Hello From The Outside

It’s Wednesday, my only weekday off, and it’s the last week of Peak, so I rally the family together in the morning to do something I’ve waited weeks to do: attempt to enter Bezos’s Balls. It was time to test whether a mere fulfillment center associate would be let into the Amazon Spheres, those tripartite oases of tropical flora purpose-built for Amazon’s corporate employees to Think Their Big Thoughts and Get Inspired. I set my kids’ expectations a few times over breakfast, warning them that there’s a fair chance we’ll be denied entry at the door. I want to prepare them so that they aren’t too embarrassed if it happens. They naturally ask why it might. This proves a little tricky to answer. I don’t want to attribute bad motives to Amazon, especially since we’ve not even been denied entry yet. At the same time, I’m sure Amazon doesn’t give its new software engineers a gallon-size Ziploc bag with an ice pack and one serving of pain-relief gel as their welcome gift on Day One. It’s hard to figure out how to neutrally convey that being “Earth’s Best Employer” doesn’t necessarily mean treating all employees the same, but instead, in our market economy, means giving each employee, according to role, the minimum amount they’d accept based on their alternatives or desperation.

We arrive at the Spheres during daylight, which itself is a welcome novelty for me these days. They look magnificent — not as magical a translucent Epcot as they did that night I drove past them on the way to the Space Needle, but still a beautiful set of glass orbs each held in shape by their gleaming white support lattices. We timidly push through a door which seems a plausible entrance, and are greeted immediately not only by a pleasant warm moisture no doubt appropriate for the tropical verdure within, but also by a level of pristine I can but analogize. There are, without fail, only two types of spaceships in all of sci-fi: you’re either bright, spotless, polished — basically impeccable — or you’re dingy, grimy, and rugged, a zero-gravity hovel thrashing through the galaxy. The Spheres clearly know which type of ship they are; BFI4 apparently does as well. The cleanliness is of a level where you hurriedly do a mental recap of what you’ve recently walked over prior to entering the Sphere, in fear that you’ve just wrecked the entire endeavor, that an attendant will look at you, more precisely the wet brown footprints behind you, sigh, and say, “This is why we can’t have nice things.”

Thankfully, in this instance, we’re warmly greeted by no less than four attendants in an empty lobby reminiscent of a W hotel spa. The smiles, the teeth, the flawless purple polos on each — only ten seconds into this adventure, and I’ve already decided this is the spaceship I want to be in when Elon sends us all to Mars. Three receptionists quickly exchange glances to coordinate who’d engage us; the one who wins (or is that loses?) asks if I’m an Amazon employee. My voice only cracked in my mind, since this isn’t a John Hughes movie, but I did hand my card key shakily over to the receptionist. She signs me in, and then gives visitors’ passes to Tanya, Caleb, and Chloe. That was it?! All the build-up, all the, “Kids, we might not be let in,” all the potential embarrassment averted with nary a hiccup?

I scan my badge at the gate leading from the lobby into the orbs, holding my breath like the moment the bad guy walks slowly in front of the closet in which you’re hiding. Please, please just let me through. I don’t want to be blown out the airlock of this beautiful ship. It’ll be so embarrassing for all of us. Please. The little scanner beeps loudly, its display screen going from green to angry red. I try again, thinking double or nothing. The universe decides double, twice confirming resoundingly that I don’t have access. Several attendants look away when our eyes accidentally meet, but the smile on the receptionist who signed us in is unperturbed.

“Do you work here,” she clarifies delicately, “… downtown?”

“I work in BFI4, ma’am!” I declare it proudly like a Marine announcing his squadron, complete with snappy salute. Of course, I did no such thing. I wish I could tell you I held my chin up, willing to die planting a flag in this frontier for my brothers and sisters in BFI4. But as it stands, as I stood, I merely answer timidly and wait, all the while berating myself for flushing. Why should my family have any less right to see your fancy big-thoughts spaceship, your satirical monument to your so-called frugality?

The receptionist’s smile doesn’t waver, though a corner moves just enough to say, “I’m definitely here to help you, but what are you talking about?” I explain that BFI4 is an Amazon fulfillment center eighteen miles south. She nods in recognition and begins a scene which you’ve witnessed in dozens of films: the one where the border guard glances a few times between your fake passport and your face, then lifts a receiver to call someone. I can’t decide whether to stay or run as she continues on the phone, answering inaudible questions softly, all the while maintaining the smile that I’m now sure could outlast a magnitude-six earthquake. I won’t run. The kids, the wife — I can’t leave them. She hangs up.

