Russ must have seen my dismay. 

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“A crawl space?” 

“You could hardly call it a crawl space,” he laughed. “You can sit up in it.”

I’ve been working as a sort of handyman-contractor lately. Lacking any specialty skills, I do a lot of demolition and cleaning.

This job didn’t look fun. A dirt floor. Joists balanced on cinder blocks. Long-forgotten debris.

The ground under the summer house sloped down toward the lake. As Russ had promised, I could sit up on the lake-facing side, but the metal ducts ran to the other end. I’d have to lie on my back while I unscrewed and pried and hammered them apart. Moldering plastic sheeting held fiberglass insulation under the house’s floorboards. Where it had let go, the yellow fluff hung loose. When I bumped it, caches of acorns spilled out.

Still, I did it. And while I peered through my steamed trifocals, I got to thinking about why this work felt more satisfying than managing software engineers.

I came up with two words: arduous and consequential. 

When an onerous job gets done, I feel a sense of accomplishment. If it’s really unpleasant, or if I do it without complaining, I feel even better.

What’s the parallel in the corporate world? I did lots of unappealing tasks: budget reviews, goal-settings, process audits, risk analyses, endless trainings on corporate values and procedures….

But I felt no satisfaction when they were complete. At best I felt relief: No diversity training for another six months. The exercises were not only tedious, but trite and ineffectual.

That gets to my second word: consequential. It’s not quite the right word, but I’m trying to say both that a job is useful, and also that there’s some peril attached to doing it wrong. 

Russ doesn’t hire me to perform any life-saving rescues, but it is always possible to injure myself. I could have brought down a tree, for example, onto a customer’s house, or even onto Russ. Not inadvertently killing him feels good.

Ironically, my corporate work felt less consequential as my career progressed.

At 25, I had worked for Danny, a Chicago “neighborhood guy” in the coin-operated arcade business who sometimes landed deals making video games for big companies. Danny liked me: probably he sensed my loyalty and found it useful to have a college-educated factotum at his elbow when he talked to the suits. 

After hiring a commercial artist to do concept drawings, I asked Danny how to pay him.

“Just tell Doris to cut him a check,” he said. 

I asked “What’s my limit? This work is going to come in at three or four thousand.”

“Limit?” Danny said impatiently. “I don’t know. Thirty thousand maybe? You’ve got to spend money to make money. You’re supposed to be smart. Can’t you handle that?”

Later that year he sent me to pitch a proposal to the board of directors at Mattel toys. I botched it, and there were consequences.

Back then I didn’t manage anyone. A human resources department would have called me “a direct contributor in a hands-on role.” 

Two decades later I managed five teams of engineers simultaneously. But as my job title and salary grew, I’m convinced my responsibility shrank. 

At my last job I never even learned where the boardroom was. I used my own cash to buy a book for a new hire because it would have taken weeks to collect the approvals on a $20 purchase order.

I can remember when big business was associated with “paper pushing” and “rubber stamping.” Computers wiped out the paper and stamps, but they also made it easy to multiply checkpoints and approvals. As a director of software engineering, it was pretty much impossible for me to botch anything.

Now, as a contractor, I suppose I’m in “a hands-on role” again. Why does it feel so good?

I recall an article about manhood by Florence King. 

First Miss King quoted Maxwell Perkins’ observation:

A man who wends his life with his knees crooked under a desk is not more than half a man, and we all know it. And Dr. Johnson said, when they were running down the military, "If a general walked into this room now we'd all be ashamed." And if a good workman, a mechanic, walked into a boardroom at a directors’ meeting, the directors would all feel ashamed.

Then she concluded:

Nothing in female psychology can compare to this. The career woman and the Mommy Tracker are well aware of their differences but the reaction they rouse in each other is mutual contempt, not shame. You will never find a woman executive watching busy diner waitresses with envious admiration the way male executives watch construction workers.

Maybe Miss King has got at the root of it. Arduous and consequential work is just manly. 

I am a man. It feels good to do something manly for once.

That’s a word no HR department would ever use.

Every five or ten years a new software methodology emerges: a process to help people collaborate on writing big computer programs. Each one promises to fix the problems of the last approach by making software, for example, more cheaply, or with fewer bugs.

A methodology called Scrum was hot in the early 2000s. I worked with Anne and Zach, a couple of managers who really liked it. 

