I have been contemplating this for about month now. I supervise part of a larger production department. My job entails producing junk mail that we ship to USPS terminals nationwide so it ends up in the mailboxes of people like anyone who is reading this. The industry term for this type of mail is Direct Marketing or something like that. I never cared enough to figure it out.

We mail lots of letters, postcards, little magazine booklets, and other forms of mail. All of it is asking the recipient to spend money or send money. We send mail for automobile dealerships focused on getting consumers to get a new vehicle. We send mail for stores, clothing manufacturers, jewelry and other cosmetics. We send kits for insurance companies and non-profit organizations. We send mail from colleges that solicits money from alumni and parents of students. Everything we mail has to do with some type of entity that wants your money.

And I hate it.

I have grown to loathe consumerism. It is parasite burrowed under the skin of our desire to have stuff. It would take surgery to remove it from where it has attached itself. It has destroyed our society. It has destroyed our ability to remain humble. It has obliterated our ability to be objective and, even worse, compassionate to those who have less, because we must get ours.

The responsibility of being in charge has drained me. I don’t care if we meet deadlines but I have to pretend that I do. The company takes on too much work that has deadlines on top of each other so I have to ask people to give up their weekends to meet those deadlines. I don’t want to get home from work and have to answer text messages that I am not getting paid to answer. I have to suffer upper management meddling in production scheduling. I have to locate components of the mailing, always asking for what I need and being mildly reprimanded if I don’t remind my boss that I need them. We all have access to the same schedule, and we have someone dedicated to managing the schedule, but he sits in his office staring at his monitors.

But there’s also down time when I need to find a way to make people look busy. I manage seven machines but I don’t have enough people to keep them all running, but I am always asked to figure out how to do it and not give reasons why I can’t. There’s little flaws in the printed material that the customer probably wouldn’t notice unless it was pointed out.

I guess my main point here is that I am under a deep conviction that we are not meant to be this way, to live our lives this way. I don’t mean living carefree and traveling and living raucously. I mean we were meant to be agrarians, toilers of the land and keepers of herds. We weren’t meant to have vast expanses of land but humble homesteads to raise generations of family on the same plot of land. We were not meant to deal with endless amounts of plastic and other synthetic containers. We were meant to plant seeds, manage a crop, store it all in a root cellar and be sustained during the times out of harvest.

Think about it. Places like Maine, Minnesota, Montana and Alaska all have one short season to plant and grow food. And that food was to last until the next harvest. How have we lost the ability to replicate that type of living? I believe most produce in stores are held up until the last few weeks of their edible cycles so we have to keep going back to buy more. Whereas people before us could keep potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, onions fresh and edible up until the next harvest season.

I don’t want to have any authority. I don’t even want to work but our society is structured so that we have little choice in the matter. I don’t want to produce something that is pointless. It’s not just junkmail. It is also building other things like houses and automobiles and clothing. Corporations have discarded any sense of pride in their products for the increase of their bottom line. There are thousands of videos on TIkTok and YouTube of people ranting about the quality of almost anything they buy. Corporations don’t care about their consumers.

My plan is to quit right before Thanksgiving 2026 and take the month of December off. I don’t know what will happen but I have the faith and belief that God will provide if I rest in Him.