“OK, you can try again.”

I scan my badge, and the gate opens. Her call had worked; apparently fulfillment center associates aren’t allowed by default, but can be let in with the right whispers and an indefatigable smile (hers, not mine). We entered the promised land at last. And the orbs … as Teri Hatcher said on Seinfeld, “They’re real, and they’re spectacular!”

Welcome to Peak Salvation. Today’s episode: Hello from the Outside.

Being inside any one of Bezos’s three balls feels like you’re in a Victorian greenhouse, down to the white metal framing that runs between all its panes of glass. Misters delicately spray various clusters of ferns, flowers, and tropical trees. A wall garden runs perhaps five stories vertically down the core of the building, the care of which might puzzle all but the most astute, who notice carabiner clips near the roof from which gardeners must abseil. Wide stairs connect each level in the large atrium in a meandering path that eventually ends at the very top of the orbs, affording vantage points from several elevations to clusters of greenery throughout.

Captivated by the wondrousness all around as we enter, I crane my neck this way and that, as I can’t decide where best to look first or longest, like the heroine of a rom-com who suddenly, when brought at last to her wooer’s secret garden, reconsiders everything she had assumed about him. How could she not have noticed? There was a softer side of Sears! I was definitely going to give Amazon a second chance after all this.

We head to the second level to a large area with tables. Chairs of all sorts surround the tables and line the rails that prevent you from falling into the tropics below. In the center of it all is General Porpoise — that’s right, like the animal — a coffee shop that sells $5 donuts. Today, I am no associate — today, I act like I’m in Corporate, like I’d insist on wearing a blue leadership vest if I ever went into that other spaceship, the crufty one with all the immigrants. Caleb and I escape the Porpoise with a black coffee and a single donut for $11, and we live large on our spoils while lounging on two rattan recliners looking straight out of Mar-a-Lago. Tanya and Chloe find a conference room with a large triangular table made of teak or some other rare tropical wood, capable of seating perhaps twenty-seven people. Its verdant walls turn out not to be walls at all, but ivy intertwined amongst thin metal wires just strong enough, at least I hope, to prevent an errant attendee from falling into the garden below.

We go up all the levels, circumnavigating each to see the Spheres and its plants from every vista, eager not to miss any special feature while so dazzled. We do the skywalk, a series of narrow bridges whose floor is made deliberately from wood slats that bend from your weight. We sit in a sort of nest. We climb to the topmost level and enter a cozy room whose ceiling is the very glass roof of the sphere, a mere ten feet above us. The room is circular, with poolside lounge chairs arranged along its edges. With the abundant sun exposure, the intent of the room is definitely for you to get a tan while you Invent and Simplify, Think Big, Dive Deep, or exercise any of the other Amazon leadership principles, any but Frugality. There’s a wifi repeater so you can work here all day.

Caleb takes the little orange rectangular pillows from eight chairs and arranges them in the shape of Amazon’s famous A-to-Z arrow, the one that reminds you simultaneously that Amazon has everything and that you’ll be happy. And I was. This moment with my family, all of us lying down as the sun warmed our skin, each thinking their own thoughts; being let into the Spheres at all, losing the opportunity to level an accusation of elitism but gaining such a delightful memory; feeling better, much better, than those dark days that led from applying on a whim, stepping my first time into BFI4, working overtime starting Black Friday, getting called Peter repeatedly until I decided it was better than not being called by a name at all, to dealing with the tendinitis — all of it leading up to this very moment, basking in the sun at the very top of Amazon’s most extravagant edifice, my family around me, not a box in sight to lift, sort, or scan. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. Never mind that I’m scheduled for a full eleven hours tomorrow, on Christmas Eve. Let’s pretend Mom and Dad work at Corporate, that we do this whenever we want, just to relax and enjoy. There’s time today.

The Spheres are staffed with maybe two dozen employees, sprinkled in their neat purple polos throughout all the levels, mostly in clusters talking to each other because there are too few visitors to help. I wonder what the minimum requirements are for this ushering job within the greenhouse. College seems unlikely; and if so, unreasonable. I wonder if these twenty-somethings get paid more than BFI4 associates. They certainly don’t look much different, other than looking far less likely to have immigrated. The job has got to be remarkably easier — not just the work itself, but the hours, given the Spheres operate pretty much when banks are open, including all the expected holiday closures. No, there would be no Peak for this staff, not this year, not ever. I think of Angelo, Aisha, Finn, Keisha — all the hardworking associates who inspired me these past weeks. Do they know this purple-shirted job even exists? Did they, perchance, apply and were rejected like Phuong, who moved to BFI4 to unblock his career? Or were these well-mannered docents just from a different world, children of the Capitol, children who’d never be mistaken for tribute?

