Yun I recently gave my two week notice at Meta. At the end of it, I will have spent just less than six months at the company. I worked on ads, which is known to be a somewhat more stressful organization at the company. Recently, I talked with one of my coworkers, Yun. He is my "tech lead", which means he is a more senior software engineer who, although he is not my manager, is nevertheless closely involved with my work and has a stake in ensuring that the work that has been given to me gets done. When I first joined the company, before I had any real work to do, we chatted sometimes at lunch. I remembered a few perfunctory details about his life - that he is from China, that he did his PhD somewhere in the US, that he had spent some years working in a different tech sector, and that he had two young children. He is balding noticeably, and has a somewhat overly round head. His gait is unusual - when he walks, he throws his weight with each step too much to the left, and then to the right, so that he seems to be swinging a bit in either direction as he approaches you. He is rather soft-spoken, and generally wears a thin, cryptic smile that I could never make sense of. And in truth, he was often the source of my stress once I began to take on actual work. He would inspect my work and ask me to redo anything that was unsatisfactory. If he felt that I had been remiss in some aspect of the work, he would criticize me for a lack of meticulousness. He would push me to finish things by certain times, and would question why things which he felt could have been done in one amount of time ended up taking me two amounts. What began as somewhat friendly lunch conversations devolved into fairly curt, scheduled meetings for project updates. In general, I disliked him. On Monday, I told my manager that I was leaving, and I submitted my formal resignation with the company. On Tuesday, I told Yun that I was leaving. I felt nervous to tell him. But he simply asked me a few questions about why I was leaving and where I was going. I have found a diplomatic and honest answer to this, which sidesteps having to acknowledge the overall level of stress within our organization and our team, and instead focuses on "working on other problems that I find more interesting" and "going to a smaller, growing company where I can make more of an impact". He reacted relatively well: He thanked me for my transparency, wished me luck, said something to the effect of "let's try and enjoy the next two weeks", and then we ended the meeting. Then, on Thursday, he came swinging over with his unbalanced gait to my desk, and he asked if I had time to chat about the projects. So I got up with him and we went outside - the weather is nice, he said, and meeting rooms are hard to find anyway - which were both true statements. And so we sat down on a walkway outside the office, underneath some trellised vines which have begun to turn red and yellow with the season, and side by side on a picnic bench with our laptops out, he asked me for some updates on the work I was doing and I explained it to him. He had unusually little to say in response to my responses. What is the reasoning behind X? What are the experiment results for Y? How is the progress on Z? Then, seemingly satisfied, he said, Hm, everything here looks good. You've been doing well. You're on track to have a successful review cycle. You should have stayed for a few more weeks to see things through to completion, you deserve it. I didn't know he thought I was doing well. I also didn't know he would tell me I was doing well. I didn't know we were going to be nice to each other. He asked me some more questions about why I was leaving and we talked a little bit about it. I tried to answer his questions and explain myself. And, I told him I thought I was making the right decision. (I have never felt that I am making the right decision in anything in my life.) Then, he paused for a little, and looked away at the sky, thinking for a bit, and then he looked back at me, with his soft, cryptic smile, and he said, in words and tones that I had not heard him use before, and of which I did not think him capable, and which altogether was so surprising to me that I must emphasize that this all happened essentially as I am about to describe it: Well, you're probably right... You probably notice that a lot of people here are stressed... Their mental health is not very good, the work life balance is not very good, everyone is tired... But I feel everyone needs the money in some way or another... You are young, you have freedom. I have kids, I have a house... You should enjoy being young. We only have sixty-five... seventy years. We should enjoy it... Sometimes I think I probably won't be able to keep doing this job for many years. The work life balance is so bad... But for now I have to do it, the pay is good, I want my kids to be comfortable and successful. It's just me and my wife, there's no one else to support us. Here, I briefly interjected that my parents were like him, alone in this country trying to support their children. In fact, not only were they alone without support, but my dad would even send money back to his parents. He smiled and said, "Yes, me too." I didn't know what to say. I thought about how my mom told me that, a long time ago, before I was born, when it was just my oldest sister, my dad told his parents that he wanted to come home for a bit back to China and see them. And they told him not to come, to stay in the US and just send them the plane ticket money instead. My mom is telling me this while we are on one of our walks after dinner last fall when I was home for a month because of a nervous breakdown where I was hardly sleeping and eating and I was constantly panicked for reasons that even now are unclear to me, and I remember flying home and feeling like a failure and a disappointment for needing my parents to take care of me, but then that night when they picked me up from the airport and we got home and they watched me eat the food they had prepared for me, and I was feeling so helpless and useless, they told me that I would stay as long as I needed, that I could quit my job if I needed, that they would look after me until I got better. And I'm not really sure how we got here, because growing up, my dad had a temper and in many ways he was not a good dad, and him and my mom were not affectionate with each other