Around the start of April in 2021, I got up the guts to ask to leave my job (which I have not yet talked about in this blog, but may or may not circle back to) as a marketing and communications executive in the collectibles industry. I hadn’t been doing well for months at that point, and It turned out that making the decision to resign was the correct choice for me.

I felt an extreme amount of pressure and responsibility on my shoulders in that job (almost certainly overvaluing myself, but whatever),and it ended up taking an immense toll on me physically and psychologically. You should never work for an employer whose well-being you set above your own, but that’s what I chose to do for too long, and by the end, I was seriously coming undone.

A big part of working in marketing is, well… marketing, which can be defined as the “action or business of promoting and selling products or services”. When one is zealously trying to promote or sell something, they oftentimes choose to present a rather lopsided perspective of their item in order to convince consumers to purchase it.

As an independent toy reporter, I had been blessed for years with the privilege of complete autonomy and being able to present a full analysis of collectibles—both the good and the bad—without being beholden to anyone. But being a company man, I suddenly had a responsibility to only give collectors partial viewpoints of items—something that contradicted my principle of 100% honesty.

I also had to learn to keep a multitude of secrets from my friends and fellow fans, violating my predilection for complete transparency in interacting with others and making me nervous about slipping up when talking to some of my closest friends . I might be spoiled, but staying true to my values is a priority in my life. Having to work around them for a job was tough for a brat like me.

Additionally, I frequently have enormous difficulties interpreting what others are saying or feeling or asking for, so I was constantly terrified I’d accidentally give an unsuitable response to one of the hundreds of social media comments I’d be moderating each day and the company would suffer for my mistake. I spent quite a few sleepless nights during that year and a half worrying about haplessly bringing shame to my employer. Those nights compounded and I felt more and more drained and sleep-deprived.

And I was being dramatically underpaid for the monumental amount of work I was doing and the damage I was doing to myself to do so, which didn’t help matters. (I also got tired of being called a “retard” by randos on the Internet who saw me in my company videos, which didn’t exactly encourage me to keep doing my best for them to keep their interest in collecting fun and interesting.)

My wife absolutely abhorred that I ever took such a high-demand, low-return job in the first place, and it was a frequent point of contention between us during my year and a half working in the industry. She loathed my devotion to the company and was delighted when I decided to give it up, so it was nice to have her full support on abandoning my job while in the midst of a pandemic and going back to my career as an independent reporter with limited and uncertain monthly income.

I gave about three months notice that I was quitting so that my boss would have adequate time to find a suitable replacement for me who could handle all my duties without disrupting the status quo, but it ended up being irrelevant—no one was actually hired to replace me at all. Nothing to make a guy feel superfluouslike his job being eliminated basically entirely. It actually made my decision to leave a easier for me, though—if my duties could be dissipated so easily, clearly I wasn’t as necessary as I feared.

While winding. down my preparations to leave my position, I spent many hours writing an elaborate step-by-step document detailing precisely how to perform all of my duties—but it was also a waste, as most of those tasks weren’t taken up by anyone else anyway and were never performed again.

And so, on August 1st 2021, I left my proverbial Spider-Man mask in a random alleyway trash can and retired from the corporate business world forever, beginning serious brainstorming for this book/blog, which I intended to be the capstone great work of my life. Little did I realize at the time that I might be starting such a chronicle too late…