Many years ago, a friend who was a private wealth manager proudly told me that he insisted his teenaged daughters get some work experience in the real world before starting their careers. The “real world” he referred to was Nordstrom. I remember thinking even back then — back in a time when he had to delicately refuse me as a client because I had nowhere near the money that would qualify for his professional advice —that his idea of the real world, and soon his daughters’, was very different from mine. Were these straight-teethed, unstoppably smiling staff all around us … were these Nordstrom people on break from college? Were there basically two types of families you could grow up in, one where your very first job required a pantsuit and another where you’re taught how to hollow out a long loaf of bread like a canoe for less than minimum wage?

We exit the Spheres full of smiles. But it doesn’t end there. Right outside, a new piece of interactive art has been set up: a series of several very large seesaws, each capable of seating four people. Caleb and Chloe hop on happily, and are delighted when the clear bar that connects the two of them lights from within as they move up and down. The surprise escalates when they discover that the fulcrums of the seesaws emit pleasant pentatonic tones each time one of them reaches the highest point. Tanya and I join in, one parent in back of each child, the four of us playing with distance until we’re level and there are no tones. We then start bouncing with gusto. I’ve got to admit it was more fun than I had expected; I felt like Tom Hanks playing “Heart and Soul” on a big floor piano in FAO Schwarz.

The scene blurs as the tones of the seesaw and the sounds of my family’s laughter go faint when a thought comes unbeckoned into my mind. What if DiCaprio and Winslet, Tommy and Gina — the sixty-something Filipino couple who always worked the same spur, gently exchanging boxes bound for each other’s carts — saw us here, now? Not exactly us, but the Philip and Tanya that worked in Corporate, the ones for whom the Spheres, these seesaws, and $5 donuts were just another outing, the ones who didn’t need receptionists to call security to grant them an exception to see 40,000 species of tropical plants? What would they think, happening upon this scene? How would they feel? Perhaps I shouldn’t project; perhaps they’d hop on a seesaw themselves and laugh until they almost cried, telling each other they should bring their adult children here the next time they get a day off. It’s certainly possible they’d toast the good fortune of the Corporates working nearby, and even their own fortune that a simple phone call would let them, too, into these Spheres built to inspire employees. It’s all possible.

I had given myself the bends within Amazon. This pinnacle was an exception; I’d soon sink back to the bottom, to BFI4, with all its pressure and darkness. And when I do, I don’t tell a soul about the Spheres. It’s better if you don’t look up.

—

I follow an Amazon truck on the way to work. It’s the classic eighteen-wheeler painted light blue. I’m used to seeing the side, with its big white A-to-Z arrow, but today for the first time I notice the back, which in big letters declares, “There’s more to Prime. A truckload more.”

There really is. I’ve reached the last week of Peak, Christmas week. I’ve been at BFI4 long enough to appreciate that there really is a truckload more than meets the eye when you order Amazon Prime.

I enter the warehouse the same as I’ve done the past five weeks, but things feel different. Associates seem lighter on their feet. There are even a few more smiles than usual. Cynthia, a young Eastern European brunette who likes wearing PlayStation and anime shirts, has a small set of reindeer antler barrettes in her hair. Rafael works beside her, each of them scrutinizing a pair of computer monitors showing various aspects of how the flats area is running. I really like them both. They’re industrious and friendly, and of late, Rafael has especially been chatting with Cynthia more, and she seems to welcome the attention. With Christmas near, I genuinely hope Rafael shows up at her door one snowy evening and silently flips through a set of poster boards declaring his love. Actually, there are a few budding couples in Ship Dock. But Cynthia and Rafael are the ones I most want to succeed. Were the world that all its nice people found each other. Of all seasons, this’d be the one in which to make that wish.

I feel so much better emotionally than when I started. I’ve kept my commitment to the job and have never been late even one time. Whereas I used to struggle with chronic insomnia, falling asleep has never been a problem during Peak. And I’m sure I’ve got much better cardio. Other than the tendinitis, my body is mostly just sore every day, but honestly not in a terrible way. I like that the very little time I have after work each day helps me focus on just enjoying it with the family. I appreciate little things a lot more now; any idle time when I’m not forced to stand feels like a win. And I’ve reset my perspective on what feels cheap or expensive.

