takin a break again

a story about employment

Choose your own intro. Are you:

1: A human or agent operating in a recruiter role following up on a job application or consulting services from Eric Lortie?

Hello! Thanks for finding this article on my Substack. I have a rather strange and eccentric background, and I hope that by posting this I’ll get ahead of some of the questions that might arise from… all of this stuff. This is a personal essay more than a professional document but it explains some of what’s going on.

2: A regular reader:

lol if I don’t ever come back to this project Emergent Dispatches will definitely have been the fastest I quit or failed at something like this.

Everything is all acceleratey.

Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, my limited and mostly self funded runway for this project has collapsed and I gotta go look for, find, and do work.

Probably, if history is anything to go on, until I can try again at this type of ontologically jarring art-project. Or maybe I’ll finally stop? Or actually do something else? Who knows where anything will be any time soon? Everything is very crazy in every direction but maybe I’m projecting.

The world is hard to monitor and make content about right now. Especially my kinda weird art content. Writing wasn’t doing it for me more than once per week. I’ve been planning on going to video with my created content, and I definitely see the value in that… but if I made that pivot now I’d just be quitting in a week. I don’t have the energy or runway for it.

So… I’m gonna go look for work! It’s an adventure! Yay!

…and this article will hopefully be a useful resource for people who are researching me as I apply for jobs. I come with a lot of baggage. I don’t apply for jobs unless I think I’d be a good fit, but all of my baggage makes it hard to tell where I’d fit. A lot of it isn’t related to whatever I’d be doing at work, but it’s weird public stuff and can be quite challenging. I’m not unaware of how I’m perceieved or present through these projects. I understand how they influence hiring decisions.

I’ve hired people and fired people. I’ve been there the first day the doors opened at some places and I’ve been there at others when they’ve closed for the last time. I’ve built the systems used by people, I’ve been the person using the systems, and I’ve been the person who configures or monitors the systems. I’ve managed, and taught, and led. I’ve trudged, and failed. I’ve seen teams trudge, and fail. My varied skills and experience are distinct and stand out immediately.

On paper I’m a good fit for a lot of roles in a lot of places but in practice I often have too much baggage to get through the door.

Basic Baggage

I’m something like a tourist so it would make sense that I’d have a lot of baggage and it’s worth being clearheaded about it all.

I’m a generalist

As you’ll see from my attached resume: I’m a generalist. I’ve had a number of different careers at this point. I spent a decade in hospitality & tourism. I spent a decade in tech. I spent some time in education.

I deleted LinkedIn at the end of 2024 and had an expansive profile. When it’s written in a traditional document format my resume is, in my opinion, too long to be useful. I like this one pager as an intro and I’m happy to talk about the rest. One time, almost a decade ago, a new colleague at a new job said something like “Wow. You’ve done a lot of stuff” to me. I’ve done a bunch more since then.

It’s not that I’m opposed to long term employment but I tend to end up in project based roles with clear endpoints. From the outside though I won’t look like the most reliable applicant in a way that’s quite obvious.

I’m in my mid-40s

I’m not very good at considering this one although I’ve been aware of it throughout my career. It relates heavily to identity in ways that don’t click with me very well, because of the aforementioned neurospicyness, so I don’t know how to plan around it.

I’m pretty mid

I have worked with and taught brilliant people. I’m rarely the most technically proficient person on a high value tech team, I’m rarely the most comfortable and engaging person in social circumstances, my work is rarely done first or to the highest quality. I’ve been a solidly mid mid-level manager. If I didn’t have the other baggage it would at least point to reliability or stability but… uhhh.

I’m pretty fucking rude

To people online moreso than to people in person. I’m comfortable being rude to people in person but people in person aren’t nearly are terrible as people online. I worked through this by mostly deleting all of my social media accounts and avoiding making new ones. I’ve had internet people annoy my employers for things unrelated to my employment.

I… think I’m allowed to swear for cultural reasons? Is that a thing? Can it be a thing? I’m French Canadian. My parents were in the military. My first job was in a kitchen. I worked on trains. Even the tech companies I worked at were often about stuff like sports and music festivals. There’s always been so much swearing at my jobs. Anyway, it’s baggage.

Basic Baggage Assessment:

Algorithmic job applicant sorting does not respond positively to my data for a bunch of obvious reasons which reflect poorly on my long-term viability and the estimatable viability as a future employee when weighed against more traditional or appropriate candidates. This is all exacerbated by a number of social factors related to how I’m assessed by human resume reviewers, and then the other baggage that comes up through google searching or local networking in my relatively small employment region. There is almost certainly always going to be a more appropriate fit than me.

Ethical Baggage

One of the reasons I have such a profoundly negative framing of business practices throughout my writing is because I’ve witnessed a variety of profoundly or lazily unethical behaviour in a variety of workplaces. One time I had to stage a coup somewhere because they’d never paid taxes and we had to rapidly get things sorted out and shut down in a way that didn’t suck horribly for everyone. The outcome on the optics of circumstances was favourable for lots of stakeholders but it had a negative impact in a way that became baggage.