around me and my sisters, so that I often wondered when I was younger if, for all his yelling and his tantrums, my mom loved him. But then walking underneath the streetlights, passing the houses and the parks, watching our shadows disappear and reappear against the blots cast by the trees, my mom says, "And so that made your dad very sad". And suddenly I can see my dad, a PhD student with a daughter, breaking down after a phone call late on some dim night in the 90s in some crappy apartment in Boston, because his parents told him to send them the money for the plane tickets, and I imagine him and my mom, long before my existence, in a moment that, if it was witnessed by the world, would only have been seen if someone had happened to have been walking down some forgotten avenue that night and had looked up at the window of some forgotten old building where they would have seen one shadow sitting down crumpled over a desk, and another shadow leaning over to embrace him - faint movements of light behind drawn curtains - and I suppose that whatever happened that night could have occurred only within some part of the long arc of what we generally call "love", after which they had a son, an anxious child, whom they raised to adulthood, and who, when he called them decades later, was told: "Come home now, and stay as long as you need". Then I saw in Yun the depth of love and life that I had until then denied. He continued: Some day I think I'll find another company, make less money, but have better mental health. And I'll be able to spend more time with my daughters. They're 5 and 10. I hope they'll be able to have the same freedom you do, to be able to pursue what makes them happy, to be comfortable and healthy. Thinking about that makes me happy. Then he stopped, and he turned towards me and clasped his hands together, and he said, I'm happy for you, Bryan. And he got up and left. I could feel the sun on my brow and on my back. It was warming me in a way that felt good. I felt as if I had been basking in the sun for longer than we had actually been talking outside. At the very least, the memory of working in that dimly-lit and temperature-controlled office, with its steady whir of typing and electrical humming, felt suddenly very distant. I feel that oftentimes what makes time feel short is a lack of change. In adulthood we begin to define our lives in terms of longer spans of time, demarcated perhaps by changes in our career, or our relationships, where we lived, what we dreamed about, if perhaps we struggled for a time with some ailment, or if we spent some time recharacterizing ourselves with some new hobby. And so we measure the passage of time not so much by the count of days, but rather by the distinct changes in persona, the different "me"s that make each of us up. Years may pass during which nothing happens, then suddenly some great upheaval occurs and then we feel that the person we were just a few months ago is as distant and unrecognizable to us as who we were when we were children so many years ago. And the feeling of melancholy comes when for whatever reason something happens and one is made to feel again as if they have taken on a previously-disassumed persona. Suddenly the past comes lurching back, the persona with all its memories and thoughts, dreams and desires. Then time is collapsed and flattened, all the time between now and when one was last that person are removed, it happens so suddenly as to be nauseating, confusing, and disorienting - it is bittersweet, a fleeting glimpse of the past, as if one was sitting on a train and thought they saw in the window the apparition of their childhood home, or the silhouette of a forgotten lover. For a moment, before one has realized what has happened, one has been thrown back in time, and then, as quickly as it came, it is gone, unrecapturable. When Yun left me at that picnic table outside the office, I had the vague sense that I was briefly inhabiting a former self, one that was more honest and alive, but I couldn't quite comprehend it. So I got up and went back inside, but as I passed the people sitting at their desks, I felt a sense of displacement. For so long I would see the people in the office and all I could see was ugliness - they are balding, pale, gaunt, with baggy eyes and hunched backs, awkward posture and gait, they clear their throats too often and sneeze too loud... Not to mention all the meaningless conversations you have at work. One person says she went out with her friends and someone threw up on her purse. You say Oh no!, but you don't care. It's a fiction, we tell pointless stories that allow us to feel vaguely reassured that we are surrounded by people who are likely humans and have lives like us. And then Yun will say that he spent the weekend taking his kids to the zoo, which though it takes an entire weekend to experience, takes only all of five seconds for him to say and even less for you to forget about, because this obviously means nothing to you and for all you know could be totally false - in fact from working with him you have begun to believe that he is an apparition who feels nothing and leads an empty existence, like a shade roaming the fields of asphodel, for whom an identity has been constructed by Mark Zuckerberg involving a wife and kids, but who exists only to criticize you and push you a little harder to make the company some more money. But as I walked through the office with the memory of the sun hot on my cheeks, I felt not unlike when I would come home as a child, when I would spend the summer days digging soil, growing plants, inspecting mushrooms and ants, picking nuts up off the sidewalk, and playing in creeks and rolling down hills, and as I passed more and more of my coworkers, upon whose faces I could see only an intense beauty and an undeniable depth of existence, the weight of each of their lives added up one after another in my mental calculations, until it became too much to bear, the thought of it dizzied me, the amount of humanity that was constantly being denied inside this dimly-lit office with its eternally anodyne and seasonless atmosphere, and the realization that the persona that I have been wearing for the past few years has been that of a liar, because what it means to work, I realized, is to deny, all the time, that you, or anyone else around you, are human - and so, what else could I do, I went back outside and I cried.