The Value of Starting Again from Zero
Gene taught himself computer science in his twenties, which, for some time, worked out splendidly. He spent three years in Sweden as a network administrator at a local university, making ends meet while enjoying life as a young expat. When he returned to Colorado, his home state, job offers abounded for anyone who dabbled in IT. This was the tail end of the dot-com boom in the late nineties: as Gene recalls, “say the letters HTML and you were hired.”
He decided to buy a $30 manual to learn the Perl programming language, which he leveraged into a programming job with a $30,000 pay grade raise. In those days, the money was that easy. Employees in the IT sector made six-figure salaries and sat pretty on stock options they imagined could only grow; they bought houses and cars that accessorized the income level. Young engineers lived large; too large, of course, to anticipate the day the bubble popped on March 11, 2000, when the NASDAQ composite crashed and would come to lose 78% of its value over the course of the next two years.
Gene survived the first round of layoffs at his firm, but the axe-man came for him the second round. The company that once called itself a big family was now having security personnel escort the fired employees out as they bowed their heads into the cardboard boxes they cradled. Some of Gene’s laid-off colleagues found that they had dug themselves deep in a hole of debt as the hundreds of thousands they thought they had in stock options evaporated overnight. Gene was slightly more fortunate: he had treated his newfound wealth with more distance and reverence, and not spent recklessly on borrowed money. Still, he went from the top of the world to blocked at every turn: the few IT companies still hiring were not going for the local guy with no computer degree.
Eventually, when Gene found a new job, it was somewhere he never imagined he’d be: behind the cheese counter of the local Whole Foods.
When Gene was growing up in Boulder, he was one of the few kids on food stamps amongst wealth-oozing peers who received Alfa Romeos for their sixteenth birthdays. Boulder, back then, was already a town colonized by affluent liberals, and Gene’s family—his mother was an artist—was paddling hard under the surface to stay afloat. At fourteen, Gene was helping his mother balance the bills and budget groceries. One day, in class, his teacher passed around a picture of the Taj Mahal, and that is when the awe-struck young man resolved to make the money to travel the world and take in these sights, which would be his version of fast cars and grandiose mountain homes.
Travel he did—Kenya, Costa Rica, Sweden—but these trips were now distant echoes from eras of collegial freedom and new affluence, far cries from handing out toothpicks and cheddar cubes in Louisville, CO. The world harbors a cruel fascination for tales of high-flying individuals crashing and burning, and Gene felt like his downfall was well known to his Whole Foods customers and colleagues, which counted many former classmates and familiar faces. In their gazes he read pity and “look-at-you-now” surprise. He hated his beanie and nametag, which he found utterly humiliating. Since he could only afford one bus fare a day, he had to commute to work by taking the bus one way and biking the other. It wasn’t just a regular bike ride: since Gene sold his Boulder condo just before it was put in foreclosure and he couldn’t afford rent, he lived at his girlfriend’s, some 25 miles away. Even though Gene grew up loving cycling, this road felt long.
How can someone educated, intelligent, and competent fall into the nightmare of being flat broke, living by others’ charity, surviving, teeth-clenched, through a hated job? It is a scenario almost universally feared; yet, until one hits rock bottom, the path of descent seems unfathomable: you’d have to really, really fuck up to get there, right?
Right. But markets crash. Products tank. Firms fail. Financial crises happen. Freak accidents in the workplace can get you fired. The trajectory from wealth to poverty often robs its victims of their agency: “drama finds you,” Gene says. That’s the scary part: it finds people who don’t see it coming, who don’t think it’s going to be them.
Yet, too often, hitting financial rock-bottom while possessing the privileges of education, youth, experience, connections, whatever they may be—is associated with a special kind of dishonor. Writer George Saunders, reflecting on a period in his life where he had just won over the dream girl of his youth but was flat-broke and forced to live in his aunt’s basement while working on roofs, remarks: “In terms of money, I got it: money forestalled disgrace.” This disgrace presumes great personal agency in failure. This disgrace Gene inflicted on himself, or found projected onto him by others, and all of it built up to a mounting, untenable pressure that forced him to recalibrate his conception of who he was and of “not making it”. “You stop looking down on poverty as the result of laziness,” Gene says, “and start understanding that sometimes it comes from plain bad luck”. Gene had painted houses to put himself through college and been told he had a knack for it, so he started looking for painting gigs to supplement his income. This was who he was now: the Whole Foods cheese guy who painted houses on the side, while, a split lifetime ago, he was a high-rolling programmer with a great income. But that was the reality he now accepted as independent of who he was and what he was capable of. Failure can hit unannounced, but climbing out of it is a feat of personal agency. The first step is to do away with the mentality of letting financial success define the grace and disgrace in our lives.
It was, Gene says, exactly like that Fight Club quote: “You are not your job, you are not how much money you have in the bank, you are not the car you drive, you are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis.” From which Gene extrapolates: “Everyone should have to start from zero once in their lifetime.”
And so for ten years, Gene painted houses in Nebraska. Then, he enrolled in nursing school. The decision was pragmatic: he’d married his girlfriend and needed to meet the financial demands of spousal life, and nursing seemed like a profession that would pay the bills and make use of his people skills. Earning that degree, he says, proved to be the hardest thing he’d ever done in terms of sheer academic difficulty. He went through several breakdowns thinking he’d flunk out. But he persisted, graduated, and got a job starting from the lowest rungs of the profession: as a certified nurse assistant, before working up the echelons to a licensed practical nurse, a registered nurse, and eventually a travel nurse.
Travel nurses are in high demand—they work for 13-week rotations at understaffed hospitals and institutions, and make a good income. Seventeen years later, Gene is more than back on his feet. In the midst of working in this new profession, Gene got a divorce that ended his ten-year stint in Omaha, so he was free live itinerantly. As a mental health nurse, his job entails working with severely mentally ill patients, convicts, abusers and victims of abuse. It is exhausting, psychologically and emotionally, but Gene has built the mental tenacity for it. His last assignment stretched into a year in Butte, Montana, a forgotten city along the I-90 and former mining boomtown left in the dust while neighboring Bozeman and Missoula were developed and gentrified. A badly scarred and mined mountain overlooks the town, where a meth epidemic has taken hold. To “wash out the psychic yuck” that accumulates from his work, Gene developed a hobby of chasing hot springs around Montana, driving out to little-known towns on weekends to mountain bike or soak in springs.
This is the new life of Gene the travel nurse. He is, now at fifty-two, a smiling man with a scruffy beard and rectangular framed glasses, a free agent awaiting his next assignment. Maybe it will be another homecoming to Colorado; maybe it will be a new life in Vermont. In the interim, Gene’s on a road trip around the Pacific Northwest, driving around solo and stopping by the places that catch his eye, unearthing little pieces of Americana in a mermaid café or a yard full of rusting Ford trucks from the 1930s. He’d never have the gall to walk onto someone’s property and ask to check out their antique car collection before, he says, but now he knows to just take the chance.
Next week, he is going on a date with a waitress from a small Montana town near the Canadian border that he drove through not long ago. She had sung to Frank Sinatra while working, and he thought she had a wonderful voice. “If I lived here,” he told her, “I’d come here every day until you agreed to have dinner with me.”
“That wouldn’t take long,” she answered.
A lot of adventures, after all, come from starting again from zero.