I’m also the type of person to be like “We’re not spending enough money on X for safety reasons” or '"Staffing levels aren’t suitable for reason Y”. I’m also pretty easily triggered by inefficient organizational stuff or lazy leadership, especially if I think it’s harmful to staff and can be prevented.

I wouldn’t wanna be a manager managing someone who advocates for the stuff that I advocate for if it’s not already present.

History is full of generals who throw their troops at certain doom rather than change plans. Something like that happens in the business world but it’s just sort of accepted as normal.

Philosophical Baggage

This isn’t like “My specific philosophy is not represented” so much as it is “many organizations and roles do not make space for philosophical considerations”. There are meta considerations to a variety of things that are evident to me due to my neurospicyness which are viewed as unwanted by folks for very normal business reasons. The only philosophy that matters is money. Time is money. Everything is measured in money. But that doesn’t mean other stuff doesn’t exist and isn’t happening. Sometimes accurate philosophical considerations dictate you change in a bigger way than established practices make room for.

Additionally, I’m not interested in working for a US-based organization. I don’t like the thought of my work going towards generating revenue and tax income in the US right now.

My philosophical baggage is totally incompatible with organizations that fear change.

Esoteric Baggage

Years ago, before I was even working with AI in my creative work, I was calling myself The Unofficial Wizard of Canada. That’s not a good fit for a lot of organizations. Like… it doesn’t need to go much beyond that, really.

I can drill down from that into any of a number of specific things, all of which would obviously be a variety of incomprehensible baggage, but I don’t really need to. I would summarize my esoteric baggage as being related to the statement: “there is a parapsychological ecosystem”. It’s a very specific combination of words and is informed my a more robust body of writing and analysis than many people do outside of academia. It looks like there is something like an unscienced system of reality where some or all of the energy and information of our minds exists. Parapsychology just means “the science of thought outside the brain” and is the scientific domain for stuff like psychic research. There’s way more evidence for this than the mainstream is willing to consider. So my esoteric work is around the limited but compelling science that exists for psychic research and… it’s just not relatable to anything. Like it’s not profitable as a primary thing and it’s jarring as a side project. It’s like “What is the engineering of the system where the information transfer of psychic powers occurs?”

It looks to me like the system or culture of science is fundamentally broken about something that directly relates to our minds and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with this. So that’s some weird baggage.

Existential Baggage

I carry a very high probability that we face increased and substantial risk from a variety of emergent global threats. I’m of the view that a variety of political and governance efforts have failed and that we are unlikely to deviate away from disastrous consequences in time. I suspect we’re trending towards an era where people have to stop doing what they thought they’d spend the rest of their lives doing and start doing the next thing they’ll spend the rest of their lives doing. At scale.

This is obvious baggage for my long term viability as a candidate both in my conviction for remaining with a less existentially-minded employer… and also due to questions surrounding the long-term viability of the current system of employment.

A practical example of my weird job hunt

This is already pretty long but I’m not planning to write again for a while so you may as well take your time with it.

I advocate for people to swing above their weight class in their job seeking. This job is an example of that, but also I don’t think it’s totally out of line. It’s the job of President of the community college provider in my home province, of which I am both a graduate and was contracted to teach an intro to tech bootcamp.

Napkin calculations of things that don’t quantify well suggest I’m something like 2 roles and 10 years short of where I’d need to be as a viable candidate for that role, as a stretch. And of course any number of past baggage listed, and some not, would restrict my inclusion in candidate lists. But all of those paradigms are collapsing. All of the stuff that is how the people who got to where they are used to measure their progress and the value of their knowledge are… fuzzy.

What is a community college network going to look like in 10 years? What is education going to look like? I hope I’m wrong about things going poorly whether or not they’re good or bad it’s clear that a variety of things, like education, are experiencing profound disruption and uncertainty. What is the shape of the type of person who can fill that role in that type of organization?

There isn’t really a way to wiggle my skills and experience into a shape that would be suitable for this role… but that begs the question: How does this art project fit into it?

https://github.com/EricLortie/laborforge-release

That’s millions of lines of code. It’s a multitenant autonomous ai ecosystem. It’s source-available public infrastructure intended to provide a functional point of discussion for the type of AI-enabled disruption that will now be faced by every organization in any remotely digital sector. It’s the type of software that will have to be integrated into every type of organization. That’s not a hypothetical. This is already happening. That codebase is an art project and it mirrors exists enterprise functionality in a lot of ways.

Is the type of person who would spend 11 months putting that together, with a variety of noteworthy and relevant experiences, the right shape to slot into a role like that… at an organization like that one… at this moment? There are leaders and there are managers. There are theorists and there are engineers. Different times call for different vibes.

In the end I didn’t apply for the job. I need to be looking more seriously than that. I also think it’s too much of a stretch, or maybe I’m just losing my mojo.

But I’m pretty confident that whoever they go with won’t have what’s necessary to get them through the coming waves of disruption and collapse, and I suspect this can be said of many organizations.

I feel bad for all the staff who have already been failed by bad management and poor leadership, and for those who will be failed in the days ahead.