How Not To Live
But really, what does 'living' even mean?
Hey dear readers! This is a bit of a departure from my usual Tuesday reframes. I woke up this morning and an unusual memory from my past (circa 2005) popped into my brain. Then the words started downloading fast and furiously to my mind, which is when I know it’s time to drop everything (including my insurance paperwork), and get to writing.
I envision this story below as just a snippet of a larger collection of stories I would like to do about searching for meaning and slow living in a fast paced world. It’s something I’ve found myself revisiting in each era of my life. I still do to this day, even while being in one of the slowest and most intentional periods of my life.
Enjoy this short story and let me know if you’d like to see more occasional storytelling Substacks from me!
We stood nearly shoulder to shoulder in the elevator, our weary eyes trying to avoid contact and our slumped shoulders further weighed down by our laptop bags. It was mostly silent, that is with the exception of the choking cries I was trying to suppress and the constant sniffling to keep my nose from running to a borderline-abhorrent level. My one tissue had long since been oversaturated on the long ride down. Why did we have to work on such a high floor of this damn building!
As we finally reached the parking garage and the doors open, popping the elevator inhabitants into the fresh, open space like popcorn out of a pot on the stove, my boss leaned over to me and whispered, “I cry too… though I wait until I’m home to do it.” She may have been trying for empathy, but I only heard shame.
As I sat in my mustang, a black one with white racing stripes to let people know that ‘yes, I am a CPA but I’m a cool CPA’, I thought through her words some more. Here she was at the near tippy top of the ladder, one step before making partner, and she would go home and cry too. Cry over work. Cry over numbers and making sure that documents had the proper signatures and dates on them. Cry over people making mistakes, information missing, and clients who groan when they see you approaching their desks.
Did any of this matter? I understood, conceptually, the need for auditing publicly traded companies. And I also couldn’t help but respond to that thought with the fact that most fraud is found from an internal whistleblower or the defrauder making a mistake. I had only a loose understanding of the purpose of our work, and it definitely didn’t seem like enough to keep me there for the long haul. Not if these intense emotions of overwhelm, frustration, and emptiness were promised to me in the many years ahead, regardless of the level I achieved.
I thought back to a moment in college, where I was talking to another student who had done an internship with one of the Big Four accounting firms and remembered him saying, “I can’t believe we need a CPA license for this. A monkey could do this work.” At the lowest levels, he may have been right. Most of what was given to the new hires was matching numbers, recalculating totals, looking for missing invoice numbers or transposed data entry errors. It was monotonous and detail-oriented. My brain was awful at it, instead preferring to do data analytics where I’d look for patterns (or lack of patterns) in financial balances and try to explain (or explore) whether they made sense.
This crying fit in the elevator was triggered by the absolutely horrible job I had done at “tying out” a financial statement, meaning I matched and validated every single number in the document against either an audited total or a previously audited financial statement. My head would spin in the sea of numbers. My mind would rearrange the order, not due to dyscalculia but due to exhaustion and living off of Splenda sweetened coffee and Reeses peanut butter cups.
I sat at my computer around the large shared table in our temporary audit room, listening to the manager reviewing my work swear in German and turn beet red as he would slam down the hardcopy papers, adding note after note to everything I did incorrectly. He was stressed because we were supposed to have completed this already, and clearly there was so much left to do or redo. His raging theatrics, knowing it was because of me and my work, made it hard to focus on the next task I was destined to fuck up. The tears began to pool behind my eyes and then found cracks from which to leak out the front and run down my face. It only seemed to frustrate him more.
“Why do we do this,” I asked myself for the 2,872 time. I remembered all of the times I bragged to family members about the expensive steak dinners, some of the most expensive alcohol I had ever over-consumed in my life, flying on a client’s private jet, and authenticating signatures and baseballs at the Major League Baseball games where I had nearly full access to go anywhere around the stadium. My work made for good stories. It felt prestigious to have letters behind my name and to start my day in a suit and high-heels that would eventually cause premature bunions and knee pain.
And yet the vast majority of me wished to take off that polyester blend suit. Heck, I would have taken off my human suit if I could. I felt like I was trying to push my way out of this container of flesh that kept driving me to worksites and cubicles and cocktail hours. It never felt right. I wanted out and away from it all–to return to the stardust that I allegedly was created from. I didn’t want to end my life. But if this was what life was, I knew I didn’t want to live it either.
Our bodies tell us when we aren't in the right place, but we don't always care to listen. I'm on my second career now. Recently, I got together with an old friend who worked at another location when we in our first, flashy careers. We had never talked about sometimes we would go into the bathroom and cry for 20-40 minutes. The grueling deadlines, overbearing bosses, and low wages were squeezing us. Eventually, we both left the industry and headed into new careers. Both of our jobs are stressful, but both of us can manage that stress now because it's the right fit.
Had I been a part of Gen Z, I don't think I would have lasted as long in that first career. Advocating for yourself and knowing when to leave is so important.