Energy

Roger: Don, do you believe in energy?

Don: What do you mean? Like the thing that gives you get up and go?

Roger: No. Like human energy. I don’t know, a… A soul?

Don: What do you want to hear?

— Mad Men (Season 1, Episode 10, “Long Weekend”)

One of the ongoing themes of this newsletter has been the question of why people quit their jobs, particularly jobs in education.

Nearly every time I talk about why I left the classroom, the answer is slightly different. Sometimes I say it’s because of politics. Sometimes I say it’s because I was burned out.

Sometimes I say it’s because the job just kept getting harder.

All of those seem true, and in a bigger sense they all overlap to reveal one of the larger, more existential reasons I felt I couldn’t teach anymore: I just didn’t have the energy for it anymore.

For whatever reason, I’ve rewatched the first season of Mad Men over the past few weeks. And like most interesting pieces of art, I’ve found that its themes and meanings have shifted for me as I’ve gotten older. When the show was on the air, protagonist Don Draper was probably about ten years older than me. Now I’m older than him by several years. And the political landscape has changed so dramatically that the show’s observations about 1960s-era America resonate in very different places.

But a conversation between Don (Jon Hamm) and his boss, Roger (John Slattery), as Roger lays on a hospital bill after a major health crisis, also resonates very differently with me now.

Visiting Roger after a nearly-fatal heart attack, Don is at first consoling. He tries to be positive in his gruff, guarded way, but beneath his affect there is a sense that he is deeply disturbed. When Roger describes an apparent near-death experience in which he felt there was “nothing” after this life, Don becomes uncomfortable. In a deeply characteristic moment he asks Roger, “What do you want to hear?”

Don’s character in the first season is gradually revealed to be mainly a costume— his career, his marriage, his image, all appear to be based on a simulacrum. He is playing the role of a confident, self-assured, ad man in order to make it seem like such a thing really exists. As Roger’s deathly pallor and the fragile performance of Slattery demonstrate, the confidence and swagger may ultimately signify nothing.

I don’t believe people often make important decisions all at once, but one of the more specific moments I remember thinking I had to leave teaching was when I was sitting in a room at my doctor’s office waiting for her to arrive. That year, my last as a classroom teacher, I had been unusually worn down, possibly a symptom of long covid after contracting the virus the previous Christmas.