to realize that things work a certain way. Work and labor are inherently political; that’s a knot that will never be untied. With each passing year the political convictions that I had to rebuild immediately after entering the working world only entrench themselves deeper in my heart. The layoffs that affected my most recent employment were in fact a direct result of Trump rolling back bipartisan legislation from the Biden administration, so I think I may be on to something there.

Regarding my feelings on my parents’ role in my relationship with work, unraveling a lifetime of well-meaning but misinformed teaching is a painful process. I really have been blessed with two outstanding parents who I have always been able to be open and honest with, and this was the first time I had to do so in a difficult way. Trying to surgically extricate little floating bits of negativity from a healthy pool is not easy. Sometimes you strike a nerve. Sometimes you can remove the detritus. My parents divorced when I was twenty which was oddly less of a disillusionment to me than coming to terms with what I was taught about life and work. In a lot of ways this made the healing process a little easier since I was able to reconcile with two individuals rather than a larger parental entity. Without revealing too much about their current reading of the political climate I can say that there has been some growth, some stagnation, some conversation, some denial. At the end of the day though they have both been my strongest supporters throughout this whole ordeal and I think that says more than anything else could.

Over the next six years I spent a lot of time trying to straighten out the third string I pulled out during that metamorphosis: my attitude towards work in general. In that time frame I had a handful of different engineering jobs. One was a decent entry level position. One was a fantastic experience. One was a soul crushingly corporate job for a disgusting company. There were hour long commutes, mind-numbing mundanity, extremely difficult but satisfying engineering challenges, morally questionable positions. We moved a lot, I worried a lot. My work life never sat still for more than a couple of years and my general attitude towards it reflected that. During that time I also divested my own self-worth from my job title enough to reestablish an identity in my own extracurricular activities. Often I hated work simply because by the time I had fought my way home through traffic I was too exhausted to pursue these outside passions. I resented work because it took that from me. Other times I could find the challenge of real engineering problems enough of a diversion to stay happy until I could get home and reengage with my real life. It went that way, up and down, until I started my most recent job.

The two and a half years I spent at that company were healing for me in a lot of ways. In fact if I was still there I would likely no longer even recognize my current feelings that have driven this essay. The importance and nature of the work created an environment that for the first time in my adult life garnered an honest drive and incentive to learn and challenge myself. It allowed me the freedom to work without supervision, to make my own choices and guide others, which quietly fostered confidence and self-esteem. For the first time in my life my work had purpose. I was able to come and go based on my own merits which allowed me to take up my own outside interests. My relationship with the societal concept of work was mended as I had found my place in it. But as you know we are in the era of great institutional failure. The reality that I had once been forced to reckon so painfully with, and then somehow finally escaped is inevitable though. Now I must ask the same questions that I was able to mute for a short while. Is this it? Is this the system through which we’ve decided to sustain ourselves and our quality of life? Despite the qualifiers of the free will we’re told we have in the free market of this free country are we moored to the ground by the incentive to keep from starving to death or are we blown about in the chaotic winds of happenstance, our entire lot in life subject to whichever open spot we’re lucky enough to land on for a few seconds before the clueless shareholders decide that they’ve broken even on it and toss us back? All I know is that during economic times like these people lose their jobs left and right and companies slam the door behind them to keep the revenue inside. A prolonged and fruitless job search has again proven that despite any ambition I might have and despite the stellar resume that I’ve assembled against all odds, I can’t free will myself into a job that a company won’t create and I’m reminded of a lesson learned all those years ago with the bonus of being overqualified for many of the few backup jobs that are available.

So here I am again. Thirty-three years old and picking up a familiar old gnarled bundle of political conviction, generational angst, economic dread, and the murder of my own self-worth all wrapped around my inner personal identity. Unlike before it’s not completely obfuscated but at the end of the day these proverbial Christmas lights aren’t going to straighten themselves out and as the world goes on around me I have nothing better to do. I can’t tell if I’m working in the wrong direction or if all the knots just look the same but I have found myself leaning back on a quote spoken long ago by two very wise men. “Work sucks.”