"Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar."
- Drew Carey

"There is a point in one's life when one cares about selling out and not selling out. One worries whether or not wearing a certain shirt means that they are behind the curve or ahead of it, or that having certain music in one's collection means that they are impressive, or unimpressive. Thankfully, for some, this all passes... It's fashion, and I don't like fashion, because fashion does not matter. What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand."
-Dave Eggers

I quit my job the other day.

You might not have known I had a job; I only started it about a month ago. I solicited people at the Mall of America to watch unreleased movie trailers and answer questions about them. It meant getting rejected by people dozens of times a day. It also meant lying on virtually every survey to meet our daily quotas, and sometimes making people up completely.

The lying bothered me from the beginning, not only in itself but the fact that it made the entire job more or less pointless. But I was especially disturbed by the fact that when one of my bosses would ask me to make someone up for a survey, they'd persuade me by saying, "You want to make some money, don't you?"

When you're in your late teens or early twenties and you're into rebellious or alternative pop culture and you have a special love for movies like Dazed and Confused and The Graduate, selling out is one of the worst things you can do. No one wants to be a sell-out. But even just a few months after leaving college, I'm seeing it happen for a lot of people: they'll take any job they can get just so long as it means a paycheck, just so they can keep living in trendy apartments and going to bars and concerts whenever they like and buying food and clothes and books and music.

And for the short time I've worked at this job at the mall, I saw how easy it is. How nice it feels to be able to cash a check at the bank and for the next few days feel like you can drop a few extra dollars on beer or a new dress. How you let the moment-to-moment details of the job distract you from the flawed ethics of what you're doing. Leaning on a railing smoking a cigarette in the sun with a nice boy, gossiping about coworkers, commiserating about the different food court options--those made it worth it for the time being. They made me start to consider keeping the job for as long as I could, enjoying the paycheck and just gritting my teeth through the dishonesty.

Because what this experience has made me realize is that I like having a job. Sure, it's hell to drag myself out of bed and drive out to the suburbs on a day when I'd otherwise be sleeping late, going for a leisurely stroll and reading all day, but I like the daily dramas and camaraderie of a workplace. That's what I really loved about Showplace, why it was so easy to lose myself in that environment, though of course that also had the plus of funny customer stories and free movies and coworkers I actually loved beyond work. The mall job has helped me look forward to whatever jobs I might have in the future, knowing that I can be reliable and learn quickly and establish a rapport with the people around me in a work setting despite my general awkwardness.

But it made me realize too that this is how the world works for everyone. Of course there are exceptions, but the average adult in our culture struggles through a job he or she hates because of the necessity of that regular paycheck and health benefits, and because of the coworker interactions and fleeting joys that make the actual work, even if it is wrong in some way, an afterthought. That must be how so many people in the country get by, even those who work for corporations that do great harm: they let the monetary and social rewards distract them. Of course fudging a few market research surveys is a far cry from, say, causing a major environmental disaster, but I think the connection is there.

Besides, part of the reason I didn't want to quit is because I don't like quitting in general. Whatever else you can say about me--and lazy is definitely high on the list--I generally stick with projects I've taken on, even if only because I'd be embarrassed to quit. And I don't like knowing that with a job like this, I have the luxury to quit. I have something to fall back on, a little leeway until I find something else. Not everyone does.

Maybe in the future I'll end up letting myself get lost in the details of a job without facing up to the larger fact that it's pointless or not fulfilling. For now, I guess I can feel good about the fact that I didn't stay at this first unethical job. Two customers within the space of a few hours confronted me directly about the fact that I was lying. The second one, an older man who knew exactly who he was and wouldn't apologize for that, almost made me cry. And I couldn't do it anymore. Maybe someday I'll sell out, but not yet.