When I asked Anne about Scrum, she said something like this: 

Scrum is the best management tool we’ve come up with to deliver quality software on time. I use it wherever it makes sense.

Zach said something a little different:

Scrum is life-changing. Its discovery empowered us to build software that always works. I refuse to work on any project that doesn’t adhere to Scrum 100%.

Both Anne and Zach were powerful advocates for Scrum, but their responses reveal a psychological, or maybe even spiritual, difference between them.  

Anne saw Scrum as something “we’ve come up with.” To Zach it was something we “discovered,” as if it existed even before we knew about it, like DNA or the neutrino. 

Anne saw Scrum as “a management tool,” valuable only to the extent it was useful. To Zach it was “life-changing,” and “empowering” and “always” the right approach. 

Anne called it “the best,” but to Zach, Scrum was necessary. No software would work without it, and neither would he.

The difference is this: Anne sees a process or system as being something malleable and potentially useful, but Zach can see it as an ideal, something we can trust in and aspire to. Anne’s view is pragmatic: a process should serve a person. Zach’s is dogmatic: a person should serve a process.

Imagining that this difference carries over into other spheres of life helps me understand the vast difference between educated people’s responses to the covid pandemic. 

The Annes of the world see remote-schooling or a personal-threat passport as a possible tool. They try it at a handful of schools or businesses, and they ask again and again: Is the policy saving lives? What problems is it causing? Should we expand it or tweak it or try something altogether different?

The Zachs, on the other hand, maintain an all-or-nothing approach. Their attitude is that if we’re going to mandate facial masks indoors, then we can’t measure results in some limited way. If even one or two people remove their masks, or if even one supermarket doesn’t participate, then the policy wasn’t followed. A policy might fail, but as long as it was followed less than perfectly, the Zachs still believe in it.

When the first covid vaccines appeared, a doctor who thinks like Anne marveled at the audacity of the president’s suggesting we needed to reach 100% vaccination. The known risks attached to the vaccine are low, but they are not zero, he said. The likelihood of unknown side-effects is also non-zero. Why would you want everyone—everyone—to do something that might cause some unknown harm down the road? If that risk comes to fruition, however unlikely, do you really want to have no one in the entire population—no one—left untainted?

But I also recall hearing an epidemiologist who thought like Zach. Her theory was that if any portion of the population remained unvaccinated, that group would serve as a breeding ground for more lethal strains of covid. Now that covid has evolved into something milder, I don’t hear this idea anymore, but at the time it motivated us to vilify unvaccinated people mercilessly.

This is the problem with Zach’s approach. If I insist that a process is valid only if it’s followed universally, I’m inclined to disregard any evidence that contradicts the process, to ignore any unintended side-effects, and to overpower anyone who resists it.

If Anne is wrong, she can find her way back onto the right track. But if Zach is wrong, he’s just going to insist more and more forcefully that we all follow his protocol, always aiming for total compliance, ignoring any collateral effects. The people who still believe we should have enforced a Shanghai-style response to covid are the same ones who ignore the depression, loneliness, subpar education, economic collapse, and social balkanization that are still ravaging us now.

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Scrum is no longer the hot new trend in software, but Anne still employs parts of it. Zach eventually gave up on Scrum entirely. Now Zach’s an acolyte of Empathy-Driven Development. “If everybody would just follow EDD, from the very beginning.…”

I hear the truism: Global problems require global solutions. That may be right, although even global problems—climate change or war refugees, for example—can be partially ameliorated by local improvements.

What scares me is how blindly the Zachs of the world nod at that cliché: eagerly, hungrily, even needily. They’re always craving the next universal, infallible system, and they get so lost in admiring and imposing it that they don’t even notice the people it hurts. 

If only the World Health Organization could enforce its policies globally…. If only every parent could be made to follow expert guidance…. If only New York and Florida had to implement best practices equally…. If only every phone included contact-tracing…. If only the same vaccine could be administered to everyone, worldwide…. 

The global solutions they’re craving happen to entail a worldwide, tyrannical police-state that destroys anyone who deviates from its edicts and inflicts universal harm whenever it makes a mistake.

But Zach’s a dogmatist, and totalitarianism is just an unpragmatic side effect. He can’t see it and wouldn’t care if he did.