Other than the psychic weight of misgivings about the demoralizing nature of the work, where it can be mindless and where everyone gets paid the same even though some contribute much more than others, the job itself isn’t too hard. The pace being set is reasonable, at least for someone in good health at my age. I’m impressed by the sixty-plus-year-olds who work there; I’d imagine by the time I’m sixty that the job would be very difficult, perhaps even too difficult. And contrary to what I had feared coming into the job, you don’t ever have to pee on yourself unless you’ve done some fairly poor planning; even then, you’re always allowed to go to the bathroom whenever you want, as long as you meet your rate.

This is not to say, however, that the job is in any way attractive. Just because you don’t have to pee right there at your workstation doesn’t mean the Amazon warehouse job is suddenly a great thing. The pay is very low, but it’s also just about the most prerequisite-free job out there, so it’s a little hard to say what higher wage would be reasonable in the market. And it also has good benefits like health insurance and tuition assistance. Even so, even considering all that, I think it’s a pretty terrible job. Every day I count the minutes until my shift is over, and even the minutes to the next break or to lunch. There’s a very real way in which you just want the job to stop. The physical strain for eleven hours one day is difficult but doable; the same strain for several days in a row begins to get wearing. More than that, it’s the absolute lack of any real mental engagement at all — not as bad as watching grass grow … but when’s the last time you had to do something for eleven hours that was incredibly repetitive and boring? How about that same thing for five days a week, weeks on end?

There’s also one pragmatic thing that’s truly terrible about the job. It’s the way in which your schedule is entirely out of your control. The idea that Amazon can add an eleven-hour shift to your schedule just the day before leaves the rest of your life perpetually uncertain. Every night before an expected day off, I have to check my A-to-Z app just in case it was announced that I’m instead due in. Imagine if my life circumstance were any different, if I had kids who needed childcare or an elderly parent I was taking care of.

As if that isn’t enough, it’s not just that your schedule is out of your control — it’s apparently also out of your manager’s control. On Thanksgiving week, each associate who originally had the weekend off was expected to come in on either Saturday or Sunday for overtime, according to what Mother Brain inscrutably decided. On Monday of that week, in a team meeting, a handful of associates brought up an issue where their A-to-Z app showed them as being required on both Saturday and Sunday (in addition to Thanksgiving and Black Friday), a situation even the managers agreed seemed cruel and unusual. The managers assured these associates that they’d work it out with HR. But by Thanksgiving, after several days of saying they were working on it, the managers instead announced the news: the scheduling software could not be appeased despite various HR incantations, so the associates would just have to come in on all four days of Thanksgiving weekend.

It’s a sign of just how much we’re at the mercy of our robot overlords when even several managers and BFI4’s HR team together could not resolve an error in scheduling despite days of trying. Moreover, what about these associates, who were made to work through all of Thanksgiving weekend, when several of those days weren’t even on their default shifts? They were told this on Thanksgiving morning in the team meeting. How do you plan a life around this? If Amazon unionizes at some point, I bet schedule predictability will be one of the key points workers will argue for: that there should be more than a day’s notice when a mandatory shift is suddenly added, and that an associate can’t be forced to work a shift under threat of being fired simply because managers and HR couldn’t get the software to say otherwise.

The only thing that makes this job tolerable for me is, frankly, the fact that I know it’ll end soon. Perhaps this perspective is from having too many years of work where my mind was engaged and interested. Perhaps it’s from the same number of years of looking forward to career growth and additional opportunities, which in the fulfillment center are few and far between. Regardless, I’d be devastated if you told me this was a job I’d have to hold for many years — for instance, to finish my college degree.

Just today, as I lifted a crate of bottled water bound for BFI3 — that is, bound for even further human processing before one last human hauls it out of a delivery van onto someone’s porch — I found myself briefly resenting that customer. Who orders bottled water to be delivered from Amazon?! Those twelve heavy bottles need to be lifted and handled by so many people along the way, then packaged into a box for shipment, a box the customer will no doubt discard right away, before they finally burn up a bunch of gasoline and end up on a porch. There is something very wrong with capitalism when it’s economical to order water to be bottled, wholesaled, purchased, lifted, boxed, lifted again, packed into a van, driven, lifted a third time, consumed, and the bottles themselves likely thrown away, especially as more plastic recycling centers are simply trashing the plastic. There must be some massive externalization of costs going on somewhere.

