Melancholia and Joy
A new beginning
Today was one of those life changing days as I quit the profession that I once worshiped, believed was in my blood and forever intertwined with my DNA and was inextricably linked with my identity and feeling of self-worth until it wasn’t.
And I can thank COVID-19 and 16 months of furlough during which time I realized that there is more to life than going to work every day, that my world will not crumble and fall, that I will not turn to dust, that I am still worth something without a label, if I no longer went to work everyday and I can also thank Social Security and Medicare for making my decision possible and also thank my wife because she makes enough money to allow me to leave my job.
I’ve been a journalist since 1971, that would be a half a century, with a few gaps through the years but journalism has been my one and only job as an adult and my one and only love until I filed the papers for a divorce today. I always thought it was like getting paid to learn, a free pass to higher education but now I feel like work is more a lead weight pulling me down than a free pass lifting me higher.
I felt very strange as I told none of my colleagues of my decision and the boss was on vacation and I thought she would be back today so I went to the office to tell her in person but instead I emailed her with my decision. Email is so impersonal but it is the way of the world.
I’ve always felt that when the day comes when I no longer feel joy or feel the potential to feel joy at what I do then it is time to hang up the computer and turn in my badge that electronically opens the front door of the building where I was previously employed that was previously unlocked and maybe that is a big part of the problem as I have felt symbolically locked out of my work for quite a while. And I also have long believed that it’s time to leave when it seems that no story is new and that I’ve written it all before and that is the way I feel and with that kind of feeling I can’t look forward to the day with excitement of finding something new. That shortchanges all those people who are doing something new who I wouldn’t be able to recognize. In short, it’s no fun any more.
And then there is the sorry state of print journalism. During my nine years with the Daily Record, we competed with the Star Ledger every day to get the news first and people really relied on the newspapers to keep them informed. Many if not most people who lived in the area subscribed to either the Record or the Ledger and people actually read the newspapers and how quaint is that. We had people calling in tips, politicians complaining about less than complimentary stories and we felt we had an ethical responsibility to report the news, at least that’s how I felt. The Record is a dying skeleton, the Ledger is begging for donations. In the early years with my current employer, the newspapers were always 24 or 28 pages long and circulation was around 20,000 papers but 15 years later, in the withering economy, the paper has been like the incredible shrinking man to the point where it’s now eight pages and circulation is negligible.
The demise of print journalism has been slow but unrelenting, like a virus or like we are being stalked by some hairy monster waiting to pounce when we have lost all of our energy. It’s touched on all areas of journalism, starting with the pay. I never expected to get the Porsche I always wanted but I did expect that I could get my Honda Civic fixed so that I wouldn’t need to start the car with a portable jump starter. The troubles began in earnest after the recession of the early 1990s when my pay was cut significantly and I now find that I am making less money than when I started with my latest job more than 30 years ago. The economy led to layoffs which meant that reporters were expected to do more with less, again, and that led to less news reported and that led to less public interest, coupled with the overarching problem of advertisers who found they could reach more people for less money on-line, so why waste their money with print news. And it all got to be so much of a grind with less and less time to do real reporting rather than simply fill up the holes in the paper and I never wanted to feel like I was just a plumber trying to keep the paper from leaking and sinking.
And then there was trump and his assault on the media and his claims of false news and how so many people believed him and how so many conspiracy theories were created and how so many people really believed that the liberal media was out to get trump as it spread lies hither and yon. I recall one official telling me that she absolutely knew that the press was corrupt and that we spread lies for political reasons and I said that I didn’t spread lies at least not intentionally and that while the press is not infallible it is pretty much made of people who believe the people need to know the truths. And trump did something else as he made reporters unpopular and while I never thought it was a beauty contest, it was nice to think that people respected our work until they started to curse us.
But somehow, until fairly recently, I never lost my enthusiasm, I never lost the feeling of excitement about being witness to a major event, interviewing a fascinating person, beating the other reporters to a gruesome murder scene, it was all so much fun, until it wasn’t. But the best stories are those where the reporter takes the extra time, speaks to the extra source, researches the extra piece of information and I just didn’t have the lust anymore.
So I will move on as I plan to work as a mentor with developmentally disabled people and I am excited about doing something different than what I’ve been doing for 50 years. No I won’t go to study penguins at the south pole but I will be doing something equally different. And now I feel the phantom pain of a leg that was amputated and I reach down to scratch and there’s nothing there. It’s like that after leaving something you’ve devoted yourself to for 50 years.
It’s hard to say what was the last straw, the icing on the cake, the final stroke, the straw that broke the camel’s back or the match in the powder barrel but I think it came when I got up one morning and thought to myself, “this is a drag.”