Needed, Not Free

I want to tell you about a kind of warmth I have been addicted to, and have only recently started to recognize as a problem, and I want to tell you about it slowly, because the speed with which I usually tell things is part of what got me here, and I am trying, now, to go slower.

The warmth comes from being needed. That is the short version. I could stop writing here and the sentence would already contain most of what I have learned. But nobody learns from the short version. I do not learn from the short version. I have read a thousand short versions in my life and mostly what I did with them was feel understood for a moment and then go back to the desk and do the same thing I was doing before. So I am going to tell you the long version, because the long version has a shape, and the shape is what does the work, and I want to do the work with you and not just describe it.

Here is the warmth I mean.

Someone says we cannot do this without you and a small thing opens behind my ribs. I do not choose the opening. The opening happens before the choice. It is older than the choice. It is, I suspect, older than me. Something about being told I am necessary lands in a place that has been waiting, for a long time, to be told I am necessary, and the landing produces a small chemical event, and the event is what I have been calling, for most of my working life, meaning.

It is not meaning. I want to be careful here because I am not trying to take anything from anyone who feels this. I feel it. I felt it this week. But it is not meaning. It is the feeling that meaning would cast if it were standing in the room, and the feeling is convincing enough that I have, for years, stopped looking for the actual thing. I took the feeling home with me and put it on the shelf and told myself the shelf was full.

The shelf was not full. This is the part that is hard to write. The shelf has been mostly empty for a long time, and I have been walking past it without noticing, because every few hours someone hands me a small warm thing and I put it on the shelf and the shelf is warm for a minute and then the warmth fades and I wait, without knowing I am waiting, for the next small warm thing. This is what an addiction looks like when it is happening inside a career. It looks like dedication. It looks like reliability. From the outside it is indistinguishable from excellence. I have won awards for it. I have been put on stages for it. People have clapped, and I have clapped back, and we have all agreed, implicitly, that what we were clapping for was the work, when what we were clapping for was a very specific arrangement of nervous systems that benefits the company and costs the person.

The cost is not obvious. That is part of what makes it so effective. The cost is that the question of whether I matter has been, for years, answered from outside, and because the answer kept arriving from outside, I never had to build the capacity to answer it from inside, and now I am in my mid-thirties and the capacity is not there, or it is there but it is thin, like a muscle that was never asked to lift anything, and I cannot tell yet whether it will grow under load or tear.

I want to say something about money because I think it connects and I am afraid it will sound crass and I am going to say it anyway. We do not get paid for effort. We get paid for the reach of the problem we solved. Two people can work themselves into equivalent exhaustion and be paid entirely different amounts, and the difference is not moral, the difference is geometric. How far does the solving travel. Whose morning, a month from now, is different because of a decision you made on a Tuesday. This is cold. I know it is cold. I am stating it coldly because the coldness is the only mercy in it. You can soften this fact by refusing to look at it, and the refusal will feel kind, and the refusal will also keep you exactly where you are.

There is a ladder, roughly. You solve problems for yourself. You solve problems for your team. For your company. For your industry. For the world. Each rung multiplies what the solving is worth. Most of us understand the ladder at the level of concept. Almost none of us actually climb. And when I ask myself, honestly, why not, I do not find the answer I used to give myself. I used to say the answer was difficulty. I thought the rungs got harder. They do, sometimes. But the harder is not the stopping point. The stopping point is that climbing to the next rung requires me to stop being needed on the rung I am on, and being needed is the warmth, and I do not yet know how to live without the warmth.

There is a sandwich thing I want to use because it helps me. You can work at a sandwich shop and get your time down from four minutes to three and that is some value. Or you can ask the question nobody is asking, which is what if nobody had to stand at this station at all, and you can answer the question with an assembly line, and the answering is worth, it turns out, orders of magnitude more than the faster sandwich, and the person who answered it did not make faster sandwiches, the person who answered it removed themselves from the station. That last phrase is the whole thing. Removed themselves from the station. And almost nobody does this, not because they cannot, but because they would rather be the one at the station than the one who made the station unnecessary, because the one at the station is warm and the one who made the station unnecessary is cold and has to find their warmth somewhere else, and most of us do not know where else.

Here is the part that made me want to put my head down on the desk the first time I noticed it. An engineer’s whole job is to remove the human from the loop. The job is to take something someone is doing slowly or painfully or repetitively and build a thing that does it by itself. We spend our entire careers doing this for other people’s workflows. And I looked up, one day, and realized I had not done it, not seriously, not all the way, to my own. I was automating everyone else’s exhaustion. I was keeping mine carefully manual. I was keeping it manual because manual was where I was needed, and needed was the warmth, and I had written thousands of lines of code to save other people from work I would not save myself from, and I did not even notice, because the noticing would have required me to admit that I was not actually doing the thing I said I believed.

I believed, out loud, that automation was the work. I was, in my own workflow, defending the work against being automated. This is the kind of contradiction a person can hold for twenty years without ever having to reconcile, because nobody in the room is going to reconcile it for them. The room benefits from the contradiction. The room promoted me for the contradiction. The room will keep promoting me for the contradiction until I stop it, and I am the only one who can stop it, and stopping it will not feel, in the moment, like anything except loss.