Anyway, these were the resentful thoughts going through my mind for the seconds that Amazon allotted me to lift these bottles in a sorting crate before setting them down on a pallet to be further processed. By the end of those seconds, I had managed to control my emotions and re-center myself around Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s call for all fulfillment center associates to work on behalf of the customer. I tried to get back into a mindset where I could believe that I was doing a true service that would make customers happy. I imagined someone being delighted that their annual ritual of holiday-time bottled water was once again ready to be celebrated with a zest and eagerness that’s most commonly reserved only for pumpkin spice lattes.

But don’t take my word for it that the job is a slog. Amazon’s annual staff turnover rate of 150% says it all. Nearly a million people have voted on this job. On average, they agree it’s tolerable for about eight months. And many of those employees will have never experienced Peak, even.

—

I don’t know how low-wage Americans make it. I suppose the same way my parents did when immigrating to the US with my brother and me: several suitcases with all our belongings, straight into below-minimum-wage jobs cleaning people’s houses. It must all be possible at some level, just empirically it must, but that doesn’t mean it’s right. Nobody working five eleven-hour shifts a week should have to also drive for DoorDash in order to make ends meet. We should aspire for an America where anyone working forty hours should be able to get a roof over their heads, where fifty-five-hour weeks can’t be forced at the cost of losing your family’s healthcare.

And what of our consumerism, with Amazon its premier representative? Ads generate in us desires for things we didn’t even moments ago know existed, and they continue to work because we refuse to otherwise pay for the various “free” apps we’ve become addicted to. Getting those things in two days wasn’t fast enough; do you think we’ll stop at one? There’s got to be a massive externalization of costs when you can order, right now, one of 957 items on Amazon that cost less than $1 and ship next-day to your house for free as a Prime member. Examples include a single lime ($0.59), a Wet n’ Wild large eyeshadow brush ($0.99), or a four-ounce bottle of Elmer’s glue ($0.50). How little would you have to pay for labor, or for the carbon you’re putting into the air, in order for this to continue?

If computers and robots continue to displace jobs in a way where some people begin to be unable, not unwilling, to retrain into other commercially valuable work, we’ll likely need to consider some sort of universal basic income. But in my experience, UBI isn’t enough for human flourishing; in a funny way, you can look at my eight months of unemployment leading up to this whole experience as a sort of ideal UBI. I was able to afford far more during those months than any future UBI likely will provide, and yet I felt empty and adrift. We need purpose. We need to know that we each can do things that contribute, things that others in our community value; we might even need to know not only that we can do these things, but that we must do them.

Some religions provide a sense of purpose for their adherents, but our nation is each year becoming more secular. National pride, in its positive manifestations, can also unite people. The past weeks have shown inspiring and humbling examples of Ukrainians, even ordinary, non-military people, uniting to defend their country — yet here in the US, we remain deeply divided over who is to blame for problems we face.

What is our national purpose now? The next season of Squid Game? The propagation of children into successful social media influencers, who then can repeat the favor for the following generation? The personal curation of a series of increasingly stimulating experiences, each more extreme just to make our meters register at all?

None of this, mind you, is Amazon’s fault. If they didn’t do one-day shipping, someone else eventually would have, taking the customers with them. If Amazon paid far more than minimum wage, some other retail fulfillment company would come along and pay a lower wage, once again winning by undercutting Amazon, assuming a labor market where there are more people who need work than jobs that need filling. This gap has existed for much of our past, and the imbalance will become even more extreme as robots increase in capability. Amazon’s not the problem; if it wasn’t Amazon, some other company would be doing the same thing and, by doing so, would instead be the subject of this podcast.

The problem is systemic, involving rules of the game which our laws have established, and conventions or communal preferences we have not changed. Tying medical insurance to employment, for example, only works if we are sure full employment will remain possible in the coming years as technology advances beyond many people’s capabilities. Also reliant on this assumption of full employment is the mindset best summarized by the New Testament declaration, “If a man does not work, he shall not eat.” Raising wages doesn’t solve the problem of ensuring every full-time worker a basic living if protectionist or obstructionist zoning laws aren’t forcibly changed. Schools, the foundries of our future citizenry and workforce, will never be equal as long as they’re funded by local property taxes.

