At first glance, it might look like, “Fuck you, Money!” As if I’m mad at money. But that’s not what I mean.
It’s an adjective. A type of money. Emphasize the first word more than the second. Maybe I should make it a one word qualifier: Fuckyou. (Still with the emphasis on the first syllable, of course.)
It’s money you have on hand so you don’t feel too desperately beholden to your job.
It’s fuckyou money.
Fuckyou money allows you to more confidently push back when you’re pushed, and if that push becomes a shove, you can say, “Fuck you.”
Just knowing you have the option makes a difference. You’ll breathe easier. Bosses can smell desperation. You’ll give off a different scent if you’re not living paycheck to paycheck.
You might get caught up in the pressures of the day and forget for a moment about the fuckyou money and get stressed out, but then you just have to remind yourself that you can walk away any time. It might not be wise, but you have the option. You have enough money to live for a few months. Maybe a year or more.
That year will fly by and you’ll have wasted all your fuckyou money, but that’s not your primary thought if it ever gets to that moment. At that moment, there will just be the delicious moment when you say, “fuck you.” Maybe it will be a great moment in your life.
Perhaps you won’t actually curse to someone’s face. Maybe it’s just “Fuck It Money.” When you’ve had enough, you just say, “fuck it.” And again, always the important part, the great part: you walk away.
Walk away calmly. Don’t make a big dramatic scene of it. The people around you are suffering also, and you may not be making their lives any easier by exiting stage left. It really doesn’t have to be a “take this job and shove it” kind of thing. You’re not angry. You’re just tired.
When the time comes, don’t think too much about how incredibly reckless and irresponsible you’re being. Just do it. I wonder what it would feel like. How liberating! How terrifying! How shameful, to risk losing whatever middle class status your job conferred on you, and the means of providing for your family.
Would it spur you on to finally do that great thing you need to do?
Or will it just be the stupidest fucking thing you could have done, you fucking moron.
If you get some fuckyou money, and you have the fuckyou money sitting around for a while, you might start thinking about it too much. It may not take much of a push anymore to get you thinking about the possibility of saying, “fuck it.” Just being expected to, you know, do your job might seem like an intolerable burden.
And maybe it is.
I had a dream a while back that has stayed with me. I thought it was just in the past few months, but looking in my journal, I see I wrote it down over a year ago.
It seemed I was going to commit suicide. It wasn’t all that grim, in the dream. Just something I was going to do. Maybe because I was so tired of my day job. But then — still in the dream — I had this sudden inspiration. I could quit instead of killing myself. Not having a job would still be worrisome, but it would be way better than suicide. And I felt so much better, in the dream, knowing I had this choice. I still remember the joy I felt at the prospect of quitting.
And now, awake, over a year later, it seems a good interpretation of this is that my subconscious was trying to overcome my fears of making a change and not having money, by framing it a little more starkly for me. With death as the other option, quitting suddenly became possible.
It could be that staying in the job, even with all of its benefits, is like death in some ways.
But, quitting? Really?
Reckless. Irresponsible.
It would be those things, to call on the fuckyou money, and to quit with only a vague plan and unlikely prospects.
But I listen to Colin Hay:
“You don’t understand, I already have a plan, I’m waiting for my real life to begin.”
And Martin Sexton:
“Making a mistake I gotta make, and I’m glory bound.”
And I know that I want to live.
I don’t want to say “fuck you” to anyone.
I want to say, “I love you.”
3 Comments
I love Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. It’s been many years since I read it, and I swear, I had forgotten all about his discussion of fuck-you money in the book at the time I wrote this post. (Certainly it was out of my conscious memory. Maybe my subconscious offered it up from this source.) I only remembered when I happened to search for existing uses of the term right before publishing this. Neal’s version of fuck-you money was different — it had a hyphen, for one thing, and it had to do with money that gives you complete financial freedom. My version is only enough to do something foolish like walk away that from a job that gives you decent, or at least adequate financial security.
20 September 2012 at 8:04 am
When I first started doing consulting/contract work, it was really painful to get through building up the buffer that NET 30 payment sets up.
You work for 30 days, then send an invoice and wait another 30 days to get paid (more if they don’t pay on time).
So, when you start contracting, you basically work for 60+ days without getting paid.
However, once you get through that, you’re basically always owed 2 months worth of money. If they terminate the contract or you decide to quit, it’s 2 months before the money stops flowing.
I noticed that once that reality really settled into my thinking, it served as a small version of FU money. Especially when combined with experience that tells me that I can find a new gig within that 2 months as damned near guaranteed.
It changed my attitude. I quit tiptoeing around issues. I started calling people out on their BS more, etc. When people would counter by threatening to terminate my contract, I’d just calmly ask them what date they’d like my last to be and found that EVERY time, people backed down.
Same thing when people insisted, for example, that I HAD to stay late on a Friday night to fix something and cancel plans involving expensive tickets (despite no one on the other end to verify until Monday morning). When I offered to come in on Saturday instead, I was told that it was unacceptable.
I started asking “or what?”.
“You have to stay late.”
“I have to stay late tonight or what happens?”
“We’ll terminate your contract.”
“So, the only person who can fix it will then no longer be available. How will that get this fixed before Monday morning?”
“I guess it won’t.”
“How does my offer to come in on Saturday sound now?”
“Pretty reasonable.”
“Yeah. See you tomorrow.”
Implicit and sitting right under the surface of many of my statements is a slightly disguised “fuck you”.
Now that I’ve been doing this as long as I have, I’ve come to realize that that position isn’t “normal” for people. I’ve been told by more than a few that they respect me more for it, but it wouldn’t have become my stance unless that 2 month buffer of back-pay wasn’t there in the background.
20 September 2012 at 3:38 pm
Hey, J — thanks for your comments. There may be a slight element of malaise in some of my posts lately, but I should say I’ve had it very good with hours and other things at my work, partly because of a similar insistence on the “work/life balance” thing. But I’m always thinking it can’t last, even though it has for years. Part of my willingness to risk the insistence is that I have some cushion in case they say, “Okay, see you later.” It’s just so expected somehow of regular, “exempt” employees that they should donate free labor and have to compensate for low staffing and poor planning. Maybe you’ll be taking on employees by the time I walk away/get canned. :-)
20 September 2012 at 4:20 pm