Working in an industry that reduced human to numbers on a spreadsheet was depressing – but as a father of three, losing that work was alarming. One year after his redundancy, journalist Greg Bruce reflects on the state of the industry that ejected him, and the grim financial reality of life after redundancy.
My ten years at New Zealand’s largest newspaper had started with excitement and happiness. I was in a job I had long aspired to, working with great people, doing work that felt meaningful. By the end of my time there, all meaning had gone from my work. It had been chewed up, digested and shat out as numbers on a spreadsheet, which was deposited into my inbox every morning.
The erosion of meaning and its replacement with numbers was at first gradual and then overwhelming. It reached its zenith in the moment when a middle manager, in denying me a pay rise, told me my writing had contributed only $12,000 worth of value to the company that year.
I had spent a lifetime building a picture of myself as the type of person who did a certain type of work. The shock of having others disagree in such concrete terms simultaneously unmoored and floored me.
The reduction of your humanity to a number, or set of numbers, is awful, no matter what job you’re in. You, or more likely someone senior to you, might argue that your enumeration is necessary for the efficient functioning of both workplace and wider economy, but that is not true. The only place it is necessary is dystopian science fiction.
Work is a place many – if not most – of us go because we have to. That is fine: life is suffering etc etc. But within the constraints of the sale of one’s labour is a space in which the dial of suffering can be turned up or down. One particularly powerful way to turn it up is to create a system in which people are little more than characters in some impossibly boring video game, existing purely to contribute points to someone else’s high score.
Workplace decisions that affect and even destroy people’s livelihoods are often presented as fait accompli, a difficult task that has to be done. We are told “there is no alternative”. But that is almost never the case. This year, the average salary of the 51 CEOs of New Zealand's biggest companies was $2.72m. Not saying CEOs don’t contribute value to their organisations, but I would be interested to see their numbers.
I have three children and many bills to pay. It’s fine to have big feelings about work and the reduction of one’s value to a number, but those feelings have to co-exist with similarly sized acts of practicality. My industry had been systematically dismantled by a combination of technology and stupidity and the end result was that I had to build a new picture of myself, and quickly.
I moved out into the world beyond the office. Specifically, I moved into my bedroom, where, for most of the past year, I’ve continued doing what I’ve always done: writing articles like this one, for whoever will pay me.
Sometimes over the past year I've felt elated at being free of the constraints of my previous workplace. More often, I've felt guilty about having let my family down. For the first few weeks after the redundancy, I existed in a state of wild emotional flux. I felt sad, angry, dislocated and scared about the future.
I settled into a fairly predictable routine. I would rise early, help get the kids to school, then return to my bedroom, do whatever writing work I had, then help get the kids to their after-school activities.
I rarely shaved or made the bed. I would go days without showering. Emotionally and psychologically, I was all over the place.
In spite of this, I knuckled down to work, churning out the articles, many of them for my previous employer because bitterness and resentment are not as powerful as the need to pay the bills. But freelance rates have barely changed in 30 years and even if there were some magic machine that could drastically improve my productivity, it still wouldn’t be enough.
My wife would regularly ask what work I had coming up and when I would be getting paid for it. My answers were always disappointing and insufficient.
She is now retraining as a teacher. Hopefully, this will allow her to get a job at some point next year, at which point we will hopefully no longer be drowning, but will instead make a welcome return to treading water while gasping for air.
Hope from an unlikely source
Through the early part of this year, I spent many nights lying awake in bed trying to come up with ways to make some cash. Having proved unable, I turned to AI, spending hours typing and retyping variations of “How can I get rich quick?” into various chat windows. AI gave me a lot of ideas – most of them unsuitable – but more importantly it gave me hope.
I held onto that hope, eventually deciding to do the only thing I’m really qualified to do: write about it. I joined the “creator economy”, launching a newsletter about all this. I named it “Exit Strategy” because it tells the story of my attempt, aged 49, to go in a new direction and to create a new self – one in which I am no longer a journalist but someone financially secure.
In its first three months, Exit Strategy has told the story of my attempts to sell a range of products and services, including an app for assessing side hustles, an information product for financial advisers and a recruitment hitlist.
Although I launched with the explicit goal of building and selling a business for seven figures within the next year, nothing I’ve created has yet earned even a single dollar, except for the newsletter itself, which, so far, has 26 paying subscribers. These are people who either appreciate my work or feel sorry for me and I long ago stopped caring about who is who.
Redundancy has taught me many things but the main one is this: When you have enough money, you have lots of worries. When you don’t have enough money, you still have lots of worries but you only have time to deal with one.
Greg Bruce is an Auckland journalist. His Exit Strategy column is featured on Substack.
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