And companies: most companies, as with most free markets, are not inherently evil. They’re just great at optimizing within a given set of rules. You are not paid some fraction of your contribution to your employer; you are paid your replacement cost. Should someone working forty hours a week lifting several tons a day, much less someone working fifty-seven-and-a-half, deserve to make a living without working two jobs? What about have kids? Or plan a Saturday with friends that they can commit to prior to Friday night? You can probably shame any one company into doing these things, as we did with Walmart a decade ago, but we can’t build a great society playing media-driven whack-a-mole every ten years by directing our tweeting ire towards the next visible offender. We need to concretize these ideals into the rules themselves, whether by passing laws, enforcing regulations, or increasing the voice of labor in how managers and owners make decisions.

Even then, a scary thought: what if our psychology is hardwired by our biology to always derive a portion of our happiness by relative comparison? What if we elevate the standard of living of every low-wage earner in the US — as we already have, significantly and objectively, in the last two hundred years — and still find that their circumstances are looked down upon, not just by higher-wage earners, but by low-wage earners themselves? Just after World War II, the average American house was 750 square feet. It was more than three times that by 2020, ballooning to 2,333 square feet, even while the median household size went down. Is it entirely inconceivable that average American houses two generations from now will be today’s McMansions, growing by the same ratio to a sprawling 7,000 square feet, even as fertility rates and household sizes continue to fall? And that a family moving into such a house will see themselves as financially strapped, living paycheck to paycheck, saving little or nothing after paying their bills, wondering why trillionaires exist alongside such poverty? The more impossible that future sounds, the stronger the evidence of just how pervasive this biology is, how difficult we find it to believe that our collective expectations might continually readjust on the hedonic treadmill that powers society’s perception of wealth and comfort, no matter how much better our own lives get.

All of my intuition struggles against this possibility of our psychology. I want to fight against it, even if true. Philosopher John Rawls put a great concept behind a terrible moniker: the “veil of ignorance.” The idea can be paraphrased thus: you should design the rules of society such that you’d be happy to then be randomly assigned to any position in that society. In my society, labor conditions would be eased to a point we collectively feel is reasonable; then — and here’s the good part — one by one, as robots advance in capabilities, they’d tap each Amazon associate on the shoulder to take their place, sending the associate home to collect what’s earned from their mechanical proxy’s labor, much as I currently collect an Amazon associate’s wage every month from my condo. What the associate then does with their time to feel a sense of fulfillment — that is the true million-dollar question, the one that I, of all people, the one who’s dedicated twenty hours to making each episode of a podcast circling around the topic, am clearly not fit to answer.

—

I called this podcast Peak Salvation because I wanted saving from three things. Most literally, I wanted every day to be saved from Amazon’s grueling Peak season. Though I benefited much from the job and am thankful for all it taught me, I couldn’t wait the entire time for Peak to end. I also wanted to explore the implications for our world if it turns out that we’re headed towards a moment of Peak Human, the moment in history where the most humans will ever be employed in recompensed labor. How should we then treat our fellow citizens? What should we do ourselves? Finally, I wanted Amazon’s Peak to save me from a near-debilitating depression. And I’m so thankful it did — these weeks at Amazon have been the best I’ve felt for many months. If there were but a way to keep the personal benefits of the job without paying its various prices: physical, mental, temporal.

Earlier in the week, some holiday cheer. Aisha announces in the morning team meeting that the day’s hot lunch would be provided by Amazon, an annual tradition.

“It’s going to be bougie,” she says, and adds by way of explanation, “There’s going to be beef!” Smiles all around as we realize we’d be entering the realm of the middle class by noon. I’m not going to be ridiculous and claim it was Tiny Tim exclaiming, “God bless us, every one!” when Scrooge brought a turkey for Christmas, but I’d be lying if I said this moment in the warehouse, smiling alongside my coworkers at the mention of beef, didn’t at least remind me of Dickens. As if those smiles weren’t big enough, and the parallels to Dickens strong enough, Aisha then takes it to the next level. “We’re also going to be giving everyone an extra fifteen minutes for lunch!” She waits just long enough for the excited glances between associates to settle before revealing her last piece of well-timed showmanship. “Paid!” she screams upwards, bringing her Oprah “You get a car! You get a car! You get a car! You get a car!” to a fever pitch.

