Let's Just Quit

AI, have at it. Take my job—please.

Years ago, I wrote a piece for Glamour about a radiant and radical weaver woman in Asheville, NC. She was a flower child, angel-faced. She was also homeschooling her daughters; I’d never really heard of this.

During the happy week I spent with her and her kids it dawned on me that homeschooling clearly and incontrovertibly meant “dropping out.”

The weaver would drop the girls at the local library, go to her loom, and pick them up in a park at 6:00 where they were smoking cloves and drinking Red Bull with their friends. It was great.

Then I started to see this phenomenon everywhere. Every time creative or ideological Americans tried reform an institution like school, they, almost in spite of themselves, quietly disaggregated it, dissolved the component parts in acid, and then rinsed the sparkling residue down the drain. Without even noticing, without telling anyone.

“My family was Southern Baptist. We went to church every Sunday, then just holidays. I’m spiritual and not religious now. I don’t identify with institutional religion. Religion? I used to do yoga. Now I’m into self-care.” Religion—poof.

Like my Appalachian grandpa used to say whenever someone requested a just-a-sliver of cake, “With a little effort we can make that none at all.”

This has officially happened with “work.” We wanted to change work around so it wasn’t so work-like. Hard. Boring. Demanding of obedience. And with a little effort, we made it none at all.