I “quit” only in the technical sense. No one demanded my resignation, but after a decade of performance bonuses, my year-end review was less than encouraging: First, you shouldn’t have written that email. And second, some people are saying they’re uncomfortable working with you now.

I had already decided I wouldn’t litigate, so I just resigned.

“Makes me feel uncomfortable” and “makes me feel unsafe” are dangerous charges. Working from home I posed no threat of infection of course, but that’s not what the charge means. I suspect it means I’m upset that someone here doesn’t share my feelings, or even, I’m annoyed that someone unlike me is permitted to work here.

The anonymous, uncontested assertion of a negative feeling was enough to tilt my performance review. It wasn’t necessary for the complainers to say it to me, and it wasn’t necessary to explain the discomfort or how I caused it. It was necessary only that a member of the conformist majority call out a dissident in the minority.

On the other hand the company didn’t fire me outright, and I suspect a sympathetic HR representative actually worked to soften the company’s initial reaction to my letter. I’m ashamed that I always seem to underestimate my colleagues and friends, but their kindness surprised me again. Many sent heartening notes. Some offered to help me find other employment. Several still keep in touch.

I’m sure that I was right to take my little stand and leave. This feeling of certainty came over me in a wave when I resigned. It persists today. My relief at disentangling myself from a business determined to cow its employees and customers into promoting what Dr. Aaron Kheriaty now calls the biomedical security state is immense. I’m eager to try something new.

After leaving I realized something I hadn’t seen before. I didn’t resign from just one corporation. I finalized a divorce with the whole high-tech world. One company might have been more willing than another to certify religious exemptions or to track weekly testing for the unvaccinated, for example, but how many Nasdaq companies refused outright to act as social-credit Brownshirts? I’m not aware of any. 

In fact most high-tech companies see a totalitarian technocracy as a business opportunity, part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Internet of Things. Both buzzwords encompass monitoring services that governments either buy directly or mandate their citizens to buy. My phone might report my meetings with friends for contact-tracing, my car might report my destinations for both pollution control and political-protest monitoring, or my fridge might report my soda consumption for healthcare cost-reductions. In every case there’s government interest in tracking and nudging me. And government contracts are good business.

So I’m out. I was never at ease on the corporate ladder, but after so long there, it came to feel like solid ground. I could answer “So, what do you do?” without having to stop and think. When a new graduate needed work, I could make introductions.

Now my income has plummeted just as my bank repeats that people like me must focus on retirement planning. I’m not sure what I’ll be doing next fall. Being cut off from the work I did for thirty years isn’t depressing, but it does leave me a little anxious.

A friend offered this advice: old books and new skills. His idea, I think, is that when the world feels askew, when we are all struggling with “unpersoning” each other in the Orwellian sense, coercing and ostracizing and scapegoating in a pretense of selfless kindness, we need to look back to what’s real. Looking at a book from long ago, from what amounts to an utterly different culture, it’s easy to recognize what carries over, what’s universal to human nature and lasting. Learning a skill also grounds us to what’s real—not a virtual skill like Instagram filters or TikTok editing, but a real skill that leaves a mark on the physical world.

A builder at my church, to my immense gratitude, has invited me to work for him. The work is tangible, and I’m learning something every day: coaxing substantial trees into falling away from the homeowner’s roof, cutting ceiling tiles, fixing the soap pump on a commercial dishwasher. I suppose it adds up to new skills.

I’ve also been reading some old books. This morning I finished Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Lily, the protagonist, is a society girl whose friends all urge her to make a profitable marriage. But Lily is reluctant to tie the knot just for money. On the last page her principles are intact, but she has lost all her opportunities and dies impoverished. 

I didn’t expect to have much in common with a beauty of the 1890s who floats between Mediterranean yachts and New York summer houses, but I do. We both lost financial security and our public identities: she by refusing to marry into Fifth Avenue society, and I by refusing to march lockstep with the corporate world. Thankfully I have too much love in my life to die like Lily. But by the end of that book, I was right with her.

“Can you believe this %$#@!?” he wrote. “It’s tyranny!”

I sympathized but also noticed what he didn’t say: “I’ll never golf there again.” 

He didn’t say it because he will golf there again. He loves that course. It’s three minutes from his house. His friends are there, it’s inexpensive, and at the club house they call him by name. He recently had a Pfizer booster, and in all probability he already has an app on his phone to prove it.