The cake was not a lie. There was beef at lunch, and it was delicious. After nearly two months of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, eating warm beef from a black plastic take-out container was some welcome holiday cheer, especially during the extra fifteen minutes of lunch where I was essentially paid to sit. I felt happy looking around the room at various associates — some of whom were even, in rare form, talking to each other — realizing this would be the last time I’d see many of them, since I had planned all along to quit after Christmas. I’d like to remember them this way: upbeat, hopeful. I open my A-to-Z app, which features at the bottom of its home page a prominent link that says, “Looking to quit?” I click the link, and it asks me whether I’d like to instead change shifts. I say no, and it asks what day I’d like to be my last. December 27, my first shift after Christmas, which officially means I’d have made it through all of Peak. The app says some brief thank-you, perhaps on behalf of customers (as is usual for most Amazon communications), but I don’t remember the exact words. What I remember was my surprise that quitting Amazon would take a quarter the time that joining it did: just thirty seconds. I’d later receive an email with a PDF announcing my termination, along with some information about COBRA; this is the sum total of all there is to say about quitting Amazon.

When Monday morning comes around, I insist on showing up for my last day of work despite heavy snow and BFI4’s announcement that associates were free to take unpaid time off due to weather. I leave forty-five minutes before the start of my shift because portions of the interstate weren’t even plowed yet, and thankfully arrive without issue, though the car slips a few times. The parking lot has only a few dozen cars in it, which, for a building used to seeing nearly three thousand employees a day, is truly almost nothing.

The inside of BFI4 is eerily quiet, like the opening scene of a zombie movie. Because of the way the entire logistics of the building are interrelated, a staff shortage in one department inevitably blocks departments upstream and starves departments downstream. As a result, there’s far more red showing on all sorts of monitors than I’ve ever seen. There are only one or two people in any direction I look as I walk through the warehouse towards Ship Dock. Like the day when an AWS outage caused everything to stop, all the machines in the building are still. But unlike that day, there is no music, no large clusters of associates scattered throughout. Instead, it’s as if some sort of rapture had hit a locale where 95% of people went to heaven. I see three leads in their blue vests talking with each other, two of them holding open laptops. A few associates work silently at tasks of their own invention. I walk past spur after empty spur, wondering what there is to do. Luckily for me, it’s my one medical accommodation day, the two-and-a-half hour shift I’d work alone under the three-story American flag teaching AI how to do work which it one day will do on its own.

I had brought a small stack of all my raffle tickets in, each looking exactly like what Skee-Ball machines dispense if you’re good at carnival games. Leads had been handing them out throughout Peak every once in a while, interrupting ad-hoc in the middle of your task, so associates could deposit them into various receptacles, each labeled with a prize: $100 in cash, a 42” TV, that sort of thing. When this first started, the cynic in me felt it was demeaning; structuring a variable-payout reward schedule as proven by many successful experiments on incentivizing mice, handing out one or two paper tickets like we were at a Chuck E. Cheese. But I’ve come to see this differently. Each time you insert a ticket into a prize receptacle, you get to imagine what you’d actually do with the prize. You get to, in a way, live a momentary dream. Maybe the actual prize is not even the point, like a lotto windfall is often not the point. The fun is the escapism as you watch those little ping-pong balls get chosen one after the other on the TV in your cramped studio apartment. The fun is Tracy Chapman with her ticket to anywhere, thinking “anyplace is better — starting from zero, got nothing to lose.” I won’t let these dreams expire; I feel an urgency to give them to someone, hopefully someone deserving.

I walk for minutes at the end of my shift looking for anyone I recognize. As I round the corner of the main Ship Dock spurs, relief. I see Bertrand, the enterprising student from the Democratic Republic of the Congo currently studying computer science at the University of Washington, the one who taught me the “bottoms” role in flats. He had spent an entire lunch a few weeks ago asking me how to find the right internships, how to pass technical interviews. I wanted him to succeed so badly. In a pause after he offloaded his pallet jack, I wave and approach. He’s the first to speak; our shifts are offset, so I haven’t seen him in a few weeks.

“I wanted to thank you so much for your advice,” he says.

“I’m more than glad to help in any way, Bertrand.” There’s no good way to lead up to it, so I tell him plainly that today’s my last day. I confirm he has my email, and emphasize that he can reach out to me at any time, that I really want to help him succeed. “And I want to give you these,” I say as I hand him the stack of raffle tickets. “I hope you win something. You deserve it.”

Out of habit, his arms and hands begin to make a gesture of reluctance to accept my gift, but he, like me, realizes they’d be of no use to me, and graciously accepts. I’m glad it’s him I run into, as he’s one of two associates I feel closest to in all of BFI4. There’s Martin, the man whose reasons for joining were uncannily similar to my own, the one whose experience of Amazon resulted in an easing of depression just like mine. Then there’s Bertrand: the only associate I ever told my full story to, the only one who knows my previous jobs and the desperation that had brought me to this place. I hope these tickets, these little wisps of dreams, are but the beginning of his journey toward a better life.