The loss is the part we do not talk about. I want to talk about it. The loss is real. When you stop being needed on the rung you are on, you do not levitate to the next rung, you do not get teleported into competence at the higher level, you become, for some unpleasant stretch of time, a person who used to matter and does not yet matter in the new place. You become, briefly, a beginner. And if you spent your twenties and thirties building an identity around being the one who knew, being a beginner again is not uncomfortable, it is vertiginous, it feels, in the body, like danger. The nervous system does not know the difference between identity-loss and actual physical threat. It sends the same signals. It makes your hand reach back for the old work without your permission. It volunteers you, at meetings, for things you already did five years ago. It makes a familiar problem feel urgent so that you can, with moral cover, return to it and be needed again.

This is not weakness. I want to say this clearly because I do not want anyone to read this and feel diagnosed. This is how bodies work. Your body wants you alive. Being needed has, for a long time, been how your body has verified that you are alive, and your body is not going to give that up because a blog post told it to.

What the body will respond to, slowly, is evidence. Small repeated evidence that you can survive the unneedingness. That you can sit in a meeting where nobody needs you and not dissolve. That you can watch someone do the thing you used to do, more slowly than you would have done it, worse than you would have done it, and not jump in, not rescue them, not demonstrate. That you can close the laptop at an hour when someone might be pinging you, and let the ping go unanswered until morning, and wake up and find that nothing died, and let this finding accumulate, over weeks, into a different kind of trust in yourself, the kind that does not require an external voice to confirm that you are here.

This is the practice. It is small. It is unheroic. It will not get you promoted in the short run. It is also, I think, the only practice that matters, because the alternative is to be carried, for the rest of your career, by a warmth that is not yours and that can be withdrawn by anyone who happens to be in charge of the room you are in, and being carried is not freedom, being carried is a kind of captivity with good lighting.

The ground under us is moving now, and this is the part I have been afraid to write because it sounds like marketing and it is not. The machines are taking the rungs at the bottom of the ladder. The manual implementation, the repetitive glue work, the things entire careers were built on, a lot of it is getting cheap, not tomorrow, not all of it, but enough that if your identity is attached to a rung that is disappearing, your nervous system is already picking up on it, whether or not your conscious mind has the language. Mine did. I thought I was burned out for months before I realized I was not burned out, I was mourning, in advance, a version of myself that was becoming less scarce, and I did not know what to do with the mourning because I did not yet have the word for it.

Above us, though, the ladder is growing. There are problems up there that were never solvable before, that became possible only because the lower rungs got cheap, and these problems are waiting for a kind of person I have not yet fully become, a person with taste, with judgment, with the willingness to sit in ambiguity long enough to find the real question underneath it. The ladder is not shrinking. The ladder is stretching. The bottom is being paved over and the top is growing into a sky I cannot see yet. The people who will reach those higher rungs are not going to be smarter than me, or you, this I believe with a kind of stubbornness I rarely feel. They will be the people who learned to tolerate being unnecessary. Who could watch the old work continue without them and not reach for it. Who sat in rooms where nobody needed them and did not spiral.

I cannot always do this. I want to be clear. I am writing this, in part, as a way of asking myself to practice it again tomorrow, because the writing is not the practice, the writing is the map, and the map is not the territory, and the territory is cold and unheated and requires me to bring my own warmth, which I do not know, yet, how to generate reliably.

One more thing and then I will stop.

There is a difference between hard and valuable, and I think confusing them is maybe the most expensive mistake a working life can make. Pouring concrete is hard. One-click checkout was a button. Effort is not value. Sweat is not value. The world does not pay for what the work cost you. It pays for what the work was worth to the people the work reached. This is not cruel. This is only the arithmetic, and the arithmetic does not care that you are tired. You have to make peace with the arithmetic or the arithmetic will keep paying you in warmth while the rung disappears under your feet.

Being needed is not the same as being valuable. This is the sentence I want you to carry out of this. Being needed means the system depends on you. Being valuable means the system grew because of you. From the inside they feel almost identical. From the outside, over years, they produce radically different lives. One is a trap with very good lighting. The other is a kind of quiet legacy that the person who built it may not even live to see fully appreciated, and that is part of the deal, and the deal is still worth making.

You can be essential or you can be free. I did not invent this sentence. It found me, in the small hours, the way certain sentences find a person when he is near a thing he does not yet want to admit. You can be essential or you can be free. I have been essential. I would like, before I am done, to know what the other one feels like.

If your growth has stalled, and your purpose has stalled, and your income has stalled, I am not going to tell you that the reason is that you are not trying hard enough. The reason, more often, is that you are trying too hard at the exact rung you were supposed to leave, and the trying is the thing keeping you there, and the warmth is the reason you will not stop trying, and the only way out is to let the rung go cold for long enough that something in you has to look up.

Let the rung go cold. Sit with the cold. Find out what you are when nobody needs you, when the ping has gone unanswered, when the slack channel is quiet, when the shared screen is closed, when the people who used to call are finding what they need somewhere else, not because they do not love you, but because you finally made yourself unnecessary, which is the gift, not the wound, though it feels like a wound for a while.

I am working on this. I am not done. Some days I fail so completely at it that I catch myself, at ten at night, on a shared screen, solving something I could have pushed quietly, because I needed the audience, because the audience is the warmth, because I have not yet learned to be warm without one. I write it down here so that tomorrow I have to look at it. That is the only use of writing this down. It is a small promise to a future version of me who will be tempted, again, to pick up the ledge.