I was promoted to write this by a conversation some dear colleagues were having recently. It got me thinking about a fundamental tension in my soul: working in what can only be described as the current frontier of colonialism as a proponent of decolonialism.
What follows is a combination of delusion, justification, and straight-up doxxing myself. It also summarizes my journey over the past year, as I have attempted to return to the workforce as a parent with decolonial aspirations.
the background
I live in a beautiful but rural part of France as an immigrant with functioning but not native French (fluency is such a weighted concept that I avoid using the word “fluent”; anyway, it’s a moot point here when the key factor is I obviously didn’t grow up speaking French).
I previously spent 18 years working in in-person community roles outside of tech, in several (but always English-speaking) countries. When I had my baby 18 months ago, I thought I wanted to leave this industry and tried exploring other options, but my issues were that most jobs outside of tech are so local in their application, which
- exposed my otherness more (non-native French is a real barrier to being hired here),
- feel cut off from the rest of the world (the French-speaking world is much smaller than the English-speaking one statistically, and we live far from a big city that has international connections),
- don’t solve for sustainability (e.g. they focus on a different but also unsustainable supply chain, like agriculture, or depend on government or corporate funding as in nonprofits),
- are much less flexible in their hours and work patterns,
- feel wasteful and inefficient after the continuous-optimization approach of tech startups.
I really explored the options local to me, and as alluring as the idea of opening a yarn and tea shop in the shadow of the medieval clock tower is (fostering a third space for the community, working with local farmers to provide education about circular supply chains, etc), I realized I would feel such a massive loss of connection to the rest of the world.
the process
I don’t think I would feel this way if I lived in a big city, but out here surrounded by rolling farmland and sweeping coastal clifftops, working in tech gives me hotlines across the planet and feeds the tension in my soul; tech has opened up our world whilst it eats it, and those of us working in community in tech are staring into it’s gaping maw. Shifting our field of vision doesn’t change what we know, and I can’t cloister down trying to ignore it.
Having explored options outside of tech I realized that I want to have front-row seats to the apocalypse (or at least be in the stadium) rather than pretend it doesn’t exist, so I thought about what I would need from a tech job in order to get everything I need from it. Those things are:
- work-life balance (as a decolonial parent first and foremost, I need my child to see and feel that they are more important than work),
- a sliver of purpose (can we at least uplift each other and build connection while the world burns?),
- yeah, that’s it!
One of the major adjustments I made was that a job needed to be a job, and whoever hired me needed to know that their job is just a job for me. I don’t need career progression, because the energy I’m pouring into that growth can be invested applied elsewhere. I scaled down my ambition and my job search to mid-level roles without management responsibilities (I manage a multilingual immigrant household in a bureaucratic country, I don’t need to manage any more than this right now).
I went into the hiring process transparent about being a new mother and having other priorities, including wanting to work on other projects with friends and collaborators. I was clear about reducing my seniority and not wanting to take on direct reports, travel extensively, or work wild hours. I adjusted my salary expectations accordingly.
I got lucky.
Someone decided that I was worth investing in, despite my caveats.
I get to speak with community members all over the world and synthesize my perspective with their stories, I leverage my international background and parenthood to form new connections that help open us all up to unexpected insights, and my functional French is seen as an asset not a liability!
in conclusion (or, where do we go from here?)
I thought that working in tech was a contradiction to decolonialism, and it is. None of the above changes that.
The beauty of decolonizing ourselves is that we do so every day, and it’s always in contradiction. We live in a colonial world, surrounded by colonial mindsets that are preserved in institutions and processes. Capitalism itself is a lynchpin mechanism of colonialism, so our existence within capitalist economies is a tether to colonialism. Our work is never done.
A big part of the work of decolonizing is recognizing that we are part of but not consumed by the systems that form our environment. We interact with them and exchange components of our thinking or being, but we still have autonomy to engage critically with them — and by extension, the parts of ourselves that are most tethered to them (we ourselves are systems made of parts, and some are easier to decolonize than others).
Separating parts of myself from the whole has allowed me to find work that serves my needs. I don’t think I would have been able to do this without the separation from the workforce that came with my extended maternity leave, and I’m grateful to live in a country where my family could have affordable, comprehensive healthcare without me working full-time. (It doesn’t need to be said but I will: any system that ties access to healthcare to employment is a form of indentured servitude, especially one that taxes your lifetime earnings whilst not providing a retirement income when your working days are through. No matter what flavour of “dream” it claims to be.)
We can keep on clawing back parts of ourselves, even as we exist within the paradigm. Purity is a myth, in large part because everything is in flux. Stasis is a myth; the only constant is change.
I keep this is mind as I work (incrementally) towards a better world for us all, knowing that I will always be as much of the problem as I am part of the solution. I just want to edge the needle. Working in tech gives me connections and resources to keep these conversations flowing, so for now I will continue to dig where I stand.
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