Speaking of phones, another friend confessed how embarrassed she felt fumbling with her iPhone to enter a restaurant. “You could have left,” I said quietly.

“You have no idea,” she riposted, “how bad things are here. You can’t go to any restaurants without proving you’re vaccinated.”

There’s only a tiny minority who are really determined to defy vaccine mandates. I can’t tell how many—perhaps 1 out 50 here in New Hampshire?

There’s an opposite group, likely bigger, who are terrified of covid-19 and strident, aching for scapegoats, and truly committed to enforcing vaccine mandates and mask mandates and distancing rules and remote learning and rapid-testing and involuntary-quarantining and heaven-knows-what-else for this and all future diseases forever.

The bulk of us are in the middle. Some are mildly supportive of the extra rules, and some are mildly opposed. We don’t like undergoing the medical equivalent of a credit check every time we enter a business, but we do want to enter. Complain to a friend about vaccine passports?—Sure. Sign an online petition?—Maybe. Vote in a local election to recall the neighborhood busybody?—Probably not. Pass up golf or Thai food?—Never. 

How many us would need to oppose vaccine mandates in order to shut down this silly-yet-sinister collecting and storing and scrutinizing of all our personal risk factors?

Not many, I think.

What would happen if just 10% of a restaurant’s patrons politely turned around and walked out? If just one out of ten golfers didn’t renew their memberships in 2022? If one tenth of the movie-watchers, hotel guests, students, cruise-passengers, churchgoers, or employees, said, “No, thank you. I’ll find someplace that respects my privacy a little better.” What would happen?

Camille and I are hardly revolutionaries, but we confront vaccine passports in little ways. 

• We buy groceries 50 minutes away from our mandate-heavy, Ivy League town. It’s tiresome to shop infrequently and far away, although the lower prices make up for the extra gas. 

• When we go out to eat, we choose a diner where there’s no visible hint of a pandemic.

• After the local kitchen and bath store introduced a slew of covid-19 mandates, we canceled our order and told them why, although switching to a competitor delayed our repair. 

• We usually stay away from corporate chains where covid-19 policy has been dictated company-wide.

• Generally we avoid wealthier, white-collar neighborhoods. The covid-obsessed mindset is mostly a high-end fashion. People who have to work on-site and with their hands are more accustomed both to risk and to ideas unlike their own.

If just one out of ten of us shunned businesses that enforce covid-19 mandates, what would happen?

No business accepts a 10% revenue drop: they would flip overnight! Soon the local governments would hear from the chambers of commerce, and the municipal mandates would disappear. Imagine that several Fortune 500 CEOs were to tell the president tomorrow: “This just isn’t working. We’re losing too many people.” There would be a volte-face on vaccine fiats.

Just a little would be enough. If my golf-addicted buddy were to show his proof-of-covid-vaccination only at the golf course, but not at the grocery store, movie theater, or bar—if he canceled the cruise reservation and the winery tour—even that might be enough. 

But the more accustomed we get to showing our papers, the less likely we are to resist at all.

“Tyranny,” he called it. We can see it coming, and we’re inclined to fight it. 

But will we give up our tee times?

There will always be those who recommend disowning family, but for the rest of us who actually want to love people unlike ourselves, holiday feasts are gifts. I’m thankful to my wife for hosting several gatherings this year, and I’m thankful to those who invited us into their homes. We are cherishing Christmas.

“I don’t want selfish people at my party,” announced one discriminating host.

That got me thinking about the ubiquitous use of the word selfish to describe the more than ¼ of our friends and relatives who haven’t received any covid-19 vaccines.

Can we stop using that word? It’s the wrong term.

Selfish is an easy fallback to describe behavior we don’t understand. The environmentalists blocking traffic, the pro-lifer praying in front of the clinic, the actor using her awards speech to pontificate on Palestine, the homeschooling mom, anyone who steps outside our everyday patterns and might suggest something uncomfortable—it’s tempting to tag such people as selfish. I suppose anyone standing apart from a crowd indirectly calls attention to himself.

But they’re not selfish, not really—it’s the wrong word. The environmentalists who expect to be arrested as they stand precariously in the intersection, like the homeschooling mom who expends a great deal of time, money, and effort to educate her children, aren’t elevating themselves. In fact they’re exposing themselves to risk and ridicule, restricting and undermining their personal well-being, in order to elevate some principle they hold to be greater than themselves. 