I stop in the break room on my way out. I had gotten used to getting a chai every day from the coffee machine, watching its powder mix with hot water into four ounces of a sweet drink that tasted more like hot chocolate (suspiciously, another drink the same machine offered). I sit and sip the drink. It occurs to me that, funny enough, I’ve still not met Leanne, my nominal manager, after all these weeks, all these adventures. It’s fitting. I might as well have never existed in her world, and in a way I didn’t, I won’t. This Amazon warehouse is only my world in the way that it’s all Americans’. One in 153 workers in the US are now Amazon warehouse workers, and during Peak, Amazon hired an additional 45,000 associates a week; so from a certain perspective, BFI4 is us, all of us. I glance down at a buzzing on my phone as I gulp the last of the chai. It’s a text message from Amazon. “We are so happy you are on board. Thank you for all that you do for our customers to deliver smiles.” Generic. Completely unaware of my imminent departure. And absolutely on brand, on so many levels.

I clock out for the last time, walk through the snowy lot, and drive away alone, leaving just as I came, an outsider lost.

—

This concludes the Peak Salvation podcast miniseries. I could never have predicted how much my journey through Amazon’s BFI4 warehouse would teach me and cause me to reflect not only on my own life, but those of many Americans. A special thanks to all of you who’ve reached out to discuss topics from various episodes, and for your support in general. The experience would not have been the same without all of you.

My sincere thanks also goes out to Rebecca Ambrose, who painstakingly edited every episode you’ve heard, teaching me how to improve my writing and also calling attention to how differing perspectives might respond to the content. Peak Salvation would not be the story that it is, truly a work I’m proud of, without Rebecca’s input and insights. If you ever need a great editor, reach out to her through fivepointseditorial.com.

Most importantly, I want to thank my wife Tanya for her support throughout this process. It’s one thing to chuckle every week at a story about some depressed tech guy working in a warehouse; it’s a whole different thing to live for months with someone who at times can’t get out of bed. In addition to supporting me through those many months of unemployed depression, Tanya also proved pivotal by enabling any of this podcast to happen at all. During my eleven-hour shifts, five days a week, it was Tanya who dropped the kids off and picked them up from two different schools; it was Tanya who took care of the house while I moaned about tendinitis; it was she who, you’ll recall, lovingly packed the occasional chocolate covered pretzels and the daily peanut butter and jelly sandwiches so that I could sleep a bit more before the 5:40 alarm. Tanya previewed every episode before release, giving me gentle feedback when necessary, but mostly just supporting and encouraging me to focus on the world as best as I can remember it, not on how my musings might be perceived by an audience.

My hope in creating Peak Salvation was to start a conversation around important changes happening in our society, and also to reach anyone who might themselves be suffering depression. Thank you for being part of that conversation, for coming along with me through this amazing journey. I hope this series has been as rewarding for you to experience as it was for me to create.

One of our seven listeners, Wayne Chang, sent in the first question of the series way back in January, which I thought would be perfect to end this series with: “Can you see yourself doing something similar to this again, like going to work at an interesting job and doing a podcast about it? And if so, what would that be?”

What next? The truthful answer is that I don’t know. I was relieved to quit after Peak ended, both because of the work’s crushing schedule as well as its mind-numbing boredom. But I benefited greatly from the job’s enforced structure and exercise. I wonder if it’d be helpful for me to find a basic job writing code, where things are expected of me on a daily basis but where I’m not personally responsible for the types of stressful decisions that are required when you have A Big Job™. Or whether a more disciplined approach to daily exercise and purposeful time allocation would be sufficient. These thoughts are complicated by the fact that the longer I remain unemployed, the less confident I feel in my ability to not only secure a job, but to hold it despite the depression that has been so consistent for me over the past few decades. Then again, that’s probably just the depression talking, since I’ve held jobs for twenty-three years without issue. These are the types of personal doubts I’m currently working through, now that Amazon’s peak season has ended.

If you’d like, you can stay subscribed to Peak Salvation. I’ll provide an update later in the year when there’s something to report. Perhaps I will have reached some sort of epiphany, or taken a job driving cattle.

In the meantime, thank you for sharing in this experience with me.