Losing the sanity bet
For the last couple of years, I’ve been betting that I can continue to tolerate my stupid job for long enough to get the bears grown up and out of the house, and it’s starting to strike me that this may be a fools bet. Sure, it’s nice to have health insurance in this, the land of the worst possible first-world healthcare system, but these days all health insurance appears to do is reduce healthcare prices down to about twice (adjusted for inflation) what they were when I was growing up, and if I end up going insane and/or developing a menagerie of interesting stress diseases just for the sake of keeping the insurance going, it’s not likely to be a particularly useful deal here.
Of course I’m not particularly employable in the computer field anymore (at least outside of the extremely small and ridiculously competitive Linux kernel world,) so backing out of the HEALTH INSURANCE + DEATH vs. SANITY + POVERTY bet is likely to result in an immediate plunge into poverty, but at least in the poverty case I’d still be alive and, possibly, sane.
Perhaps I’ll become a carpenter. That’s a job that’s got some respect, not like being a computer programmer.
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Go for it. I’ve yet to meet a single person who says “I wish I hadn’t quit that job I hated.”
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“Don’t tell my momma I’m a sysadmin, she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse.” — Alan J. Rosenthal
Good luck, Jim. Me, i’m planning to get out of this racket and get into winemaking.