It’s the same with the one out of four friends and family who are inaccurately labeled the unvaccinated. How do they express their selfishness? They…

• surrender their jobs and health insurance

• are arrested and imprisoned in many countries, sometimes even in America

• forfeit parental or custody rights

• are renounced by the less tolerant among their friends and family

• give up their social activities and recreation as institutions enforce passport-only access

• relinquish their right to speak in the public square, especially online

• suffer every imaginable insult to their intelligence: they are told they disregard science, they’re manipulated by conservative media, they’re gullible enough to believe in conspiracy theories and witch-doctors and horse medicine, and on and on.

Would selfish people really choose all this suffering, or would they put their own convenience first?

I’ve behaved selfishly. I know what selfishness feels like, charging for the last seat on the train or steering my wife away from the musical and towards the action movie. Losing my job over a vaccine-tracking database feels different. When I talk to people who haven’t received one of the covid-19 vaccines—or who, like me, have refused altogether to participate in the vast new information networks tracking their social risk—these people don’t sound selfish.

And frankly it’s just hard, as a vaccine-passport-carrying majority are systematically isolating a minority, to apply the word selfish to the minority. I suppose an oppressive majority can be made up of altruistic, magnanimous people while a victimized minority can be made up of selfish people. But it’s hard to imagine. Historical examples from the Salem trials to the Jacobins, from the Cultural Revolution to the Hutus, go the other way. History often ends up describing those majorities with words like hysteria and zealots and terror, but it never seems to describe the minorities as selfish.

So call us non-conformists, certainly. Call us stubborn, sure, for holding out all this time. Call us cynical for failing to applaud proof-of-covid-19-vaccination, even after every form of media, from Twitter to Fox, has promoted it. Call us paranoid if you must, for imagining there could be harm in a world in which a president alone—without any legislation, without any approval by elected representatives—can declare crises as he likes and demand that every citizen and private business not only comply, but also punish and report dissidents.

Call us any of these. But don’t call us selfish. We’re not.

Either rule could return—President Biden’s administration will continue to fight for them. But as I write this, big companies that both sell to the federal government and employ many people are now free to do as they like. They may fire or keep us dissenters.

Will they fire us?

My employer says it doesn’t want to:

• Our objective is to retain all [Company] colleagues—we do not want to lose anyone over this mandate... Because the government is a significant customer for us, adopting the vaccine mandate is a necessary step to protect the business…

But what have corporations done since September?

• They hired third-party compliance firms to track new personal information online.

• They demanded all their employees upload their personal data. The deadline to do so has already passed. Many employees complied unwillingly.

• They ran internal marketing campaigns to pitch “safety” in the workplace.

• They identified non-compliant employees and prepared to fire them, originally on December 8, and later on January 4.

• They cultivated an environment in which some employees dutifully and openly asserted they are afraid to work with non-compliant (“irresponsible” and “dangerous”) colleagues.

Corporations are invested in this now. It’s already in motion. A serious shove is needed to propel big companies. The government shoved boldly, ignoring the separation of powers and (again!) the tenth amendment.

Once these big institutions are in motion, however, it takes an equally great force to stop them. The courts’ injunctions—though the right response—are hardly a force at all. A huge freight train is hurtling forward, about to blow past the January 4 milestone, and the courts have effectively said “Until we work this out, you may choose to back off the throttle.”

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As an example, consider our annual raises and bonuses. Big companies set budgets for compensation by department: when one employee gets more, another gets less. The purpose of a raise or bonus is to motivate an employee. My company recently worked out its numbers, but I haven’t yet been told my own share.

I wonder…having known that I would be fired on January 4, how much of his budget did my boss allocate to motivating my performance next year? I know what I would have done in his shoes.

By genuflecting to an illegal policy at once, companies have put themselves in a tough spot. According to the National Law Review:

• Contractors…will want to consider whether to institute a complete stop or move forward based on the employer’s own business decision to require vaccinations… Contractors moving forward with vaccination programs must be particularly mindful, however, of the dozen or so state laws that do or may conflict with the requirements of EO 14042.

Ah, yes. Those pesky state laws that actually proscribe workplace vaccine passports. What will happen when they are challenged in court? Meanwhile, will they just fire me?